Monday, June 20, 2022

How Starbucks saved my life

 

There was a time in America when the average guy could work 25, 30 or 40 years with the same company, retire with a defined benefit pension plan, and (in some case) get a fancy watch.

 I know a few people my age who worked a lifetime with one company, retired with a defined benefit pension, and lived decades after retirement in comfortable circumstances – but that is no longer the norm.

A few years ago, I read a book titled “How Starbucks Saved My Life”. In many ways, what Michael Gates Gill experienced was similar to what I (and thousands of other people) experienced during what normally be their peak earning years.

When I was 51 years old, the department that I worked in shut down. Although I tried to find a similar position at another insurance company, those jobs no longer existed. Ultimately, I got a job as a commissioned life insurance agent, but my new income was substantially less that I was making before, so my dream of retiring with $1,000,000 in the bank and a paid off mortgage became dreams I would never achieve.

In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house in the suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he turned sixty, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his twenty-year marriage. Then, he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined. Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son. Gill had no money, no health insurance, and no prospects.

One day as Gill sat in a Manhattan Starbucks with his last affordable luxury—a latté—brooding about his misfortune and quickly dwindling list of options, a 28-year-old Starbucks manager named Crystal Thompson approached him, half joking, to offer him a job. With nothing to lose, he took it, and went from drinking coffee in a Brooks Brothers suit to serving it in a green uniform. For the first time in his life, Gill was a minority--the only older white guy working with a team of young African-Americans. He was forced to acknowledge his ingrained prejudices and admit to himself that, far from being beneath him, his new job was hard. And his younger coworkers, despite having half the education and twice the personal difficulties he’d ever faced, were running circles around him.

The other baristas treated Gill with respect and kindness despite his differences, and he began to feel a new emotion: gratitude. Crossing over the Starbucks bar was the beginning of a dramatic transformation that cracked his world wide open. When all of his defenses and the armor of entitlement had been stripped away, a humbler, happier and gentler man remained. One that everyone, especially Michael’s kids, liked a lot better.

The backdrop to Gill's story is a nearly universal cultural phenomenon: the Starbucks experience. In How Starbucks Saved My Life, we step behind the counter of one of the world's best-known companies and discover how it all really works, who the baristas are and what they love (and hate) about their jobs. Inside Starbucks, as Crystal and Mike’s friendship grows, we see what wonders can happen when we reach out across race, class, and age divisions to help a fellow human being.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/427475.How_Starbucks_Saved_My_Life

When I lived in Aurora, Illinois, I met a man named Jim who suffered some enormous setbacks when he was in his 50’s. His story can be read at the link below:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-world-trade-center-fell-on-my-head.html

Michael Gates Gill is not the only person whose life was transformed by Starbucks, but the latest example will surprise you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/business/starbucks-union-rhodes-scholar.html

Jaz Brisack became a barista for the same reasons that talented young people have long chosen their career paths: a mix of idealism and ambition.




Most weekend mornings, Jaz Brisack gets up around 5, wills her semiconscious body into a Toyota Prius and winds her way through Buffalo, to the Starbucks on Elmwood Avenue. After a supervisor unlocks the door, she clocks in, checks herself for COVID symptoms and helps get the store ready for customers.

“I’m almost always on bar if I open,” said Ms. Brisack, who has a thrift-store aesthetic and long reddish-brown hair that she parts down the middle. “I like steaming milk, pouring lattes.”

The Starbucks door is not the only one that has been opened for her. As a University of Mississippi senior in 2018, Ms. Brisack was one of 32 Americans who won Rhodes scholarships, which fund study in Oxford, England.

 Many students seek the scholarship because it can pave the way to a career in the top ranks of law, academia, government or business. They are motivated by a mix of ambition and idealism.

Ms. Brisack became a barista for similar reasons: She believed it was simply the most urgent claim on her time and her many talents.

When she joined Starbucks in late 2020, not a single one of the company’s 9,000 U.S. locations had a union. Ms. Brisack hoped to change that by helping to unionize its stores in Buffalo.

Improbably, she and her co-workers have far exceeded their goal. Since December, when her store became the only corporate-owned Starbucks in the United States with a certified union, more than 150 other stores have voted to unionize, and more than 275 have filed paperwork to hold elections. Their actions come amid an increase in public support for unions, which last year reached its highest point since the mid-1960s, and a growing consensus among center-left experts that rising union membership could move millions of workers into the middle class.

