After every election cycle, the committee-assignment shuffle begins. This winter, once Democrats secured their 51–49 advantage in the Senate, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington took over the Appropriations Committee chair position from retiring Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy. That left the top job on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee open for the taking. The Democratic senator next in line to sit in it was Bernie Sanders.
HELP is not the Senate’s top panel, but at Bernie’s direction, its hearings are already some of the most anticipated in the chamber. And with Republicans controlling the House and the filibuster still in place, the committee will be mostly about using the bully pulpit, something Sanders delights in more than almost any other Democrat. And now, his first major hearing is set for late March, with his first sparring partner acquired: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.
Sanders has wanted a piece of Schultz for years. In March 2022, the senator sent the CEO a letter demanding he “end the union busting and obey the law.” In 2019, when Schultz flirted with a run for president, Sanders was blistering about the billionaire’s political ambitions and about Schultz’s opposition to Sanders’ proposals on taxing the wealthy.
Schultz had previously declined a request to appear before Sanders’ committee, with Starbucks claiming that because Schultz would soon be stepping down as interim CEO, there was no reason for him to attend. “He will remain on the board, he is the CEO today, and he would be the CEO when we invited him … it is clear to everybody that it is Mr. Schultz who sets the policy of that company,” Sanders shot back Tuesday, before a committee vote the next day to haul in Schultz via subpoena. Schultz ultimately caved, announcing he’d come willingly to be interrogated on March 29.
In a surprisingly frenzied two-year period of unionization across the U.S., no workplace has featured more prominently than Starbucks. Roughly 290 stores have voted to unionize, making the coffee chain an epicenter of the new labor movement. The national organizing wave has been embraced both by Democrats and an American public that is more positive on unions than at any point in the past 50 years. It has not been cheered by the Starbucks C-suite, though, which has desperately tried to stave off further union drives. Schultz was brought off the sidelines for a third stint as the company’s CEO in part to thwart this campaign, becoming the national face of union busting in the process.
Since Schultz returned, the company has been on the vanguard of union opposition, equal parts innovative and ruthless in repelling further organizing. Zero of the newly unionized Starbucks stores have successfully signed contracts. The union, meanwhile, has brought more than 500 separate charges of unfair labor practices to the National Labor Relations Board, alleging everything from retaliatory firings to store closures. Starbucks has raised wages and improved benefits for nonunion workers, while nearly 200 union organizers have been fired.
Some of those tactics have run afoul of the law. On March 1, Starbucks was scorched by an NLRB ruling, which detailed “hundreds of unfair labor practices” and “egregious and widespread misconduct demonstrating a general disregard for the employees’ fundamental rights.”
As Michael Hiltzik noted at the Los Angeles Times, Judge Michael Rosas even “ordered Chief Executive Howard Schultz and Denise Nelson, the company’s senior vice president for U.S. operations, to read out (or have it read out in their presence) a 13-page statement detailing workers’ unionization rights, all the ways they were violated and all the remedies he specified.”
Sanders is expected to address all these details at length in Schultz’s hearing. “Will we be very aggressive to hold companies accountable?” Sanders asked in an interview with the American Prospect. “Yes we will.”
The hearing will also serve as a powerful reminder of how far the Democratic Party has come in its attitudes toward labor in the Biden years.
The administration’s appointments to the NLRB have established a union-friendly 3–1 Democratic majority on the board, and appointed onetime Communications Workers of America lawyer Jennifer Abruzzo as lead prosecutor. The incoming new labor secretary, Julie Su, has a strong pro-worker track record as well. Biden has been arguably the most vocally pro-union president in 50 years (though his record there is not without some blemishes), personally supporting union drives at places like Amazon and making unions a focal point of his most recent State of the Union. It’s an especially dramatic transformation for the nation’s leading Democrat, given that it was the very same Howard Schultz who was reportedly in line to be secretary of labor in a Hillary Clinton administration, as Axios reported.
And now Sanders, who is owed quite a bit of credit for fomenting Biden’s pro-union awakening, will get his own crack at the action. The senator has already put more of an emphasis on the “L” in HELP than any other chair of the committee in recent memory.
Schultz won’t be the only corporate executive or billionaire Sanders drags in for questioning. Already, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel has agreed to come testify before HELP in March after his company announced plans to surge prices on the COVID vaccine. Bancel is coming willingly for a hearing titled “Taxpayers Paid Billions for It: So Why Would Moderna Consider Quadrupling the Price of the COVID Vaccine?” After a Sanders-led pressure campaign, the company has since backtracked on its plans, but that still didn’t get Bancel off the hook.
While the rest of this term’s lineup remains unannounced, it would not be a surprise to see multiple insurance and pharmaceutical executives land in the Sanders hot seat shortly.
Meanwhile, Republicans on the HELP committee are already grumbling. Republican Bill Cassidy recently complained that the GOP senators on the committee should be more involved in the committee’s work, and lamented that Sanders was “threatening long-standing bipartisan comity,” per Politico, by moving quickly and without their input. HELP has not recently been the place where corporate executives go to get their comeuppance.
For the next two years, with a divided Congress and a narrow majority in the Senate, Sanders’ committee hearings could be the closest thing the Democrats have to must-watch TV. That’s great news for a party that struggles with messaging, and for anyone interested in seeing America’s richest, most powerful, and most exploitative executives squirm.
