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The staff of the world's largest coffeehouse chain is encouraged to promote better representation of minorities and will be trained against racial prejudice.
To foster diversity, Starbucks requires its senior executives to take racial bias training and links their compensation to "goals of increasing minority representation in the workforce," reports the Wall Street Journal. By 2025, the coffeehouse chain wants 30% of its 200,000 employees in the United States to be people of color and top management to reflect diversity more.
“It’s not a straightforward matter,” says COO Roz Brewer, herself black. According to CNBC, only 15% of Starbucks' top executives were people of color in 2019, while 46% of the overall workforce “identify as a minority.”
The company undertakes to publish the progress of its policy in this area each year. “The remuneration of senior executives will be determined in part” by the results obtained, specifies the Wall Street Journal. A mentoring program for employees of color is also in place.
Racism in business
Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the actions of the Black Lives Matter movement this summer, the world of work in the United States has taken hold of issues of equal treatment of people of color and “some companies have made a commitment to more diversity in their workforce, ”explains the Wall Street Journal.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, "dissuades companies with a contract with the federal state from issuing specific diversity targets or from conducting training on racial prejudice." The White House is considering “canceling contracts with companies that violate an executive order prohibiting recipients of federal grants from providing diversity training”.
The world's largest coffeehouse chain works with the US administration but refuses to renege on this “commitment” to diversity. Which dates back to 2018, when she had to react after the scandal sparked by the arrest of two black men at a Starbucks coffee shop in Philadelphia, who were waiting for the start of a business meeting to order, recalls CNBC. After the protests went viral, Starbucks shut down all of its American coffee shops for half a day so that all of its staff would receive training against racial prejudice.
