Generation Bernie hits Starbucks

Philip Locker spoke with a long-time union organizer active in DSA, who asked to be anonymous, about the wave of Starbucks workers fighting to unionize, the challenges they will likely face, and what role should socialists play in this struggle. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

As we speak, workers in more than 50 Starbucks stores in 19 states have filed for union elections with the NLRB. You’ve been involved in worker organizing efforts over many years. What do you make of the strategy Starbucks Workers United is using and how does it compare to other efforts?

It’s interesting to contrast the Starbucks Workers United approach towards organizing baristas with the Fight For 15 model, because they’re really opposites. Fight For 15 organizes fast food workers industry-wide into strikes and mass actions to create a crisis for the fast food companies, but has struggled to institutionalize the movement into an ongoing shop floor presence. 

The task of building a union has only started when you’ve won an NLRB election.

By contrast, the Starbucks organizing has been far less centralized and has relied on NLRB elections rather than strikes to build momentum. This bottom-up, worker-to-worker organizing has caught fire and spread to hot shops across the country. It recalls an earlier era of organizing where there was less emphasis on identifying strategic targets and running comprehensive campaigns to generate the necessary leverage to compel a first contract out of an employer.

We should learn from the Starbucks workers and encourage the optimism that is giving the struggle a sense of momentum, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the challenges of building a union at an international corporation like Starbucks, where workers are dispersed among 9,000 small stores in the US. It’s important to remember that the task of building a union has only started when you’ve won an NLRB election, and that only about 50 percent of unions that win the election go on to win a first contract. 

What’s different this time?

What’s really new with the Starbucks campaign is that they’re doing it store by store. These are small stores with 15 to 20 workers per store. There are a few reasons this is working so far.

First, Biden’s NLRB has come through on something by allowing unionization elections a single shop at a time. This is a very favorable ruling for the workers. 

Second, this is Generation Z’s COVID moment, where people who are 35 and younger have been working through COVID, and have been through the Bernie experience and the BLM uprisings. They’re pretty primed to join a union. 

And the third thing is a kind of obfuscation of what building a union is, making it seem easier than it is – you just have to win a majority vote of your co-workers at your store, even though we know that establishing a union is a much tougher fight. 

What kinds of anti-union tactics can we expect from Starbucks?

The “union avoidance sector” is professional. Workers have to sit through relentless meetings where you’re just made to feel uncomfortable. 

And that’s really the more ubiquitous form of union busting. Relentless presentations, lots of one-on-ones to hear your concerns, to make sure that you have the “right facts” about unionization, and doing that until the workers are just worn out.

And even if the workers win their union election all Starbucks has to legally do is bargain with you in good faith – meet with you and look at your proposal – but they don’t have to give you anything.

Even if we win union recognition at 100 Starbucks, if you can channel Starbucks corporate for a moment, what would it mean to negotiate a good contract with those 100 stores? All 9,000 of your stores are going to unionize and demand that contract. So you have an extreme interest in not reaching a first contract with those first 100 stores. And they have no legal obligation to sign a contract.

Isn’t the biggest danger that Starbucks endlessly delays, there will be turnover among the workers, and things will sputter out? It seems to me critical that every stage of the unionization effort is building workers’ organization and confidence to take action that can have an economic impact on Starbucks. Building that muscle means organizing rallies, national days of action, pickets, and building towards a strike.

I think that’s dead right. Workers ultimate leverage is their ability to strike and to organize national actions that disrupt the possibility of business as usual continuing for Starbucks.

One of the downsides of selling workers on the idea that it is easy to form a union is that maybe they’re not prepared for what comes next. To actually win the improvements that you’re looking for won’t come from legal protections of the NLRB process, but from taking escalating actions to the point of being able to shut down a critical number of stores.

A typical weakness of the labor movement in unionization drives is separating the fight for union recognition from winning a contract as two completely different stages. When the labor movement was most successful in this country in the 1930s the battle for unionization was connected immediately with taking strike action for higher wages and better conditions.

Since they’ve chosen the NLRB route – to separate union recognition from the battle to get a contract – one of the core assumptions of that strategy within the labor movement is: If you’re going for an NLRB vote, you don’t attack the company. You adopt a kind of a rhetorical framework: “Hey, we want the company to be more successful, and we think we have ideas that would help.”

The argument is that it’s going to be a razor-thin election and if you beat up on the company, you tend to lose the margin you need to win the vote. 

In contrast, there’s an approach of comprehensive campaigning for unions. You are fighting for a first contract and recognition all at once, in the same way that the CIO in the thirties did. 

The reality was that the CIO was built by a militant minority and it wasn’t built on elections. The sit-down strikers occupied the Flint auto plant at GM and demanded union recognition from the company. So they’re two different strategies. Can we bring these strategies together?

I’m very much from the opposite school of the strategy of focusing on NLRB elections. However, we now have this wave of store filings with the NLRB. That’s exciting and I think you’ve got to ride the wave! 

Let’s see when this wave plateaus and then starts to drop, and then there will be a more open discussion about a changing strategy. I think that once a critical mass of Starbucks workers have won an election, it’ll be important to convene some sort of national bargaining convention or some sort of space where workers can determine what their demands are, what sort of actions they’re willing to take to win them, and what their contract campaign will look like. 

Let’s push for a national bargaining convention where workers get together and draft their demands.

What’s the role of socialists in this?

We can be thought leaders about the big picture questions. What’s our vision on industrial unionism? How do we create class struggle, worker led unions at Starbucks? 

And at the same time, DSA chapters can do a lot of community organizing to fund-raise for the workers and build public pressure on the company to stop their union-busting. 

I also think the role of socialists is to be the leaders at the workplace. DSA has members who already are at Starbucks. Some of the key on the ground worker organizers of this effort have been DSA members from the get-go, including in Buffalo. 

Obviously, for DSA everything should be seen through the lens of how do we support this campaign and not a sectarian mentality of how to use this for our benefit? What do we do to make sure Starbucks workers succeed in forming a union that wins a good contract? But within that I think that there’s every reason DSA should try to build a socialist current among the workers.

I think one strength of this campaign, and one reason it stands out from a lot of other campaigns, is that there’s a radical and politicized layer of workers driving it forward. 

That was one thing that was a real strength in the 1930s and is missing in most unions today. And that’s a strength in this campaign. DSA can help to make this radical core more conscious and more solid by bringing the militant minority of workers together into a socialist organization where they can discuss and work out the key demands and strategy that will be needed to win, and then organize to win Starbucks Workers United to their proposals.