From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Middle East Starbucks franchisee firing staff due to impact of boycott over Israel-Hamas war
The Middle East franchisee of Starbucks says it has begun firing staff at its coffee shops across the region after the brand found itself targeted by activists during the ongoing war between Israel and the Hamas terror organization in the Gaza Strip.
The Kuwait-based Alshaya Group, a private family firm holding franchise rights for a variety of Western companies including The Cheesecake Factory, H&M and Shake Shack, issues a statement acknowledging the firings at its Middle Eastern and North African locations.
“As a result of the continually challenging trading conditions over the last six months, we have taken the sad and very difficult decision to reduce the number of colleagues in our Starbucks MENA stores,” the statement reads.
Alshaya declined to answer questions about how many employees it was firing. Reuters, which first reported the layoffs, put the number at over 2,000 employees. Many of its employees in the Gulf Arab states are foreign workers hailing from Asian nations.
Alshaya runs about 1,900 Starbucks branches in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and United Arab Emirates. It had employed over 19,000 staff, according to the Seattle-based company.
Since the shock terror assault carried out by the Hamas terror group inside Israel on October 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza, Starbucks has found itself alongside other Western brands targeted by pro-Palestinian activists over the war.
The company prominently has been trying to counter what it describes as “ongoing false and misleading information being shared about Starbucks” online.
“We have no political agenda,” Starbucks says. “We do not use our profits to fund any government or military operations anywhere -– and never have.”
Though the company does not operate in Israel, its upper management has earned a pro-Israel image by pushing back against an anti-Israel statement made by one of its workers unions in the war’s early days.
In October, the company sued Starbucks Workers United for using the Starbucks logo in a statement that expressed support for the Palestinians, while failing to condemn Hamas’s brutal massacre in Israel.
