California’s Economic Decline: College Students Look to Starbucks for Post Graduation Employment

California’s economy is so bad, college students are fighting to unionize Starbucks, in anticipation of their future jobs.

“When we graduate, we want to enter a workforce where workers have a real voice on the job with their employers,” said Eren Whitfield, a UCR Student and member of UCR Students Against Starbucks, The Press-Enterprise reports. “Bringing people together for a common purpose has been our main goal.”

Her statement should provide enough evidence that Econ 101 must be required to graduate college.

“Students at UCLA and UC Riverside are demanding their schools cut ties with Starbucks until the coffee chain ends an alleged union-busting campaign against its baristas.”

The students will be delivering petitions with more than 1,500 signatures to the two universities this week. “The move to organize has grown rapidly in recent years with workers at more than 385 Starbucks stores unionizing with Starbucks Workers United as they lobby for higher wages, increased staffing and consistent scheduling, despite heavy pushback from the coffee chain.”

California’s economy has moved from a strong manufacturing economy with full-time, high paying jobs and benefits, to a service economy of part-time jobs with minimum wage pay and no benefits.

For every one job created in manufacturing, several others are created to support the business – suppliers, vendors, shippers and deliverers. The California Manufacturing and Technology Association is pushing for a manufacturers tax credit once again:

“Small and medium-sized manufacturers account for 70% of California’s output. A tax credit would make them more competitive with out-of-state producers while reducing barriers to entry and innovation for new and existing manufacturers in the Golden State – bringing jobs, more entrepreneurship, and economic benefits to the diverse array of communities that they call home.

A manufacturing tax credit would allow California’s manufacturers to deduct the full sales and use taxes from their state tax bill for purchases of manufacturing and R&D equipment.”

As the Globe reported Monday, Small, medium and large businesses are packing up and moving to business friendlier states for lower taxes, fewer regulations, and affordable housing for their employees. And they are moving because they are rewarded for being in business by other states – unlike California, which makes it as painful as possible to do business in this state.

College students considering Starbucks for post graduation employment is stunning – college students used to work part-time at Starbucks while attending college.

As for the Starbucks on UC Riverside and UCLA, “student employees are agitating for higher wages, and think unionizing is the only way,” the Press-Enterprise reports.

This is where they are delirious. Have their college professors have led them off the fiscal cliff, or conditioned them to accept service jobs?

California businesses are not only leaving the state, but businesses have been closing in record numbers, particularly since Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered all “non-essential” businesses closed during COVID. More than half of the state’s restaurants did not make it, and even many large businesses succumbed. But that was just icing on the cake of California’s declining economy.

Decades of Democrat policies have serviced to harm California’s waning manufacturing sector. And Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger perhaps signed the death-blow to manufacturing – he signed AB 32, the toughest anti-global-warming regulations of any state into law in 2006, I reported in 2010.

And since 2007 – in anticipation of the new mandates – California has led the nation in job losses,” Wall Street Journal contributor Stephen Moore said.

“Green jobs in California seem to rely solely on government grants and the use of taxpayer dollars, and not in the actual creation of manufacturing jobs,” I reported. Even in 2010, a Milken Institute study found that high taxes and an “onerous regulatory climate” cost California 476,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs. And that’s not all: those missing jobs would have spurred the creation of an estimated 1.17 million more jobs throughout the economy, in addition to other benefits.

The warnings were there, but politicians were more interested in their funders’ agendas.

Earlier in January, Google, Twitch and Discord instituted mass layoffs, the Globe reported. “For much of 2022 and 2023, mass layoffs, primarily in the tech industry occurred frequently in the Bay area. While there were dozens of such layoffs affecting 100 employees or more, large cuts, such as Salesforce having so many rounds of firings that they had to give up an entire office building, 12,000 at Google, and 10,000 at Meta, made headline news across the world.”

San Francisco-based gaming company Unity also layed off 1,800 employees earlier in January. Twitch let go 500 employees in San Francisco as well.

In November, Social media giant Nextdoor, which I refer to as one big “Karen” clambake of angry menopausal harpies, announced in a financial report it would lay off 25% of its staff.

Over 2,000 jobs were lost at Gap, Dropbox in April.

In March, Meta announced 10,000 more job cuts in second round of layoffs.

And in February, almost a year ago, Yahoo, Twilio layed off thousands, and PayPal and NetApp layed off 3,000 employees.

UPS just announced it will lay off 12,000 employees, notably because of “labor negotiations last summer and the higher costs of a new Teamsters contract.”

These huge layoffs have taken place while naive college students are demanding unionization at Starbucks. The gender studies majors just don’t know what they don’t know.

That’s a sure-fire way to encourage Starbucks to not only leave their college campuses, but perhaps plan move out of the state entirely.