Seeing as the industrial revolution took place in the 1700s, and the IWW has only been around since 1905, it would appear this ...

... is a miscalculation.

Bullshit Alarm

The article says that 42% of Starbucks employees are COVERED by their health insurance plan. That doesn't mean only 42% qualify, it simply means 42% of their employees have insurance through them. The spokesperson for Starbucks explains this by saying that a large % of Starbucks employees have health insurance from other sources, such as a spouse or parents. They claim 91% of Starbucks employees have insurance from some source.

Makes sense to me; you see a lot more young people working at Starbucks as opposed to Wal-Mart.

im bitter.. and stabucks makes me want to kill myself after slaving myself there for 3 years

but seriously a lot of this has to do with the manager.. ive had managers that fixed it so that i would only be able to work 15 hrs a week. making it impossible for me to get the health benefits i needed..

As much as I loathe Starbucks with the fury of a thousand white hot suns, I have also always heard that they treat their employees well. I will have to stick to loathing them for their crappy, generic coffee served in a crappy, generic corporate atmosphere.

More propaganda. It would be really, really nice to hear from someone who actually checked to make sure that what they were repeating wasn't slanted with the intention of coopting people into supporting a position without understanding it.

Of course, the fellow alleges he was fired for his association with a radical trade union, so maybe that's the issue at hand?

I know ths isn't the point of the article, but it irritates the crap out of me that swill Starbucks passes off as a macchiato has become the most commonly accepted.

A Starbucks Macchiato is not the same as a macchiato ordered from a real coffee bar.

I'm skeptical as to the slant that this article takes, but even that considered, it doesn't sound THAT bad. If you're looking for a career, you probably don't want to stay at Starbucks. Duh.

I make no illusions about being a Starbot, so feel free to take my comments with a grain of salt.

- Starbucks was the first corporation to offer health benefits to part time employees. If you work 20 hours a week or more you qualify for benefits. The health plan might not be the most generous in history, but if you plan on working 20 hours a week, good luck finding a health plan anywhere else. I have heard that on a store level some managers will intentionally suppress part time hours to disqualify staff, but the company also has a crapload of snitch lines. Do the corporation a favour and weed out the bad managers.

- The company does just a couple more charitable/corporate responsibility things than $2 out of each pound of Sumatran sold. How about the tens of thousands of dollars invested in growing communities where coffee is produced (and that's for things like schools and drinking water systems, and not just coffee farms). How about the $5 million pledged (about $2 million so far provided) to a Hurricane Katrina relief fund? How about the fact that the company will match any donation made by anyone in its employ, up to $2000? How about paying more than 1.5 times the commodity price on coffee from farmers to give them incentive to improve their own conditions?

- If Starbucks is such a horrible place to work, I doubt that it would've made Forbes' list of top 50 corporations to work for. Beyond the health benefits thing, there's stuff like tuition reimbursement programs, and a confidential support line (of which I've availed myself on occasion), as well as operations procedures that are designed to look out for the employee.

- It's partly their own fault for lazy beverage nomenclature, but there is a difference between an espresso macchiatto and a latte macchiatto. Incidentally, when a Tim Horton's For Lifer (which is a good 90% of Hamilton) comes into my store and orders a double-double, I don't cop an attitude at his inferior coffee tastes. If a Starbucks lover decides to sully your specialty cafe with their presence, why not try being inviting once in a while, and you might end up with a convert or two.

Maybe Starbucks has bought my love with that free pound of coffee a week, and I'm looking at a lot of things through rose coloured glasses. I make no illusions about it being the best coffee in the universe (though don't count on your favourite cafe having that either), or being the most generous corporation, even if when compared to similar retail chains it's doing pretty goddamned alright. I wouldn't put down anyone who hates the place, as long as they've actually thought out the reasons why.

Ummmm, no. The roots of the industrial revolution are in the 18th century. None of the features commonly associated with it, however existed until well into the 19th, and certainly not in the US. Similarly, the roots of the IWW go back well in to the 19th century. To oversimplify, the IWW was a reformation of the Knights of Labor in response to AFL style trade unionism. The KoL was founded in response to post Civil War US industrialism. To say that they are not contemporaneous is exceedingly pedantic.