“These Are Not the Droids You’re Looking For” — Nice Try, Howard
Consider Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, testifying in front of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions:
“I grew up in Federally-subsidized housing. My parents never owned a home. I came from nothing. I thought my entire life was based on the achievement of the American Dream. Yes, I have billions of dollars. I earned it; no one gave it to me. And I’ve shared it constantly with the people of Starbucks. And anyone who keeps labeling…this billionaire thing…it’s your moniker, constantly; it’s unfair.” (Italics mine)
I watched this testimony live, because I was very eager to see if the CEO overseeing Starbucks’ egregious union-busting efforts was going to get his ass handed to him by a Congressional committee. As it happened, Mr. Schultz proved surprisingly resistant to suggestions that he or his company had done anything wrong, ever. He made liberal use of the Monty Python “That parrot’s not dead, it’s only resting” defense, recharacterizing his behaviors as benign and in the best interest of everyone concerned.
But Senator Bernie Sanders’ repeated references to Mr. Schultz as a billionaire clearly got under Mr. Schultz’s skin. It was apparent that his personal pride and self-image had been wounded, as he took exception to this characterization and attempted to deny that he was in fact what he is.
This was amusing, and impressive for its audacity — here was a grown, educated, articulate adult, caught red-handed (“I have billions of dollars” is pretty much the dictionary definition), trying to convince a Congressional committee that he was not a billionaire. At least not in a bad way. One wonders if Mr. Schulz maintains this same schizophrenic denial with his family — “No — guys, listen to me. I know we have billions of dollars in the bank accounts, but we are not ‘billionaires,’ OK?”
He then went on to make another claim that went unchallenged in the moment but should have been. He said, “I earned it; no one gave it to me.” Now this sounds plausible because we are all conditioned from birth to believe that we have to work to earn our living, and what we earn from working is ours by right. Mr. Schulz would have us believe that he worked very hard, so he “earned” a very large amount of money. Most of us grew up enchanted by the myth that if we worked harder, we too stood a good chance of earning as much (or more! This is America, land of opportunity!) as Mr. Schulz.
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This is of course not true. There is only room for a very few at the top of any pyramid, and the few at the top of the pyramid that is the American economy (and Mr. Schulz would certainly have to be counted among them, having all those billions of dollars) don’t work to earn their living in the same way as all the people on the lower tiers of that pyramid. When Mr. Schulz says “I earned it,” he is employing a kind of sleight-of-hand to make his audience believe he is as entitled to those billions as a barista is entitled to their paycheck.
Contrary to Mr. Schultz’s assertion however, disingenuous or otherwise, that he “earned” the billions of dollars at his disposal, the reality is that he took them. Those billions did not come to him, as he would have us believe — and as he no doubt likes to believe — by the sweat of his brow. They came to him by the sweat of someone else’s brow — namely, the collective brow of Starbucks employees, all of whom work for a wage. He has not “earned” his billions any more than a feudal landlord “earned” the abundance of produce tithed to his estate by the peasants living on it.
Mr. Schulz’s billions come to him because he happens to be the beneficiary of a fundamental feature of our economy that no one much talks about. And that is that Starbucks employees do not receive from Mr. Schulz the full value of the work they are doing for him. They are paid for a certain number of hours of work, during which they produce a certain amount of revenue for the company (the retail value of however many beverages or products get sold during those hours of work). Mr. Schulz pays for the hours, but he does not pay the full value of what was produced. The difference between what they produce and what he pays them, minus a few deductions and expenses, is Starbucks’ profit. That is where Mr. Schulz’s billions come from. And when you consider how much of that profit he has commandeered for himself in one way or another — billions of dollars, as he says — you can appreciate just how much of the value produced by baristas is not going into barista paychecks.
This is how Mr. Schulz “earns” his billions. By withholding it from the paychecks of the people who actually work at Starbucks. This puts his claims about “sharing” his billions with the people of Starbucks in a somewhat different light. Like many in his position, he understands sharing to mean “I will make a show of giving back some portion of my billions to my employees, to demonstrate what a benevolent overlord I am, and to dilute any impulse on the part of the employees to storm the C-suite with knives and pitchforks to take it all.” Keeping in mind that whatever he gives back will be reproduced for him in short order, while he sleeps, by his investment portfolio.
So this is the delusional world that Mr. Schulz and his compatriots at the very top of the economic pyramid inhabit. It is a different world from the one inhabited by the people who work for him. It is delusional in the sense that once inside that world, one becomes able to entertain fictional notions about their actual situation (“I resent being called a billionaire”), and also to buy into the fantasy that their position, their power, and their ability to siphon the wealth of society into their personal bank accounts are all justified. Hard work, that’s what got me these billions. Not hardly.
One note about this whole “sharing” costume Mr. Schulz wants to wear: remember he made these claims while being interrogated about his company’s relentless and possibly illegal efforts to block any attempt by Starbucks employees to wrest from the company a little more of what they contribute. “I share, but on my terms, and I will fight to the death any attempt by the people of Starbucks to negotiate different terms.” Sharing, indeed. To date, Starbucks has yet to agree to any contract with the union formed by its employees.
Mr. Schulz is entitled to his billions in the sense that one way or another he managed to maneuver himself into one of the slots in our economy where billions go to accumulate. But those slots only exist because we all buy in to the delusion that they are as natural and inevitable a feature of our economy as heat is to summer. Nothing could be further from the truth.
