Starbucks Bucks Its Workers’ Labor Union

Even though more than 500 Starbucks shops had unionized by the end of 2024, it seems that the company’s management did not respect the new union very much. Unfortunately for the company, one implication that can be drawn is that the company’s management didn’t respect federal labor law very much too. For in not respecting its union enough to negotiate it on reducing employee work hours, the company violated federal law. The “smoking gun,” I submit, was that the management used dissimulation to respond to the government, rather than address the complaint directly.

The full essay is at "Starbucks Bucks Its Workers' Labor Union."

Authentic Corporate Social Responsibility during a Pandemic

"We’re doing a lot of social distancing,” U.S. President Trump claimed during his press conference on Coronavirus on March 23, 2020. The day before, he had said he is proud of the American people for voluntarily taking precautions. March 21st, I had been in a Target store to buy some necessary items. No one was "social distancing," including employees. A more accurate, and better understood term would be physical distancing, as it is more broadly applicable than socializing and the latter can be done at a distance, especially via telephone and the internet.[1] A day before, I had been in two grocery stores—two because one—a Safeway [Albertsons]—was missing so many hoarded items. I found no physical distancing at Safeway and Sprouts. The former was not that safe after all, and the latter's healthy-food was not being sold in a healthy way. It was as if the employees, customers, and managements were oblivious to the obvious risks, but the explanation may be more complex. I contend that it applies to corporate social responsibility too. For I also found that none of the store managers was making announcements or had signage to remind people to keep a distance from other people in the respective stores. On March 26, 2020, I again saw no physical distancing being done by employees and customers at a Safeway store; the store manager told me he would have a store meeting on the issue. In the meantime, not even periodic announcements would be made. This is known as erroneously applying status-quo management procedures in a state of emergency. Also, Safeway's store management had not acted proactively to ration products such as toilet paper and cleaning products that had been voraciously grabbed off the shelves by herd-exuberant customers in a panic mode. In short, I submit that the unique business conditions of the Coronavirus pandemic can be used to assess whether corporate social responsibility is real or merely a marketing tool.

The full essay is at "Corporate Social Responsibility during a Pandemic."  

How actually safe was Safeway during the pandemic?

1. "It is important for us all to realize that when they recommend 'social distancing' . . . what health experts are really promoting are practices that temporarily increase our physical distance from one another in order to slow the spread of the virus." Cecilia Menjivar, Jacob Foster, and Jennie Brand, "Don't call it 'social distancing'," CNN.com, March 21, 2020 (accessed April 4, 2020). 

Managers Going too Far: Targeting Linguistic Over-Reaches

The practice of using words beyond their contexts such that the words’ meanings are tortured and yet are pretended not to be was a trend in modern America during the 2010’s. The business manager instigated the trend in order to “gild the lily,” which means to claim more than is warranted or merited. Astonishingly, people dismissed or perhaps even didn’t recognize such over-reaches. Perhaps as long as people have used language, egos gripped in the pursuit of gain have presumed that keeping to a word’s extant meanings in a language is somehow optional.

The full essay is at "Managerial Over-Reach."

Business Ethics Through Rose-Colored Glasses

That business ethics scholars are as though children playing in the clouds in claiming that the vast majority of business practitioners are good-intentioned, or ethical, is an empirical statement that is in need of empirical verification. I suspect the scholars' typical utopian perspectives, curiously coincident with prescriptive ideological "Thou shalt nots," suffer from not touching ground from gazes atop ivory towers. That is to say, the scholars are factually incorrect. Let us, therefore, sweep away the fog so at least we have a realistic picture of what is actually going on "on the ground."

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available at Amazon.

Target’s Senior Managers in Damage Control Mode: A Forensic Appraisal

The number of transactions at Target, a major American retailer, during the weekend before Christmas in 2013 came in at between 3 to 4 percent lower than for the same weekend in 2012.[1] That the number of shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2013 are five less than in the previous year and number of transactions at other retailers during the weekend in 2013 is slightly higher than for the previous year suggests that Target did indeed take a financial hit due to the massive breach in electronic security. The debit and credit-card numbers of up to 40 million customers (between November 27^th and December 15^th) could have been compromised by hackers who immediately began selling the “secured” information from abroad.[2] Lest this lesson in the downsides of electronic commerce and globalization be enough bitter medicine to swallow, Target’s damage control gives us a rare opportunity to glimpse the mentality of the company’s corporate-level managers by inference.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available at Amazon.

Off Target: Corporate Spending as "Speech" against Gay Rights

In a 5-4 decision on January 21, 2010, the US Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that federal restrictions on corporate spending in elections constituted a violation of free speech. Critics called it wrong to equate corporate “speech” with individual speech and said the ruling would allow special-interest money to flood election campaigns. The bipartisan nature of the opposition to this ruling is striking in these largely partisan times. The court’s ruling is opposed, respectively, by 76, 81 and 85 percent of Republicans, independents and Democrats; and by 73, 85 and 86 percent of conservatives, moderates and liberals. Majorities in all these groups, ranging from 58 to 73 percent, not only oppose the ruling but feel strongly about it. Even among people who agree at least somewhat with the Tea Party movement, which advocates less government regulation, 73 percent oppose the high court’s rejection of this particular law. In addition to overwhelming opposition to the decision, there’s also bipartisan support for Congress to try to reinstate restrictions on campaign spending by corporations and unions.

The full essay is at "Target's 'Free Speech'."