Starbucks Fires Union organizer Lexi Rizzo Days After Howard Schultz Senate Grilling.

Starbucks fired a longtime union organizer just two days after Howard Schultz, the billionaire and former CEO, was grilled at a Senate committee hearing on the company’s illegal anti-union campaign.

Lexi Rizzo led the campaign at a Buffalo Starbucks, which was one of the first to hold a successful unionization vote and started a movement that has spread across the country, involving thousands of Starbucks workers.

Rizzo – who worked for the company for seven years, according to GoFundMe – was fired from her job as shift supervisor on Friday Buffalo News.

Rizzo was jailed for repeatedly being late for work, Starbucks told the outlet. The Starbucks Workers United union said Rizzo’s firing was “the ultimate retaliation.” Two other pro-union workers have also been fired, the union said.

“I’ve given this company every ounce of everything I have,” Rizzo said in an emotional video posted to TikTok, “My heart is broken.”

Rizzo continued to target Schultz, who appeared before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Senate last Wednesday.

“You’re a heartless monster and I don’t know how you sleep at night,” she said of Schultz, “Hundreds of thousands of people are giving everything they have so you can make another dollar. And then you treat us like dirt.”

Democratic senators confronted Schultz last week about eight rulings by National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) administrative judges that Starbucks had committed 130 labor law violations since the union campaign began in Buffalo in December 2021. Schultz denied that the company broke the law.

Last month, an NLRB administrative judge found that Starbucks committed “egregious and widespread” labor law violations when it fired six pro-union workers in Buffalo and Rochester. The company was ordered to reinstate and compensate the workers.

“Starbucks has waged the most aggressive and illegal anti-union campaign in our country’s modern history,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said as he opened the hearing. “This anti-union campaign was led by Howard Schultz.”