Factually! with Adam Conover - The Secret Agent Organizer of the Starbucks Union with Jaz Brisack

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Companies are infamous for their union busting tactics, but that doesn’t mean union organizers don’t have their own strategies. This week, Adam speaks with Jaz Brisack, an undercover organizer, or union “salt”, who took a job as a barista in a Starbucks in Buffalo, NY with the explicit intention of organizing Starbucks employees. Thanks to the effort of Jaz and other organizers, around 550 Starbucks stores and 11,000 baristas now have a union. Adam and Jaz talk about how to drum up support for a union in a workplace, the tactics companies use to try to prevent unionization, and how cats are a surprisingly effective source of early workplace bonding. Find Jaz's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I don't know anything Hello, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me on the show again. You know, for nearly four years now, workers at Starbucks across the country have been unionizing. Some 550 stores have now been organized, along with over 11,000 baristas. It is one of the most significant labor campaigns in recent memory. And those workers are currently negotiating with Starbucks over the contract. The baristas are sitting across the table from the bosses

saying, you better give us what we want. Now, if you're as inspired by this as I am, you might be wondering, how do you even get started with an organizing campaign like this? How do you take a workplace from being non-union to union? Because we all know companies will do everything they can to convince workers like you not to organize. And even workers who do want a union might not know the process or what it would require.

There simply isn't just a big old union button you can press to organize your workplace after a crappy shift. The odds are stacked against the workers, and that is because of decades and decades of corporate lobbying to change our labor laws, to stack the deck in the favor of the corporation, and against the workers. But you know what? The labor movement in this country is crafty, it's resourceful, and they've come up with a lot of really awesome techniques that help get around this corporate chicanery. And one of them, my very favorite, is called the SALT. This is a tradition in the labor movement that goes back decades. SALTs are sort of undercover organizers.

They're trained in how to organize a workplace, but then they get hired in a workplace without revealing that fact. Instead, they simply do the job, but while they're there, they start talking to the other workers. They say, hey, are you interested in forming a union here, perhaps?

Hey, maybe we could foment a rebellion from the inside. It is one of the coolest types of people in the labor movement. This is literally a double agent who fights on behalf of the working class. And guess what? We have a salt on the show today who actually helped organize the original batch

of Starbucks workers in Buffalo, New York. And their experience doing so shows what is possible in the labor movement if we take radical action to benefit the people who actually do the job. This interview is so inspiring. I know you're gonna love it. Before we get into it, I wanna remind you that if you wanna support the show

and all the conversations we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Cunover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show. You can even join our online Discord. We do a community book club every other month that I think you'd love to be a part of. We just read Cashmere Hills, Your Face Belongs to Us. Coming up soon, we're reading Rashid Khalidi's

The Hundred Years War on Palestine. So head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover if you'd like to join us and be a part of our community. And if you'd like to come see me do standup comedy on the road, well guess what? Coming up soon, I'm headed to Indianapolis, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Brea, California, Los Angeles, Tacoma, Spokane, Washington, Des Moines, Iowa, Atlanta, Georgia, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.,

and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Head to AdamConover.net to get those tickets. I'd love to see you out there. And now I am so excited to welcome onto the show Jazz Brissac. They're an organizer, a barista, and the author of the new book, Get on the Job and Organize, standing up for a better workplace and a better world. Jazz is one of the most fucking badass people I have ever met in the labor movement. I cannot wait for you to meet them.

Please welcome Jazz Brissac. Jazz, it's so good to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's so great to be here. We've hung out a couple times at various like labor events. I think I saw you at labor nodes. I think I saw you at a different conference we were at. We talk a lot about labor on this show.

You're, you're a real fucking organizer. I've been called a professional organizer. I would say I'm maybe an unprofessional organizer, but it is my, my whole personality. So why are you an unprofessional organizer? Well, because they always say, companies love to say union organizers are outside agitators and professional organizers.

And so I'm trying to combat that narrative by being unprofessional. Okay, but you. I'm joking. But yeah, by being sloppy and showing up late to meetings, which is endemic in the labor movement is in some places anyway.

But you have worked as a salt, right? Tell us what that is. Yeah, so a salt is someone who gets a job at a non-union workplace with the goal of forming a union. And so yeah, it's a practice that goes back to the beginnings of the labor movement. It was super common, you know, at the beginning of the 1900s. It was commonly used by the industrial workers of the world and other unions.

