Soft on Starbucks.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

I am deeply disturbed by your latest issue (Spring 2004) I read the article about Starbucks by the alleged "union organizer," Kim Fellner. So she wants to write "dangerously?" Well she has written such a puff piece about this huge transnational operation as if all she had in mind was job security in the fervently anti-labor capitalist market. How juvenile is it to hype this mega-business because they hire people of color at $7.50 an hour, while their CEO is paid yearly close to $2.5 million--with stock options of many millions of dollars more? And the subtext that since Starbucks is a welcome convenience for her, perhaps owner "benevolence" is about as good as workers organized to protect themselves? Is that the "paradox" for Fellner and for you?

Howard Shultz is also an ardent supporter financially and in public of the illegal and bloody expansionist policies of Israel, an inherently apartheid nation that undermines everything you purport to stand for.

I don't think Starbucks is a friend of communities of color, or a friend of your readers.

Patricia de Larios

I was intrigued and then disappointed with your recent article, "The Starbucks Paradox." As the organizer of the Starbucks campaign for Global Exchange, I can attest that our work has been greatly misrepresented in Fellner's article. Starbucks is the undisputed leader in the specialty coffee field and one of the largest coffee sellers in the US. However, four years after initially agreeing to offer Fair Trade--an agreement that was supposed to begin with a 5 percent volume goal-Starbucks still only sells about 1 percent Fair Trade. Meanwhile, in the last three years, the international price of coffee has plummeted from around $1 a pound to about 50 cents--with farmers gaining merely 20 cents of that. That means farmers are suffering increased impoverishment, malnutrition, and losing their traditional lands all over Latin America, Africa, and Asia. On the other hand, Fair Trade Certified coffee means community empowerment and economic fairness for half a million farmers in hundreds of cooperatives in over 20 countries around the world. Where is the class and race analysis when the means of production--the labor of the black, brown, and Asian coffee farmers who make less than a dollar a day and yet make Starbucks rich--is given only one cursory paragraph in a 2600 word article?

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Deborah James