'Starbucks Fires Employee on Food Stamps for Eating a Sandwich from the Garbage'

[Popular Front of Judea]

True tales of the precariat. Touching the concern that the management has for their employees health. :rolleyes:

Last Monday, 21-year-old barista Coulson Loptmann was fired from a downtown Seattle Starbucks where he’d worked for more than a year. The reason? He ate a sandwich that had been thrown away. Really. Like most cafes, the coffee giant gets rid of food that has expired; they donate what they can and toss the more perishable items.

Loptmann, who says he couldn’t get enough hours to pay his bills and survives partly on his food stamps, explains, “I hadn’t eaten all day and I was on a seven-hour shift.” A coworker had just marked some breakfast sandwiches out of stock, and he figured no one would mind if he grabbed one of the plastic-wrapped sausage sandwiches out of the trash can.

But Starbucks did mind. According to Loptmann, his manager sat him down a week later and told him she’d found out about the sandwich and contacted HR, “and they consider it stealing, and it’s against policy. So I’m sorry, but I have to terminate you.” She fired him on the spot.

The incident comes up just as fast-food workers prepare for another strike this Thursday—and this time, they're asking baristas to join them. Seattle's fast-food walkouts this spring were extraordinarily successful, shutting down multiple restaurants, and this week, organizers for Good Jobs Seattle are encouraging low-wage workers in coffee shops to join the national push for a $15 an hour minimum wage.

Starbucks Fires Employee on Food Stamps for Eating a Sandwich from the Garbage | Seattle Stranger Blog

(http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/08/27/starbucks-fires-employee-on-food-stamps-for-eating-a-sandwich-from-the-garbage)

[Tolstoy]

I once ate a burrito out of the Taco Bell garbage in front of my ex girlfriend and she didnt even dump me, so to me this looks especially ridiculous.

You know this system is cutthroat when it even denies the working class its crumbs

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

disgusted but not surprised.

[Brutus]

disgusted but not surprised.

I think that's my reaction to most news

[Popular Front of Judea]

I have a suspicion that there is more to the story -- as in the management was looking for a pretext to fire him and he duly gave them one. (Been there.) He is eligible for unemployment, it will be insult added to injury if Charbucks appeals his claim.

Glad to see everyone is reading the article. :rolleyes:

[bcbm]

I have a suspicion that there is more to the story -- as in the management was looking for a pretext to fire him and he duly gave them one.

i dunno this sounds like pretty standard policy for a place like starbucks. i have definitely heard of people having the cops called on them for stealing when they were dumpster diving.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

i dunno this sounds like pretty standard policy for a place like starbucks. i have definitely heard of people having the cops called on them for stealing when they were dumpster diving.

It'd be nice to see this blow up in their face.
Did y'all follow a few years ago when Tim Horton's (Canada's nationally endemic patriotic doughnut dealer) in London, Ontario fired a single mom for giving a timbit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbit) (approx. retail value $0.15) to a baby?
It actually kick-started a pretty broad discussion (and she got her job back). Tim's isn't an IWW closed-shop yet, but, hey, picking a battle like this and demonstrating what can be won if you raise a little hell is a thing.

I hope buddy goes to SeaSol and they fuck with Starbucks' shit.

[o well this is ok I guess]

Actually, that's pretty ridiculous. I know two guys who work at starbucks and taking food at the end of the night is just something everyone does.
Though I guess it's probably just the ones they work at.

[Popular Front of Judea]

Just because everyone does it doesn't mean the management can't fire your ass for it -- especially if they are looking for a pretext for doing so.

[Klaatu]

Fishing food out of the garbage is not 'stealing.'

My dad was in World War II, and he saw people eating out of garbage cans in Germany (some of them were wearing business suits!)
This is what war does (war as was the result of Nazi-Capitalism)

[Zergling]

Gotta wonder how the manager lives with herself over doing something like this.

[tachosomoza]

So, you'd rather lose all of the value by destroying something, instead of producing value by feeding people. Capitalism is waste.

[Quail]

I honestly can't get my head around the idea that taking stuff from bins is stealing. If something has been thrown away, presumably it's because it wasn't wanted anymore so people should be free to take it if they can make use of it.

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

I remember seeing armfuls of burgers etc being thrown out when I worked McDs and knowing i'd be fired if I so much as had a bite of one.
Fucking ridiculous, though unsurprising.

[A.J.]

Really insult to injury here.

I mean the only reason this poor sod was scavenging for the most basic means of subsistence was because he was so underpaid in the first place. Then to be sacked by the very exploiters who are the root cause of scavenging in first place!

I think this is an example of what's called a "vicious circle"

[A.J.]

I honestly can't get my head around the idea that taking stuff from bins is stealing. If something has been thrown away, presumably it's because it wasn't wanted anymore so people should be free to take it if they can make use of it.

Perhaps their reasoning was that the bins, and therefore it's contents, are the property of starbucks until such time as it had been taken away by whatever waste disposal firm they hire.

[argeiphontes]

Deserving of a brick thru the big plate glass windows. Since Obama is listening I only recommend peaceful protest and unionization, of course.

[Rugged Collectivist]

I honestly can't get my head around the idea that taking stuff from bins is stealing. If something has been thrown away, presumably it's because it wasn't wanted anymore so people should be free to take it if they can make use of it.

They're throwing it out because they don't think they can sell it anymore. If they find someone willing to eat it they'll try to charge them (sometimes at a discounted price, but still).

[Jimmie Higgins]

We "voluntarily" don't get lunch breaks at my work. To make up for it they used to allow us to take food from the kitchen. They brought in a new chef and when my coworker grabbed a pastry like he's done for 5 years, the new chef saw him and grabbed it out of his hand and threw it against the wall yelling: this is not for you! In other news he also gives people slices of wedding cake in exchange for running errands for him. All kinds of violations - and these are just the ones I've heard of. People just quit rather than try and stand up. Me and a couple of coworkers challenged them on the lunch break issue and I thought we were one step ahead of them because we got some support from a number of workers there and did some legal research... But then they very quickly and slickly outflanked us... I felt a little like Ned stark realizing that his piece of paper with the king's last wishes was no match against lannister gold and swords. Sorry for the nerd reference there. They knew how to undermine our solidarity better than we could organize it.

[argeiphontes]

^ what was their rationale? IIRC under federal labor law you're entitled to a half hour paid or an hour unpaid.

Agitating at work is hard. At my last job they didn't like me pushing for their own interests even :lol: when I wanted the DevOps team to be more Agile. They only had a superficial understanding of the paradigm and tried to incorporate it into their own authoritarian views of how the place should be managed. It was a real contradiction of capitalism we were struggling over. I believe the entire team has quit by now... :lol: