Starbucks fired a long-time union organizer only two days after Howard Schultz, the billionaire former CEO, was grilled at a Senate committee hearing over the company’s illegal union-busting campaign.
Lexi Rizzo led the campaign at a Starbucks in Buffalo that was one of the first to hold a successful unionization vote, launching a movement that has spread across the country and involved thousands of Starbucks workers.
Rizzo—who had worked for the company for seven years, according to a GoFundMe—was fired from her job as a shift supervisor on Friday, according to the Buffalo News.
Rizzo was canned for repeatedly being late to work, Starbucks told the outlet. The union, Starbucks Workers United, said Rizzo’s firing is “retaliation at its worst.” Two other pro-union workers were also fired, the union said.
“I have given every ounce of everything that I have to this company,” Rizzo said in an emotional video posted to TikTok, “My heart is broken.”
Rizzo went on to take aim at Schultz, who appeared before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) last Wednesday.
“You are a heartless monster and I don’t know how you sleep at night,” she said of Schultz, “You have hundreds of thousands of people giving everything that they have so that you can make another dollar. And then you treat us like we’re dirt.”
Democratic Senators confronted Schultz last week on eight rulings by administrative judges at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that Starbucks had committed 130 labor law violations since the union campaign began in Buffalo in December 2021. Schultz denied that the company had violated the law.
Last month, a NLRB administrative judge found that Starbucks had committed “egregious and widespread” violations of labor law when it fired six pro-union workers in Buffalo and Rochester. The company was ordered to rehire and compensate the workers.
“Starbucks has waged the most aggressive and illegal union-busting campaign in the modern history of our country,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said as he opened the hearing. “That union-busting campaign has been led by Howard Schultz.”
