Starbucks is one of the worst companies pushing wokeness.
The coffee chain crossed one bright red line.
And Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is fighting Starbucks for one unexpected reason.
Florida Attorney General fights Starbucks for using racial quotas in hiring
Seattle-based coffee chain Starbucks is using its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda to create racial quotas for hiring.
Starbucks created sweeping DEI policies in response to the death of George Floyd in 2020.
The company set a stated goal on its website of “achieving Black, Indigenous, and People of Color representation of at least 30 percent at all corporate levels and at least 40 percent of all retail and manufacturing goals by 2025.”
Starbucks executives’ compensation was also tied to reaching DEI goals.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody filed a complaint last spring with the Florida Commission on Human Relations alleging that Starbucks was setting illegal racial hiring quotas.
Starbucks claimed that those figures were merely “aspirational” goals, not racial quotas.
Moody noted that tying executive compensation to those goals called that into question.
“They set specific race-based employment targets. And to the extent, Starbucks suggests that these are merely aspirational ‘goals,’ and not quotas, that claim would be hard to square with Starbucks’s decision to tie executive compensation to meeting those targets,” Moody’s complaint stated.
The Florida Commission on Human Relations ruled that Starbucks did not appear to violate any state law.
“The commission’s Office of General Counsel reviewed all available evidence and the investigative memorandum, and made a recommendation to me, as executive director of the commission, that it is unlikely that unlawful discrimination occurred in this matter,” Executive Director Cheyanne Costilla wrote.
Fight against Starbucks woke hiring policies heads to a judge
The Florida Attorney General was not going to give up on holding Starbucks accountable.
Moody’s office filed a petition with the Florida Division of Administrative Hearing for a judge to hear the complaint.
Her chief of staff, James Percival, wrote in the petition that in “the attorney general’s view, the investigative memo lacked a thorough discussion of the allegations and failed to provide a reasoned basis for its determination.”
Moody argued in May that Starbucks was using its DEI goals to create reverse discrimination.
“So many of these DEI policies that have been pushed in corporate America that were meant to address and prevent discrimination are now pushing policies and programs and initiatives that may, in fact, be unlawful employment practices, in fact becoming discriminatory themselves, in fact, further dividing racial friction and polarization and society,” Moody said.
To achieve its state quota of racial diversity meant that Starbucks would have to discriminate against other applicants to reach it.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has promised that his state is where woke goes to die.
He tried to tackle DEI policies in businesses with his 2023 Stop Woke Act that outlawed any mandatory DEI training for employees.
A federal judge put a permanent injunction on that section of the law while the legal battle plays out over it.
Florida is leading the charge to stop the DEI agenda.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this story.