 Howard Schultz has written three books about his experience as the founder of Starbucks – and I have read all of them.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=howars+schultz&i=stripbooks&crid=18X55B0LPNYGG&sprefix=howard+schultz%2Cstripbooks%2C129&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

In comparison to other companies, Starbucks is a pretty good place to work, due to the benefits it provides to its employees. At a time of rising prices, record corporate profits, and demanding work conditions, the time is now ripe for unions to rise again – and the store in Buffalo is no longer the only Starbucks that has a union.

A few years ago, employees at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga tried to form a union, and several Amazon warehouse locations have done the same.

Last week, employees of an Apple store in Maryland voted to form a union.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/technology/apple-union-maryland.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Technology

My dad was a union man.

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2021/05/my-dad-mail-carrier.html

When he joined the Post Office in 1954, union membership was at its peak. The Republican Party felt that unions were so important that union membership was a part of the 1956 Republican national platform.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1956

Here’s the relevant portion of the platform:

In addition, the Eisenhower Administration has enforced more vigorously and effectively than ever before, the laws which protect the working standards of our people.

Workers have benefited by the progress which has been made in carrying out the programs and principles set forth in the 1952 Republican platform. All workers have gained and unions have grown in strength and responsibility, and have increased their membership by 2 million.

Furthermore, the process of free collective bargaining has been strengthened by the insistence of this Administration that labor and management settle their differences at the bargaining table without the intervention of the Government. This policy has brought to our country an unprecedented period of labor-management peace and understanding.

We applaud the effective, unhindered, collective bargaining which brought an early end to the 1956 steel strike, in contrast to the six months' upheaval, Presidential seizure of the steel industry and ultimate Supreme Court intervention under the last Democrat Administration.

**********************

The Rhodes Scholarship is an international postgraduate award for students to study at the University of Oxford. Established in 1902, it is the oldest graduate scholarship in the world. It is considered among the most prestigious international scholarship programs in the world. Its founder, Cecil John Rhodes, wanted to promote unity between English-speaking nations and instill a sense of civic-minded leadership and moral fortitude in future leaders, irrespective of their chosen career paths. Initially restricted to male applicants from countries that are today within the Commonwealth, Germany and the United States, the scholarship is now open to applicants from all backgrounds and genders around the world. Since its creation, controversy has surrounded its initial exclusion of women, its historical failure to select black Africans, and Cecil Rhodes's own standing as a British imperialist. At present Rhodes scholarships are offered to all the countries both for male and female for postgraduate studies at Oxford university.

Rhodes scholars have achieved distinction as politicians, academics, scientists and doctors, authors, entrepreneurs, and Nobel Prize winners. Many scholars have become heads of state or heads of government, including President of the United States Bill Clinton, President of Pakistan Wasim Sajjad, Prime Minister of Jamaica Norman Manley, Prime Minister of Malta Dom Mintoff, and Prime Ministers of Australia Tony AbbottBob Hawke, and Malcolm Turnbull. Other notable Rhodes Scholars include Nobel Prize-winning scientist and discoverer of penicillin Howard Florey, Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa Edwin Cameron, Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, Australian High Court Justice James Edelman, journalist and American television host Rachel Maddow, author Naomi Wolf, musician Kris Kristofferson, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodes_Scholarship

Some of the people who have been awarded the Rhodes scholarship have become wealthy – and Bill Clinton is likely the best example – but that’s not the point of the scholarships.

Listed below are some of the best-known recipients:

https://people.howstuffworks.com/13-famous-rhodes-scholars.htm

 There are those who might think that Jaz Brisack is wasting her potential by working at Starbucks – but Cecil Rhodes himself would disagree.

In his last will, Cecil Rhodes provided for the establishment of the Rhodes Scholarship. Over the course of the previous half-century, governments, universities and individuals in the settler colonies had been establishing travelling scholarships for this purpose. The Rhodes awards fit the established pattern. The scholarship enabled male students from territories under British rule or formerly under British rule and from Germany to study at Rhodes's alma mater, the University of Oxford. Rhodes' aims were to promote leadership marked by public spirit and good character, and to "render war impossible" by promoting friendship between the great powers.

Eventually, women also became eligible for the scholarships – and Jaz Brisack was not the first woman to be so honored.

Starbucks may not have saved Jaz Brisack’s life – but she fulfilled Cecil Rhodes’s idea of “promoting leadership by marked public spirit and good character”.

 

 

 

 


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