Why Union Drives are a success

After decades of declining union membership, organized labor in the US may be on the cusp of a resurgence. Workers seeking better working conditions and higher wages have recently unionized at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple and elsewhere. Applications for union elections this year are approaching their highest level in a decade. I asked Noam Scheiber, who covers employee and labor issues for The Times, what’s behind the latest wave of union activity.

Ian: You recently profiled by Jaz Brisack, a Rhodes scientist and barista who helped organize a union at a Starbucks in Buffalo, the first at a company-owned store in decades. Why did she want to work there?

noah: Jaz comes from a tradition. We saw it during the Depression; people with radical politics who take jobs with the explicit intention of organizing workers. The term for this is “salting”, like the seasoning. The practice has had limited success in recent decades, but we’re seeing a wider resurgence of it, and Jaz is part of that. Several salts got a job at Amazon and helped organize a facility on Staten Island. Academics like Barry Eidlin and Mie Inouye have written extensively about this.

Jaz is very open about her beliefs. She wore a Karl Marx sweatshirt at Oxford University and once urged the Chancellor of the University of Mississippi — during a reception in Jaz’s honor — to remove a Confederate monument from campus.

She is idealistic and ambitious, but being a social being doesn’t always come naturally to her. She told me that when she first started college, she was “incredibly socially awkward,” in part because she’d been homeschooled. Still, she would urge herself to do things that required interacting with strangers to move things forward, such as handing out flyers to promote a union campaign at a nearby Nissan plant.

Employees of nearly 200 other Starbucks have organized themselves since Jaz .’s store union in December. Did they follow her example?

After their union won, Jaz and the other organizers received inquiries from Starbucks workers across the country. They would have Zoom conversations and tell them how to get started. I was with the Buffalo organizers the day the union won at a Starbucks in Mesa, Arizona, the first outside of Buffalo during the campaign. An employee at Jaz’s store, Michelle Eisen, had been in close contact with the Mesa employees. I went out to dinner with her and some of the other Buffalo organizers that night and they were dizzy. They were proud of what they had set in motion.

So these things catch on. When I cover a union campaign these days, I ask, ‘Have you been paying attention to what’s going on at Starbucks? At Amazon?” The answer is invariably not just yes, but: “It inspired us, it motivated us, it showed us that it was possible.” That was the case when I interviewed Trader Joe’s and Apple workers. And, historically, unionization has tended to happen in spurts.

Graduates seem to be driving this spurt.

An important part of the story is the radicalization of the HBO employee. You had a crushing recovery from the Great Recession followed by the pandemic. Being highly educated does not necessarily mean being on board. But whether it’s Starbucks, Amazon or . is REIhighly skilled employees are closely involved.

As a group, highly educated Americans are becoming more liberal than working-class Americans. Has that been an obstacle to organizing workers without qualifications?

Highly skilled workers often get the ball rolling, but they are quite adept at bringing a diverse group together. I spoke with Brima Sylla, a Liberian immigrant who helped organize with his colleagues at the Staten Island Amazon facility. He has a Ph.D. in public order and speaks several languages. He helped enroll hundreds of people, many of them fellow African or Asian immigrants. Another organizer was Pasquale Cioffi. He is a former dock worker and comes from a more traditional working-class background. He was good at talking to non-university people and Trump supporters. Having a coalition that brought Brima and Pat together helped the union win.

You compared organizing today to the 1930s. What parallels do you see?

The Great Depression was clearly a traumatic moment. The financial system was collapsing. The economy was collapsing. Unemployment was 25 percent. But by 1936, things were considerably better, though still not great. This was also the case during the pandemic. Many people lost their jobs in 2020, but the labor market was tight in 2021, and employees felt empowered. That one-two punch – a traumatic event, and then things get better – is a recipe for successful organizing.

Your profile of Jaz reads differently than many Times stories. You talk about yourself — like her, you were a Rhodes scholar and interviewed your former classmates, contrasting their late 1990s business outlook with her skepticism. Why did you write it like that?

Once I understood Jaz’s background and role in the Starbucks campaign, my first thought was, “Wow, this probably wouldn’t have happened among my cohort of Rhodes scholars.” My reflex was to compare it to my group and marvel at the differences. It seemed fairer, more authentic, and more compelling to just own that.

More about Noa: He joined The Times in 2015 after nearly 15 years with The New Republic and lives near Chicago. After a bad experience with late-night coffee, his college humor magazine, and an 8am math class, he avoids caffeine.

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Why Union Drives are a success

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