Starbucks Workers Get Poorer

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Starbucks Workers Get Poorer

© Courtesy of Starbucks via Yelp

The minimum amount Starbucks workers are paid increased to $15 recently. That equates to a little over $31,000 a year. Once taxes and social security payments are taken out of this compensation, the figure falls under $25,000 in most cases. The raise also came as inflation was in the midst of the highest increase in prices in nearly four decades. Based on this calculation, Starbucks workers may have become poorer than they were a year ago.
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While those who are paid low wages can drop their cost of living by a very small amount, they still can’t dodge the increase in essentials, including housing, fuel bills, food, and clothing. Many of these prices have risen faster than overall inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, which is called the “Consumer Price Increase” in certain quarters.

Starbucks employees do not have many places to turn to get better pay. Most do not have college education. Others are retirees who need to supplement Social Security payments. These people, in general, do not have a large number of alternative job options.

Some workers have turned to unionization. Senior executives at Starbucks have fought this with unusual ferocity. They see it as an avenue down which lies a loss of control of one critical part of their stores. The worker union efforts have only begun at a small number of locations. It will take years for unions to take hold in most of the coffee company’s nearly 16,000 locations.
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Starbucks workers have become overwhelmed by the Consumer Price Increase. And, they have no way out.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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