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NEWS & LETTERS, September-October 2005EssayCall of the Siren: A proletarian critique of Starbucksby T. C. Autumn Their work is useless to them; it is their wage that they get (in exchange for selling their labor power as a commodity) to survive every day that is useful. They produce nothing. They work at a Starbucks coffee shop, but they could work at any retail location and perform the same function for the enterprise. They work at the level of circulation in capitalist production. The value of the things waiting to be sold is simply waiting to be exchanged for money of the same value. The required content of the labor in the coffee shop is customer service and relations, cleaning the shop, making drinks and taking money. Physical abilities are required and are limited to specific functions. The longer the person is performing the functions, the more they become routine, wearing down the worker’s faculties by performing inherently mechanical functions. Starbucks sells the activity of its workers. The "legendary customer service" commanded of its employees is a means to decrease product circulation time in order to increase surplus value. The workers’ function is direct interaction with consumers as individuals and, more importantly, with the money they pay. The enterprise demands the content of the store workers’ labor to be immaterial. Customers enter the relationship with the retail worker in a bubble of time, where the customer is just that, an alienated being by intent, as a buyer. This enterprise thrives in part by utilizing the commercial end of consumption hierarchies, in which McDonalds, for example, thrives on the lower strata of this hierarchy. The existence, the whole life of the worker, her subjectivity, is atomized in time and in the perception of the relationship of the customer and also among each of the other workers and management (who tend to atomize and terrorize his life even more). In the presence of upper management workers are seen in their most sheepish servitude and conversely, though not frequently enough, in their most virulent anger. We get easily caught up in the false totality of work in the time we are in it. It is a totality because of its demand of our subjectivity do to it; but it is fragmented and thus alienated from each of our total lived existence. Starbucks is similar to any other company in its operational function. It operates on the division of labor, on buying the raw materials from agricultural enterprises, and on material and immaterial labor that makes up the work of coffee processors in its factories and of customer service employees in its coffee shops. The WALL STREET JOURNAL (4/12/05) ran an article about efficiency (increased amount of labor worked) in Starbucks stores. It said Starbucks engineers are constantly visiting and studying its stores around the country to find ways to get customers through the line faster. This means cutting out the time it takes a wage laborer to do certain tasks, thus constantly increasing the rate of circulation and thus surplus value. These engineers are having a good time designing sped up labor processes that wear down workers. Workers are reduced to the specific function in selling their behavior and attitudes to Starbucks’ requirements--working the cash register, espresso bar and other stations. The WALL STREET JOURNAL article mentioned a position, created in 2003, called the floater, in which a worker does several stations at once--getting customers’ orders, pouring coffee, getting desserts, etc. It allows for increased rates of exploitation. All retail laborers anywhere are a cost, as they do not produce value. They are just the exchange mediums, the transformers of values. They perform mechanized functions as is expected in the division of labor. The capitalists know that workers’ wage labor power--even if the Starbucks store is to "Provide a great work environment and treat each other with respect and dignity"--is still an impediment to its other principle: "Recognize that profitability is essential to our future success." But retail labor is merely a cost of circulation that is a productive investment. Starbucks prides itself as being unique in its methods of customer service relations, in the benefits and perks it gives its employees, and in its relationship to the communities where the coffee is produced and where its coffee shops are located. The real effects of its supposed unique activity is primarily to affect its spectacular relation to its commodity both inside the company and as an attraction to its customers. No one would go to Starbucks if it were not selling coffee, lattes, pastries, and more. It would not exist if it did not have a commodity to sell. It does not sell the store workers’ attitudes alone; this is merely part of its method of selling. It has to buy the coffee to sell it, to buy from other enterprises who buy the labor of coffee farmers who grow and pick the coffee beans. Then the coffee must be transported to factories to be processed and packaged to the point of selling these materials. Starbucks cannot escape the base imperialism of capital (which goes into all spheres of global and human existence, not just regional-based exploitation), in its reliance on coffee production in regions of the world affected by the centuries of European and U.S. exploitation (that was and continues to be a cornerstone of such nations’ general material development and capital accumulation) for distribution to consumption production receptacles, that is, the coffee shop. For example, the value of the labor of the Starbucks employee in the U.S. is higher than that of the coffee bean picker in Latin America, Africa or the Arabian coast, because of the way global society has developed, in which the division of labor is internationally based and exploited in different ways in different regions. Of course, this is one of the things that makes Starbucks