Compliance coming right up: City must fully investigate Starbucks worker complaints

Any investor or executive management consultant worth their salt will tell you that there’s hardly anything worse for business than excessive unpredictability. Long-term trends and outcomes will never be perfectly foreseeable, but at the very least you need to know things like how much inventory to stock for the next several months, how much must be spent, and so on.

Yet at the ground level, many large employers are happy to forget this maxim, forcing their workers to live in a state of unpredictable flux when it comes to schedules, hours and pay. They learn practically on the fly when and for how long they’ll be on the clock and consequently how much they’ll be making, a situation that makes it very difficult to plan anything.

New York City, a proud standard-bearer for worker protections, has said enough’s enough and in 2017 enacted local laws requiring employers to give their workers at least 72 hours’ notice of shifts and pay premiums for opening and closing stints, among other things. The city shouldn’t hound small employers who are genuinely struggling to comply, but it should throw the book at the marquee names that intentionally violate the rules.

The latest among them: Starbucks, the ubiquitous coffee chain, which has seen 27 baristas at 23 locations file complaints with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection alleging violations of the law. The workers are affiliated with the as-yet-unrecognized Starbucks Workers United proto-union, but collaborating with the behemoth 32BJ-SEIU.

All workers should have a right to make informed decisions on whether a union is right for them or not, but regardless of whether the SWU’s efforts are successful, the city has a responsibility to investigate the alleged malfeasance and address it as necessary, as it did with Chipotle, which was forced to pony up $20 million for violating the same laws. Companies with market capitalizations in the tens of billions can afford to give their workers a little security, and workers can’t afford not to have it.