Its funny to watch "progressive" mega corporations like Starbucks, Apple, Amazon + more skirt around unions. Essentially they use PR to say we are all for these corporate safe progressive topics... but any topics of worker rights, unions.. nope.
To that end they are forced to behave progressively — so I don't think there's much of a distinction with regard to whether the company truly is or is not "progressive".
and what the heck do you mean by "progressive"?
It has come to mean anyone who is generally left-liberal and favors achieving those policy goals through gradual reform rather than sudden reform, or direct action.
well-understood by marxists (are there any of them around any more?) but not i suggest by the rest of us.
and of course apple, starbucks and co are all "progressive" and not out to gouge you for all you have?
or is this just another part of mad usa politics and wokeness?
More seriously, revolutionary Marxist parties exist in all countries with varying degrees of success. Most of us are involved in the labour movement, often organising within unions.
There are progressive companies, but they are usually labor coops.
Patagonia.
For instance, a progressive value is having a diverse workforce because discrimination and prejudice are immoral. A corporate value is having a diverse workforce because it makes labor organization harder. The corporate messaging about diversity initiatives this will appear to be progressive political messaging, but really isn't. Progressives support workplace diversity to combat prejudice, while corporations support workplace diversity to exploit prejudice.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21228324/amazon-whole-foo...
One of the complains perusing the SB subreddits discuss how pay doesn't keep up with cost of living and that the benefits are difficult to qualify for due to the company scheduling hours under qualifying threshold for them in a 6 month period.
It is also interesting to hear that these locations are running skeleton crews while overhiring just to be able to schedule each worker fewer hours.
It is not possible to be a progressive mega corp.
I'm less sure about Apple, which might actually have more of a progressive streak in it (I'm simply not knowledgable), but the other two are pretty much standard exploitative mega corps.
Well, Steve Jobs specifically.
Maybe because I am in denial, but I like to sort of differentiate the two. However you feel about the twain a decade ago, to be blunt, Steve is no more and Apple continues on.
Moreover, Cook was the main driver for putting all of Apple manufacturing in totalitarian China, which has caused many difficulties for Apple's "progressive" image, because the Chinese government has forced Apple into censoring the App Store and even into censoring the operating systems (removing references to Taiwan, for example). Not to mention the often terrible working conditions in iPhone factories.
Does anyone besides me remember that CEO Howard Schultz thought he should be president back in 2016? This whole thing just makes me want to shout from the rooftops: We do not have a left-wing party in the United States! The Democrats are anti-union and pro-austerity. We have a center-right party and a far-right party, that's it!
It's basically a marginal position at this point to be outright pro-union, even more so to be pro-nationalization / pro-interventionist. Apart from outliers like maybe Bernie Sanders, an explicit working class orientation has been taken over almost completely by the populist right, and much of the self-identified "left" speaks mostly to the concerns of the upper middle class. Not just the mainstream of the US Democrats, but even much of what is spoken about by "the squad", or the Canadian NDP party.
In some areas, if you break down voting maps by demographic, parties lumped in as "left wing" now tend to dominate in areas with higher incomes. Strongly working class areas often swing populist right. This was not the case even 20 years ago.
Regular working people are not the audience anymore.
If a part of your platform is "No immigration" it becomes very difficult to distinguish that from "No immigration (because I don't like brown people)".
Specifically in the case of Starbucks, progressives do not think they are.