And it was kind of, you know, most people need jobs. And if you have a job, why not get one where you can also help grow the labor movement? So, but in some ways, this is like being an undercover union organizer. Like you, you take a job, which anybody could take, right? You apply for it, you apply for it legitimately, but you're going in with the express purpose of, of organizing the workers there into a union or, or at the very least beginning to foment a rebellion in some way. Yeah. I mean, I think, um, certainly if your coworkers are not interested in unionizing,

you're not going to be able to just magically be the vanguard of the revolution and create something that wasn't there from the beginning. But I think we're at this moment where union density is at its lowest point in more than 100 years. But approval of unions and the desire to form unions is surging.

And so, consulting can help people who are, you know, theoretically pro-union or theoretically would love to organize their own workplace, understand, hey, this is possible. We can actually make this happen. And so assault is basically that spark. But yeah, because for a lot of people, I imagine there'd be a gap, right?

Where even if they're like, oh, I saw some footage of a strike. I am interested in uniting. Where do I go? Where do I start? They're just an average person working at whatever the employer is. They haven't had training. We have like almost no labor education in America whatsoever. So people don't know their labor rights at a baseline.

So it's helpful to have someone come in and sort of spread the word, right? Or like be the spark perhaps. Yeah, I mean every single day in this country, workers are fired for talking about wanting to unionize at work or having an organizing conversation with a coworker. And often, if a company is smart, they'll fire workers before the campaign is public, before, you know, there's company knowledge that you can go to the National Labor Relations Board and be like, hey, they knew what we were doing.

And the company, if they do it early enough, is like, oh, we had no idea workers wanted to organize. We were firing you, you know, because you cursed on the job, because you weren't in dress code, because you were 10 minutes late. And so, salting is one of the best ways to help protect workers by having folks sequence when they're gonna start having organizing conversation so that you can build the momentum, but also keep the campaign quiet until you build enough relationships and enough support to actually be able to launch very quickly.

And I think, you know, I got a job at Starbucks and then by recruiting other folks to get jobs, we could build enough relationships around the stores in Buffalo to be able to launch without getting folks fired. So you did this in Buffalo, which was the epicenter. That was the very first place that Starbucks workers started organizing. How did you get involved in organizing to begin with? Well, I grew up in the South. I did not have a lot of exposure to unions growing up. My dad had immigrated from India and was working in like the tech and marketing sector.

My mom was a private school teacher and had some right wing Southern populist tendencies. And so neither side of my family had a history and had some right wing Southern populist tendencies. And so neither side of my family had a history of unionization. I was a nerd growing up, so I learned about labor history. Well, most nerds don't learn about labor history. They learn the names of Star Wars characters.

So how did your nerdery go towards labor history? That's fair. I became an atheist, which was not the most popular move. I was living in East Tennessee at the time. So many, but again, I'm sorry, I just wanna say, so many stories that start with I became an atheist and badly, right? I also became an atheist.

I did not become, I did not go into the YouTube, Richard Dawkins, Robin Holes. Thankfully did not go into the YouTube Richard Dawkins rabbit holes. Thankfully, I went into the much earlier like Robert Ingersoll 1880s oratory rabbit hole. I ended up getting really into the Scopes Monkey Trial. Wow, I was in a play about that in high school. Oh, so cool. Yeah.

Thank you for, yeah, thank you. No, that's how I learned about it. I was in a play in high school. Was it in, so cool. Yeah. Thank you for, yeah, thank you. No, that's how I learned about it. I was in a play in high school. So cool. Was it Inherit the Wind? Yes, Inherit the Wind. Yeah, that's how I learned about this. So Inherit the Wind was my gateway to communism.

Let me just tell you a quick story. Was that I was a background, I was a child. I played a child. And there was a scene where there was a country picnic and there was a real potato salad on stage. And I was hungry during one of the shows, I got in trouble for eating too much of the potato salad. Wow.

That's my story of radicalization. Please continue with yours. No, that sounds like a really great agitational moment. How did that make you feel? Yeah, that's why. Then that led to me organizing my high school theater truth and we took control and we started putting on only union themed plays. Go on please.

Theater kids make great organizers. Anyway, so I learned about Clarence Darrow who was the lawyer who had represented the teacher during the Scopes Monkey Trial. Clarence Darrow was also Eugene Debs' lawyer. That got me into Eugene Debs. I did a Google search, never heard of him before, read his speech when he was going to jail for encouraging draft resistance during World War I. He said, while there is a lower class, I am it.

While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free. This was my first time ever hearing about solidarity, really the first time I'd ever heard, you know, any of these kinds of prison abolitionist ideas. And I got really into Deb's and really into like, you know, little red song books of the industrial workers of the world.