just like other enterprises, not what makes it unique. Starbucks’ "Chief Coffee Master" wrote for its newspaper to store workers: "We need to treat Starbucks as we would a cherished personal gift. We need to treat it with the proper respect and continue to work hard each day, in everything we do--building on the theme of human connection." It’s obvious this means understaffing and cutting cost. This is one essence of class struggle, directors affecting our lives for profitability. But the bosses must face many an uncertainty of worker availability, no-shows, quittings, ambitious worker-group scandals to appropriate more value for their labor, different kinds of on-the-job resistance, bad attitudes, sickness from overwork, and more. A few months ago some workers were discovered to have been voiding customers’ transactions to put that money into the tip jars instead of the till, since the tips go solely to employees. (Due to an array of surveillance technology, the workers got caught and were fired.) The security setup at the Starbucks is notable in the use of technology to secure the company’s hand in the class struggle by keeping workers in check with surveillance cameras, computerized tills (cash registers) and timeclocks connected to a Starbucks intranet. All of this can be monitored from sources outside the store, for example by upper management specialists. Starbucks perks are nice in comparison to other jobs in other places. But if the perks were sufficient there wouldn’t be the constant employee turnover rate, as is the case in Starbucks coffee shops here in Chicago. Employees sometime work at two different stores and for seven to nine days without a day off. Conditions are the same every day. The time passed away remains the same, so the time seems absent, like a sort of anxious torture. The same aspects appear daily; the same acts and behaviors, the same words and waiting people, in dead time, in bought space. I watched the workers today. The man at the espresso bar did a million variations of the same work process all day, and thanked each and every customer in his weary eyes and flushed face. It’s his duty as a commodity. He repeats it to every customer, a "thank you" from Starbucks, through the hollowed out subjectivity of the worker, no matter how sincere or not. Just like a McDonalds or a car factory, the Starbucks shop is set up in work stations and production processes that are more or less uniform for every Starbucks the world over. Its uniform product protocol is always pushed by management. The tragedy is that the workers antagonize each other over implementing these stupid policies. Here is an alienation, internalized by many workers, evident in their attitude and behavior on the job. Many illusions are accepted by many workers. It is easy to talk of Starbucks as if it is an autonomous entity rather than a constructed and maintained social relation of exploitation with a hierarchic ideology, secrecy and bureaucracy, a commercial enterprise which allows for the maintenance of the protracted goal of capital accumulation (as in any company anywhere for that matter). Upper management, the company’s directors, acts as priest figures, full of professional and paranoid artifice to protect their position as directors of stealing our labor power through the law of value, which makes them not at all unique, of course. Meanwhile the workers associate themselves as one with Starbucks when talking to customers. "We" do this or "We" do that, and true, on the material and to-customer relation level the workers at the store perform various functions with their own activity, at the level of prostitution, that is, wage labor. They associate themselves in an alienated way to the products they sell for the company’s profits, as if it were their goods being sold for themselves, as if those workers were in direct control of the quantity and kind of products being distributed to the store. As in many capitalist enterprises, Starbucks has the Keep Busy policy. It can become an internalized compulsion of the workers forced to act on this enforced policy. While most shift supervisors are paid little more than lowest tier employees, they often act as watchdogs of the store and its regulations. So far this method of labor enforcement has succeeded, along with the global alienation that makes for successful social pacification. Not all supervisors act like this regularly and none of them all the time, but workers remain in servitude and continue to create the profits of the enterprise Often the store manager acts as a coach, a pep-talker, a cheerleader for the company, to be friendly while also acting as a punisher, lecturer, threatener. But push they must, as the managers above them do, and other factors--particularly rule by the market and whatever crisis seemingly affects it--compels them to push all the more. You can be proud of your work and have a meaningfully positive attitude and believe in (internalize) the required ideals that Starbucks considers its measure of a model worker. But if you don’t express this to some extent you’ll be fired. The same goes for any company. The store manager may take you in back and drill you, say maybe you need an attitude adjustment or you should find another job because you obviously aren’t happy with your job, and they threaten to fire you--which is a common managerial scare tactic in many enterprises. In "A Community of Laborers or a Human Community?" (COMMUNICATING VESSELS, No. 14) the author states: "Rest assured, the petty tyrant who owns the café across the street from Starbucks is probably little different from the manager of your local Starbucks." We can also see that the worker at that café across the street is not subject to the rules and regimentation that come from the maze of bureaucratic management departments of Starbucks, but this does not change the fundamentals of wage labor in any enterprise. |
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