By Heather Haddon
The 200,000 workers at Starbucks Corp.'s U.S. cafes are on the
rapidly shifting front lines of the service industry's
confrontation with the coronavirus pandemic.
Workers who pour coffee for millions of Americans risk exposure
to the virus if infected customers visit their stores. They are
also under pressure to keep cafes cleaner than ever to reassure
customers as confirmed cases multiply across the country.
"We take cash from customers. They are sneezing and coughing and
not covering their mouths," said Lacreshia Lewis, a 27-year-old
employee at a Starbucks at Orlando International Airport, who is
involved in a union-backed campaign for more benefits.
Ms. Lewis, who is pregnant, wants the licensee of that Starbucks
store, HMSHost, to provide her paid sick time and face masks.
HMSHost said its workers at its 1,520 U.S. airport and other travel
restaurants get paid flexible time, and that it is following
federal guidelines that don't recommend service workers wear
masks.
Starbucks said Wednesday that it would pay any U.S. workers in a
14-day quarantine after exposure to the coronavirus. Starbucks also
extended the benefit to all employees who are above the age of 60,
pregnant or have underlying health conditions.
"Our commitment is to always do what's best for you, our
customers and our communities," Rossann Williams, executive vice
president for Starbucks stores in the U.S. and Canada, said in a
letter to employees on Wednesday.
Starbucks already granted paid sick leave and insurance to
employees who work at least 20 hours a week. But not all
franchisees extend all the same benefits as company-owned stores.
Starbucks owns 8,867 cafes in the U.S., and licenses an additional
6,321 to franchisees.
Other U.S. chains are also working to protect workers and assure
customers their restaurants are safe. McDonald's Corp. said it
would pay employees at its company-owned U.S. stores if they need
to be quarantined. Darden Restaurants Inc., owner of Olive Garden
and other chains, said it would speed up plans to grant paid sick
leave to its more than 180,000 hourly workers at 1,800
locations.
The world's largest coffee chain has sent U.S. employees at
least five memos in the past two weeks explaining added benefits
and new steps to keep cafes clean. One stretched over four pages,
according to a copy reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. It set
guidelines for everything from when to wear plastic gloves to how
to properly mount hand sanitizer on walls.
The pandemic is already weighing on Starbucks's bottom line. The
company last week cut its sales forecast for China, its
second-biggest market, after the outbreak there forced it to
temporarily shut more than half of its 4,300 stores and suspend
work to open new locations.
Most of those stores have reopened, but Starbucks also has
temporarily closed or limited hours at stores in countries
including Italy, Japan and South Korea with intense local outbreaks
of the virus. Estimated losses have reached into the hundreds of
millions of dollars.
Starbucks temporarily closed a cafe in downtown Seattle last
week after a worker there was infected with coronavirus and
quarantined. Starbucks, which is based in Seattle, said it sent
home employees who had direct contact with the worker and did a
deep clean of the store.
The more stringent cleaning regimen is exacerbating frustrations
among some workers who said other recent changes have left them
overworked. Starbucks has shifted a higher portion of its orders to
mobile platforms than most other chains, adding complexity for
workers filling orders placed online as well as at counters and
drive-throughs.
"The store gets more and more dirty as we don't have the time to
properly clean," one store worker said recently on an internal
message board reviewed by the Journal. Denise Nelsen, a Starbucks
U.S. operations chief, responded at that time that the company was
working to give managers the labor and resources they needed.
Starbucks said the more intensive cleaning should take about 30
minutes a day on average, and gave managers that time in budgeted
labor hours to accommodate the work.
Supervisors at one New York store convened last month to figure
out how to implement the new cleaning guidelines, a participant in
that discussion said. "We didn't even have a spare bucket to do
this, let alone a store-wide meeting to ensure all the baristas
were on the same page," the person said.
A spokeswoman for Starbucks said employees are being instructed
to reduce nonessential tasks such as organizing stock to make time
for the extra cleaning.
Several Starbucks workers said their hands were getting dry and
raw from all the extra washing. One shift leader at a cafe in San
Bernardino, Calif., said the company was playing an audio message
every half-hour over the headsets that some employees there wear,
reminding them to wash their hands that often.
The person planned to bring a tub of balm for co-workers' hands.
"Your skin will crack and bleed," the shift leader said.
Write to Heather Haddon at heather.haddon@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 12, 2020 13:44 ET (17:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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