Consumer Group Accuses Starbucks of Exploitative Labor Practices

WASHINGTON — A consumer advocacy group filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Starbucks saying the company falsely labels its coffee and tea as “100% ethical” despite a history of what it called “slave-like conditions” on farms where the coffee beans and tea are grown.

The lawsuit says Starbucks uses its reputation for ethics as a marketing strategy while its farms in Brazil, Guatemala and Kenya exploit laborers.

“On every bag of coffee and box of K-cups sitting on grocery store shelves, Starbucks is telling consumers a lie,” Sally Greenberg, chief executive officer of the National Consumers League, said in a statement.

Starbucks denied any wrongdoing and pledged to fight the lawsuit. The company says it accepts coffee beans and tea products only after each supply chain is checked and verified as meeting ethical labor standards.

The abuse of workers has included child laborers, grueling work, use of illegal migrants and requiring women to have sex with the managers who hire them, according to the lawsuit filed in District of Columbia Superior Court.

Washington, D.C., which is the headquarters of the National Consumers League, has a law called the Consumer Protection Procedures Act. The law forbids a variety of deceptive business practices.

In the case of Starbucks, the National Consumers League says the deceit is the company’s claim of “100% ethical” while exploiting workers in foreign countries. The company listed several examples:

• At Kenya’s James Finlay tea plantation, undercover British Broadcasting Corporation journalists reported they found sexual abuse of workers, including supervisors requiring women to have sex with them in exchange for their jobs. Finlay workers have filed a class action lawsuit alleging brutal working conditions and low pay. It says supervisors fire chronically injured workers instead of providing them with health care.

• At Brazil’s Starbucks-certified Mesas Farm, law enforcement officers rescued 17 workers, including a 15-, 16- and 17-year-old, from grueling work conditions, the lawsuit says. They were required to work outdoors without protective equipment, sometimes in bad weather, while lifting coffee sacks weighing more than 130 pounds.

• In Guatemala, an investigative news story reported that children under 13 years old were working 40 or 50 hours per week at three Starbucks-certified farms, according to the lawsuit.

Starbucks’ certification program, called Coffee and Farmer Equity Practices, was one of the coffee industry’s first set of ethical sourcing standards when it started in 2004. 

The CAFE Practices consist of guidelines Starbucks developed to ensure the coffee and tea it buys are good for the environment and the supply chain’s workforce. It includes requirements for fair labor standards, sustainable agricultural practices and environmental measures to manage waste, protect water quality and conserve energy.

Coffee bean bags Starbucks sells in its stores bear the company’s logo and the words “100% ethical coffee sourcing.” Starbucks repeats its commitment to ethics and human rights on social media channels and its website.

“We take pride in conducting business responsibly and supporting communities where we do business, from bean to cup,” the website says. “As a company that buys 3% of the world’s coffee, sourced from more than 400,000 farmers in more than 30 countries, Starbucks understands our future is inextricably tied to the future of farmers and their families.”

Despite media and government investigatory reports that contradict Starbucks’ assertions of ethics, the company has “turned a blind eye and continued to point to so-called ethical ‘certification’ programs that are known to be unreliable as the basis for its representations that its coffee and tea products are ethically sourced,” according to the National Consumers League lawsuit.

It seeks an injunction to stop Starbucks from continuing to advertise “100% ethical coffee sourcing” without first improving working conditions for farmworkers in its supply chain. The lawsuit also wants the court to order a corrective advertising campaign by Starbucks as well as payment of damages. 

“Consumers have been misled by Starbucks’ deceptive advertising, and Starbucks, with annual profits exceeding $21 billion, has unjustly benefited from branding itself as an industry leader in corporate responsibility while hiding the true nature of its unreliable and inadequate sourcing practices,” the National Consumers League said in the lawsuit.

The case is National Consumers League v. Starbucks Corp. in District of Columbia Superior Court.

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