Starbucks, Hexagon and the End of the Working Class
SCOTTSBORO, ALABAMA – On June 6, employees of Starbucks store 66182 in Jackson County, Alabama, joined a nationwide movement of baristas calling for better hours, wages and benefits, that has grown to include almost 300 Starbucks locations across 35 states. In a letter addressed to the coffeehouse CEO, Howard Schultz, workers decried the lack of support for long-time employees, haphazard scheduling practices, and anxiety levels requiring emergency room visits.
“People [are] not getting enough hours to get the benefits that Starbucks promises”, store employee and signatory Garret Ellison told a local TV station. Fellow signatory Siera Moore seemed almost apologetic when asked about the reasons she decided to join the Scottsboro Alabama Starbucks Workers United group, assuring WHNT that she was fighting for her hours to be restored rather than a pay raise.
Moore’s trepidation may be understandable in a heavily conservative state like Alabama, but it is more so the result of Ronald Reagan’s all-out assault and ultimate obliteration of organized labor in the United States, which was best exemplified by the Brown & Sharpe Manufacturing Co. strike of 1981 in Rhode Island – the longest-running, and possibly most pivotal, industrial work stoppage in American history.
Another, more high-profile strike broke out a few months earlier among the nation’s air traffic controllers and captured most of the media’s attention. Considered to be “the greatest disaster in the history of American organized labor”, Reagan’s unprecedented decision to fire over 11,000 PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association) union members within 48 hours of the walk out set the stage for a Republican-led anti-union political overhaul across the country that persists to this day.
Nevertheless, it was the Brown & Sharpe strike where the most crucial matters concerning mass labor in the United States were throttled by big business. Centering around Brown & Sharpe’s attempt to create a modular workforce, giving management the right to shift employee assignments at will and undermining seniority tenets and other worker protections afforded through union membership. Exactly the kinds of protections Starbucks employees, and the vast majority of wage laborers, lack today.
Although Brown & Sharpe replaced all of the striking workers in a relatively short period of time and continued operations, the striking union members were able to maintain their public fight due to a law in Rhode Island, which provided unemployment compensation for union members who went on strike. The battle went on for 17 years, and featured several instances of police brutality, including tear gas attacks and one worker shot by law enforcement, while warming his hands over a fire. Another died of hypothermia after six hours picketing in subfreezing temperatures.
In 1998, a final ruling came down in favor of the precision tool manufacturing company from the Rhode Island Supreme Court. By then, however, the company’s market had shrunk considerably due to foreign competitors and ceased making its signature milling and measurement machinery.
Two and a half years later, a Swedish holding company that was in the process of transitioning from tuna imports and other disparate businesses to a technology conglomerate, picked up Brown & Sharpe’s Precision Measuring Instruments Division and Measuring Systems Group for the relatively paltry sum of $180 million or just $4 a share.
The Measure of Man
Brown & Sharpe was only the first of a massive acquisition spree for Hexagon AB, the Swedish concern controlled by the family of billionaire and security industry magnate Melker Schörling, which has brought more than 170 companies under its corporate umbrella over the last two decades to build what may be the world’s most important metrology company.
Metrology is the application of “measurement science to enhance economic security and improve quality of life”, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and is at the center of practically all “smart city” infrastructure projects. Hexagon’s metrology tentacles spread far wider, however, boasting separate divisions for agriculture, manufacturing, mining, geosystems, and many more.
The headquarters of Hexagon’s Safety, Infrastructure and Geospatial division are located just 50 miles west of Scottsboro, in a suburb of Huntsville, Alabama. Less than 10 minutes away from Hexagon’s offices is Redstone Arsenal, where Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun worked alongside other Paperclip scientists extracted from Hitler’s top weapons research teams to build America’s space program, as well as enhance its chemical weapons capabilities.
On Tuesday, this division announced a partnership with Japanese multinational ICT corporation, Fujitsu, to “accelerate the development and promotion of use cases to solve societal challenges and contribute to the realization of the ‘Trusted Society’”. The press release goes on to specify that these “use cases” relate to the leveraging of “digital twin technologies and solutions from both companies, including IoT sensors, data processing, AI analysis and advanced data visualization”.
