Starbucks is interviewing candidates to succeed its longtime interim chief, Howard Schultz, but it’s looking outside its Seattle headquarters.
“For the future of the company, we need a domain of experience and expertise in a number of disciplines that we don’t have now,” Schultz told the Wall Street Journal. “It requires a different type of leader.”across the country. Some 70 stores in 25 states have already voted to be represented by a union contract while 275 out of 9,000 stores have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to be represented by a union.
Schultz, who has led the company for more than three decades, stepped back into the fray in April on anCristina Arias It was the Brooklyn-born Schultz’s third time taking the reins of the company he built into an international juggernaut.Schultz says he is vetting several “viable candidates” and expects to choose one by the fall, according to the report.The company’s executives in charge of human resources, public affairs and public policy — two of whom have been with the company for more than 15 years — are leaving the company.
As Starbucks faces a tsunami of labor activism, it has taken a hard line in some instances, offering its employees who do not want to be represented by a union contract better benefits than those working for stores that have a contract.Over the weekend, a store in Ithaca, NY, that was represented by the union was closed permanently by the company.