All 1,110 Canadian Starbucks stores will close their doors Monday afternoon as employees receive mandatory anti-bias training, a move prompted by an April incident in which a manager at a store in Philadelphia called the police on two black men who were sitting at a table waiting for a friend to join them before ordering.
The session is built around a series of videos developed to train American employees in May. In an open letter to customers, Starbucks Coffee Canada CEO Michael Conway wrote, “This conversation will continue and become part of how we train our partners going forward.”
Assigning this type of training – or related diversity, anti-oppression and cultural competency training – has caught on in education, policing and corporate environments, becoming an easy reaction to high-profile incidents of discrimination and a go-to sentence for badly-behaving employees. But does it actually achieve what it sets out to do? (CP)
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