I was memorizing Joe Hill's songs and, you know, maybe falling in love with Paul Robeson. Um, and so, um, I had still had no idea that this still existed. Like my concept of labor was, you know, we had this really cool moment. Mother Jones is great. And then it just disappeared. Um, I got to college at the university of Mississippi and I had a labor journalism professor was like, Hey, you're really into this. disappeared. Um, I got to college at the university of Mississippi and I had a labor journalism

professor was like, Hey, you're really into this. Did you know that you can actually do this? And I was like, what? Um, and he introduced me to his friend, Richard Bensinger, who was working with United auto workers on a campaign to organize Nissan, um, which had a 6,000 person factory in

Canton, Mississippi. Yeah. So I started working for the UAW, um, first doing student solidarity and then actually house calling workers and, you know, working as an organizer on the campaign. Um, we did not win. Nissan waged a terrible terrorist campaign

against the union, you know, terrifying workers saying the plant would close, trying to pit people against each other on racial lines. Um, one of my jobs was going through the health and safety records in the plant and trying to talk to workers who had, you know, been in terrible accidents. A worker had actually died on the, on the shop floor. And so we lost, but it really showed me that union organizing is a matter of life and death. Um, and so after that, I ended up going to Buffalo and working on campaigns like spot coffee, um, which was a local coffee shop chain. Spot workers had lots of overlap with Starbucks workers.

Um, people had worked at one company and then gone to the other one or their friends and roommates and partners, um, were working at the other company. And so, um, Benny And so Benny was a Starbucks worker who was the former partner of a coffee union leader. And so we started talking about organizing their Starbucks. One of their main issues was, you know, Starbucks was really into serving coffee with a cop at this time and like promoting great relationships

between the public and the cops. Coffee with a cop? What is like, like if you go to Starbucks, you can have coffee with a cop. They would have free coffee and they would invite cops. And so they would have, yeah, they were improving community cop relationships. I mean, I used to work at a gas station right out of college

and I remember there was a policy like cops get free coffee at the gas station and, you know, they'd roll in once a night and get their free coffee. And it kind of honestly seemed not like a protection racket, just sort of like these guys, it wasn't like we love the cops. But Starbucks went a little further. They were like, I mean, Howard Schultz, I would learn later, had this idea that basically the best thing you can do to save a community

is put a Starbucks in it. And so like he went to Appalachia with JD Vance, which has not aged very well. And he was like, I'm going to save Appalachia by putting more Starbucks into Appalachia. So anyway, his solution to, you know, policing and racism and, you know, structural oppression was we're going to have the community and the cops, you know, form bridges over coffee. And so Benny, the worker that I was talking to, one of their organizing demands was I don't want to have to serve these cops. They were, they started to try to form an organizing committee and then they were fired pretty quickly.

And so, yeah, that was my entrance into Starbucks. I think Buffalo's really interesting. I do stand up in Buffalo sometimes. First time there was a couple years ago. I love Buffalo. It is the coolest city. Oh, I went in the summertime. I know the winters are tough.

I love Buffalo too. It's like really this wonderful, you know, upstate New York City, beautiful architecture. It's like no industry ever came and fucked it up or left and fucked it up, right? That is not true. There's so many decrepit steel mills, south of town.

I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. But Buffalo itself felt like a vibrant city to me. University town. But also I had heard about the Buffalo Starbucks. I went into another coffee shop while I was there and they had a bunch of union signs up and I think there was like a union meeting happening. And I was talking.

It might've been. It might've been. So there was, what I'm getting at is there was like already like a culture of union coffee shops in Buffalo before these Starbucks started organizing there. Is that correct? Yes. No, Starbucks was part of an industrial union project.

So what we were trying to do was organize started organizing there, is that correct? Yes, no, Starbucks was part of an industrial union project. So what we were trying to do was organize all of the coffee shops. In 2017, Gimme Coffee in Ithaca, New York became the first unionized coffee shop, not ever, but the first certified existing baristas union in the country at the time. And then other workers like spot coffee workers,

perks workers in Rochester and then in Buffalo were reaching out and like, hey, can we do this? And so when we won spot coffee, the company had started off by firing workers and retaliating against the union. And then over the course of the campaign, Buffalo, which is a really amazing, very working class city, really rallied around the union and boycotted spot coffee. Um, and the company was like, Oh no, we have to recognize the union or else we are not going to be able to survive. And so they went from union busting to, you know, reinstating the fired workers and signing a contract with $4 an hour wage increases.

