For the past two years, even as the pandemic shut down key markets and created supply shortages, Kevin Johnson, the chief executive of Starbucks, managed to lead the company to robust revenue and profit growth.
But in recent months, those operational and financial successes have been overshadowed by a wave of employees — “partners” in Starbucks parlance — who have taken to social media to criticize work conditions and raise other issues at the chain. As a result, more than 100 Starbucks stores in more than 25 states have filed for union elections. Many either have begun to vote or are likely to vote in the coming months. At least six have voted to unionize.
On Wednesday, in an abrupt move, Starbucks said Mr. Johnson, who has held the job since 2017, will retire on April 4 after 13 years with the company.
His interim replacement until the board of directors names a permanent one is a familiar name: Howard Schultz.
Mr. Schultz, 68, joined Starbucks in the 1980s and built it into a global coffee giant. And this isn’t the first time he has come back to oversee the company. After stepping down as chief executive in 2000, he returned as C.E.O. from 2008 to 2017, when Mr. Johnson took over and Mr. Schultz became executive chairman. Mr. Schultz will also rejoin the company’s board. Shares of Starbucks rose 4.8 percent to $87.10 on Wednesday.
The unexpected leadership change followed weeks of mounting pressure from investors as more stores filed for union elections. “We believe that Starbucks’s reputation may be jeopardized due to reporting of aggressive union-busting tactics,” a large group of investors, representing more than $1 billion in Starbucks stock, said in a letter sent to Mr. Johnson on Tuesday. Starbucks has denied engaging in anti-union activity.
This week, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint accusing the company of illegally penalizing two workers involved in a union drive at a Starbucks in Phoenix, the latest in the chain’s labor struggles.
It is unclear whether the return of Mr. Schultz signals a softening of the company’s battles against unions or a deeper entrenchment. Mr. Schultz, who stepped down as executive chairman in 2018 and was, at the time, one of the largest Starbucks stockholders with 33 million shares, has played a significant role in the company’s response to stores that have sought to unionize.
In September, Mr. Schultz visited Buffalo to address local managers, telling them that the company had let them down by failing to help them address operational issues at their stores, and that he was not anti-union but “pro-Starbucks,” said one person who attended but was not authorized to speak publicly. Other Starbucks executives, like John Culver, the chief operating officer, and Rossann Williams, president of retail for North America, attended the meeting, but Mr. Johnson did not.
Starbucks declined to make Mr. Schultz and Mr. Johnson available for interviews.
After the leadership change was announced on Wednesday, Mellody Hobson, Starbucks’s chairwoman, acknowledged to CNBC that the company had “made some mistakes” in addressing workers’ concerns. Ms. Hobson is co-chief executive of Ariel Investments, a firm that considers itself an early adopter of environmental, social and governance investing.
Jonas Kron, the chief advocacy officer for Trillium Asset Management, one of the investment firms that has written to and met with Starbucks executives urging them to take a neutral posture, said he believed the comment could be “the first signal of a pivot” on the union issue.
But a few hours later, during the question-and-answer session of Starbucks’s annual shareholder meeting, Ms. Hobson said the issue of neutrality was “nuanced” and would limit “our ability to speak to our partners in certain ways.”
Mr. Kron later said he considered the comments at the meeting “disappointing.”
Various Starbucks executives mentioned during the shareholder meeting how successfully the company had worked with its employees during the pandemic, with pay and other benefits improving over the past year.
Starbucks is one of many companies where employees, many of whom worked long hours and under arduous conditions during the pandemic, are now trying to organize through TikTok and Twitter accounts, seeking better wages, steady hours and increased benefits.
Two weeks ago, employees at a Manhattan location of REI, the outdoor equipment and apparel retailer, voted to create the first union at that company. Voting in union elections at two Amazon warehouses will end this month.
Mr. Johnson, a former senior executive at Microsoft who was Starbucks’s president when he was named chief executive, raised the prospect of stepping down with the board of directors last year, he said in a company statement on Wednesday.
“A year ago, I signaled to the board that as the global pandemic neared an end, I would be considering retirement from Starbucks,” Mr. Johnson said. Starbucks said he would continue to serve on the board and as a consultant through September. The company said it had been planning for the succession since last year and anticipated it would have a new chief executive by fall.
The first time Mr. Schultz returned to Starbucks, he abruptly replaced Jim Donald as chief executive when the company was struggling with a downturn in the economy, an influx of coffee competition and missteps.
This time, while Starbucks is on stronger financial footing, Mr. Schultz will have to deal with the rising union issue, a concern he has faced before.
When he acquired Starbucks in 1987, several of the company’s Seattle stores were unionized, as was its local coffee roasting plant. Mr. Schultz made clear to union officials that he did not welcome the relationship.
“He went ballistic screaming at me, telling me to get out of the plant,” said Pam Blauman-Schmitz, the local union rep for the United Food and Commercial Workers, of her first visit to the plant under Mr. Schultz’s ownership. “He followed me all the way out.”
In the late 1980s, workers at the stores voted to decertify the union, and the roasting plant followed in the early 1990s. In a subsequent book, Mr. Schultz said a single worker “did some research on his own and began an effort to decertify the union.” But he acknowledged that he did not want the company to be unionized.
“I was convinced that under my leadership, employees would come to realize that I would listen to their concerns,” Mr. Schultz wrote. “If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union.”
Union officials believed that Mr. Schultz had played a role in the decertification. “We thought it was initiated by a worker that Howard had handpicked to run the decertification campaign,” Ms. Blauman-Schmitz said.
Marie Solis contributed reporting.
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