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Howard Schultz on JobsStarbucks CEO; independent candidate for President until July 2019 |
At Starbucks, I set out, in so many ways, to create the kind of company that my father never got a chance to work for. One that treated people with dignity and respect.
In America in the 1960s, an unskilled worker like my dad who got hurt on the job was typically dismissed without notice. The accident left my father with no income, no health insurance, no worker's compensation, and because my parents had no savings, they had nothing to fall back on. If not for a local charitable organization, Jewish Family Services, my family would have run out of food.
I've tried to imagine the situation from my father's point of view. He took on the "worst job in the world" to support us. But what did he get for it? Abandonment by the company whose work broke him. The sight of my helpless father slumped on the couch wedged itself into my consciousness forever.
My intention was to spur job growth, beyond the people Starbucks was able to hire. Doing so could help rev the economy. Of all the problems facing the nation, employment was an area in which Starbucks had the most credibility. Creating jobs was what we did. That year, the company was on track to hire 12,000 more partners globally. But if we wanted Starbucks to help make a dent in the country's high unemployment situation, we had to look beyond our own ability to hire.
Small business can be the job engines of local economies. But they weren't growing. The Great Recession had slammed small companies especially hard, in part because they relied on capital from banks to fund their initial growth. But since 2008, many banks were only lending money to the most qualified, asset-rich borrowers. Not necessarily entrepreneurs. We agreed that focusing on funding small businesses [would be our policy].