Starbucks Corp. on Thursday said it isn’t planning to send interim Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz to testify on alleged labor-law violations before a US Senate committee.
(Bloomberg) — Starbucks Corp. on Thursday said it isn’t planning to send interim Chief Executive Officer Howard Schultz to testify on alleged labor-law violations before a US Senate committee.
Instead, Starbucks offered to send Chief Communications and Public Affairs Officer AJ Jones, who already met with Senator Bernie Sanders’s staff last month, along with May Jensen, vice president for partner and labor relations, and Zabrina Jenkins, acting executive vice president and general counsel, according to a letter posted to its website.
The Seattle-based company argued that Schultz wasn’t the correct person to testify because his tenure as interim leader has been focused on Starbucks’s reinvention plan, and because he’ll cease to be CEO at the end of this month.
Sanders, a Vermont independent, earlier this week scheduled a March 8 vote in the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to compel Schultz to appear before the panel. Sanders has also previously invited the coffee CEO to testify voluntarily about National Labor Relations Board complaints that the chain has broken labor laws. Starbucks has denied the allegations.
The chain has been facing a unionizing push from baristas at some of its US locations. However, the pace of cafes filing petitions to organize has significantly fallen off from last year.
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