Hexagon’s Alabama-based division and Fujitsu have already been working together in other smart city projects, such as a shared mobility project in Munich, Germany. With this new “Trusted Society” endeavor, the claws of the cybernetic enclosure sink deeper into the already highly compromised fabric of our society. Hexagon and Fujitsu are poised to “deploy these technologies to develop joint solutions that deliver richer information and deeper insights to customers in government, the public sector, transportation and utilities”, and thus lay the necessary groundwork for a full-spectrum data surveillance economy, where “economic security” and “quality of life” are programmed to maximize return on investment through smart contracts and prediction markets.
Authenticated Impostors
Ola Rollén had been tapped by Schörling to lead the transformation of Hexagon at the turn of the 21st century. Hexagon’s technology company acquisition spree was often handled through a separate investment vehicle set up by both men called Geenbridge Partners, as well as Rollén’s own private investment concern. In 2016, Norwegian authorities detained Rollén on allegations of illegal market activities, when Hexagon purchased controlling shares in NEXT Biometric, a fingerprint sensor technology firm, via these proxy investment entities.
Schörling fell ill and was on the verge of selling Hexagon for $20 billion a year into the controversy. Rollén, who maintained his innocence, was eventually cleared by Norwegian courts and resumed his stewardship of Hexagon, acquiring at least 32 more companies since, including several large American firms. Among the most notable was Hexagon’s acquisition of Infor, a $3.2 billion-dollar enterprise asset management software company previously owned by Koch Industries.
Koch also has a presence on Hexagon’s board of directors through Brett Watson, President of Koch Equity Development, along with former and current executives of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and Electronic Arts (EA). The Schörling family continues to be its largest shareholder. Meanwhile, NEXT Biometric’s latest contract reveals Hexagon’s ultimate direction.
In May, NEXT Biometric announced a $40,000 purchase order for its fingerprint authentication product to be used in a “financial inclusion” project in sub-Saharan Africa. Johannesburg-based FinTech, Waxed Mobile, has partnered with another South African company called Digital Twin to set up mobile-first microfinance mechanisms throughout the region:
“With this new product we provide the microlender the mechanism to finance the farming process and thus also enable the farmer to meet their financial responsibilities. We also minimize the need for any payments to be made in cash making transactions simpler, cheaper, and more secure in rural areas.”
Anthony Stewart, Group CEO of Waxed Mobile
Remembering Ourselves
Hexagon’s Geospatial division claims to “aid government services in more than 100 countries”, and to “support more than two dozen departments and ministries of national defense”. Although such claims might include some creative copywriting from their marketing department, there is no reason to doubt that the company’s footprint is far-reaching, and represents one of the leading forces in the implementation of 4IR infrastructure and backend services to enable the establishment of the digital enclosure.
In 2022, the most important unionization effort of the century in the United States can barely bring itself to divorce its own discourse from the vocabulary imposed by corporate, which was designed to create a false impression in the first place. “They [Starbucks] say the word partner,” said Ellison, referring to how the company calls its employees, “and we really just want to emphasize that they mean partner through and through.”
Of course, when we think of labor exploitation, a barista at Starbucks isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. In fact, downstream in the supply chain of the coffee store giant are thousands of far more heavily exploited coffee farmers, whose earnings haven’t changed in twenty years and where child labor is common. Such things are beyond the control of the average Starbucks employee, yet they are all part of the same global chain of exploitation by large multinationals, and which are availing themselves of digital technologies to automate the management and enforcement of their exploitative policies and practices.
In a world where companies like Hexagon and their partners are fitting every nook and cranny of our cities and natural landscapes with devices to turn “complex data about people, places and assets into meaningful information and capabilities” for their own benefit, concepts like unionization lose their meaning. Robot baristas are around the corner and the CEOs will just pay lip service to employees until they become cheap enough to staff locations with them.
So, it may be wise to drop the pretense of a “working class”, altogether. The kind of union we need is one where the relationship to our own communities and social matrixes serve each other, and not a post-human, fragmented digital counterfeit.
