Starbucks execs sued over woke discriminatory employment policies
Yesterday, I wrote about how woke corporations are signaling virtue by discriminating against whites and Asian-Americans in their employment practices. My main example was Pfizer, which bars members of these two groups from its highly-rewarding Fellowship program.
Today comes news that the people who run Starbucks, another woke corporation, have been sued for similar-style, but more pervasive, discrimination. The list of the roughly three dozen defendants begins with company founder and current interim CEO Howard Schultz, and works its way down the corporate chain.
The suit is brought in Washington state court by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a shareholder of Starbucks. The Center is represented by the American Civil Rights Project. (I should mention that I’m a member of that organization’s board of directors. Years ago, I represented Starbucks in some employment matters, but that was long before it adopted the policies at issue in this litigation.)
The lawsuit alleges that by adopting a series of employment and contracting policies that discriminate in favor of certain minority groups on the basis of race, Starbucks executives have endangered the company and all of its shareholders in violation of their fiduciary duty. It alleges that they have done so with full knowledge (having been so informed by the American Civil Rights Project) of the risks they’re imposing on investors. These risks arise because the employment policies in question violate federal and state civil rights laws.
According to the Complaint, which you can read here, Starbucks executives placed the company at risk, even after being warned that they were doing so, to further their own interests. They want “to pose as virtuous advocates of ‘Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity,’ even if it harms the company and its owners — a classic case of (admittedly non-pecuniary) self-dealing.”
In a press release, Dan Morenoff, head of the American Civil Rights Project stated:
Corporate America has embraced illegal, discriminatory policies that almost all Americans oppose because its decisionmakers get all the benefits while the costs are diffused across lots of unorganized shareholders. Courts need to change that by putting the decisionmakers on the hook for the harms they do.
Joel Ard, Washington state co-counsel, added:
The people of Washington, many of them Starbucks shareholders, want and deserve better from their largest and most recognizable corporate citizens. I am confident that the courts will agree and take this chance to use long-established principles of American corporate law to halt, at the wholesale level, corporate America’s ‘woke’ embrace of illegal, racial discrimination.
Among the racially discriminatory policies that give rise to the lawsuit are these: Starbucks has promised to make hiring and promotion decisions based on race. It has developed a program to enhance promotion opportunities that is available only to BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) employees. It has decided to make selection decisions for board of directors slots based on race. It has set aside 15 percent of its advertising budget for minority-owned businesses.
The plaintiff seeks a declaration that these policies are unlawful. It also seeks an injunction against their use. And it seeks an award of damages, including punitive damages, for breach of fiduciary duty by the Starbucks defendants.
I sometimes think that corporate America is as much of a threat to our rights and liberties as leftist political leaders, and a greater threat than their mainstream media allies. People can ignore what the MSM reports as news (and increasingly they do). They can “throw the bums” out of office (though that’s rarely easy, and their allies in the bureaucracy usually remain in place).
It’s less clear what can be done to change the behavior of woke corporations. But when, like Starbucks and Pfizer, they behave as if they are above the law, the remedy resides in court.
The American Civil Rights Project and a handful of similar organizations deserve great credit for leading the charge to obtain such remedies.