And so that gave us a base of coffee shop workers. It gave us, you know, an example of how unionizing had transformed workers' lives from, you know, dead end poverty jobs into coffee as a career. And a lot of people in the coffee industry, you know, love coffee, love the job. It's a great job, but it shouldn't be, you know, a choice between doing something you love

and not having healthcare, not being able to afford to live. And so people were able to actually live and do the job that they cared about. Because part of it was the people, the city supported them, boycotted. Buffalo is so sick, man. I just wanna say one more thing about Buffalo

is that both Portland and Austin are like, keep the city weird, right? And there are these two examples, these cities that have not stayed weird at all. They've gotten like very boring and corporate. Buffalo's gotten weirder. Buffalo's gotten weirder, but the Buffalo motto,

I saw painted on the side of a building, was keep Buffalo a secret. Have you seen this? And I was like, oh, Buffalo is awesome and they don't want anybody to know. Well, it's gonna be one of the only livable places in the country because of the access to fresh water. So there's eventually gonna be an influx of people

seeking the water. But no, I mean, I think like actually Buffalo, used to have steel mills and auto plants and, you know, like any other rest belt city, it has suffered tremendously. Um, and certainly now, you know, the industries have changed. There's many, many more folks, you know, in the

service sector in similar industries. Um, you know, there's a Tesla plant where we tried to organize the workers who were doing the autopilot labeling of data for self-driving cars. Um, and I think there's also been a lot of folks from more right wing, you know, states moving to Buffalo because it's a relatively low cost of living, but you have greater access to, you know, um, support and you know, if you if your Buffalo has a large trans community that's migrated from states where it's very hostile

into the city. And so there's this Buffalo barista bubble, which is broader than just baristas, but it's a very progressive place rooted in this working class union history. Yeah, thank you for giving me deeper history than I had. I mean, I was just sort of, sometimes you travel to a place and you're like,

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surprising things that's been so successful about organizing Starbucks and it's Flown in the face of a lot of previous like labor movement wisdom about How you had to go after a company like that or whether it was even possible to organize, you know fast food type places Yeah, I mean I will say our initial plan was to organize every Starbucks in Buffalo and, you know, try to have the fight with Starbucks over, you know, whether we could actually win the right to organize, not just win a union election at the labor board, but actually get the company to stop

fighting the union, sign the fair election principles, which are a code of corporate conduct that basically set a higher standard than labor law and negotiate a contract. And so we had a committee across most of the 20 stores in Buffalo. But from right out the gate, as soon as we launched the campaign, Rossanne Williams, the president of Starbucks North America was on a plane to Buffalo. They started sending managers and executives from around the country. Wow. To disrupt the union campaign. Um, we moved very, very quickly. Um, we started having organizing conversations and launched a couple of weeks later.

Um, we filed for the first stores within a week of going public, and we did that because we knew the company was going to respond very strongly. Obviously, we were hopeful that maybe they would take a different path. They always said they were a different kind of company, a very progressive kind of company, but almost every company is going to do everything they possibly can to try to crush the union before it gets a foothold. And so quickly, we realized we didn't have enough support in all of the stores to overcome the union busting that Starbucks would inevitably

start doing. But we did have, you know, 100% support at Genesee Street, which was one of the locations by the airport. We had, you know, super majority, like 80% plus at my store, um, in Elmwood and at another store. And so we filed for three stores, um, so that we could prove, you know, that we actually, the workers wanted the union and so that we could move the fight over, over the right to organize, um, and whether Starbucks would allow workers to have a union, you know, into the public eye. Uh, we, we skipped a step because I want to talk about when you join Starbucks

as a salt, uh, how do you go about then trying to, you know, uh, convince or help the workers they're organized? Like, how do you have those conversations? Yeah. I mean, I think I didn't say the word union for eight months. I tried to build relationships with folks. My friends and coworkers were like,

not my Starbucks coworkers, my union coworkers were like, you don't have a personality outside of labor. Like, how are you gonna not talk about unions and labor history for eight months? Cats, the answer is cats. Every Starbucks worker loves cats, loves plants. Loves big goods. No dogs in Starbucks?

There are dogs, but cats are a super majority. I adopted three cats almost as soon as I started at Starbucks. It was a pandemic. It was very isolating in a lot of ways. You didn't adopt these cats just as something to talk about. No, as something to talk about, as a way to invite people over to come see my kittens and as therapy because, you know,

everyone who's organizing should have a burnout plan or cats. I think cats are a burnout plan. This is the secret to organizing, is cats connect people. They bring them together, incredible. And so how do you start to broach those conversations? I mean, because look, you're going in with, you have an ideology, you have an agenda,

you have a mission that you're trying to accomplish, but also, it's kind of funny, right, because it's a mission on behalf of the other people who work there, but it needs to be up to them, right? You can't be telling them what to do, so how do you bridge that? I mean, I think most of my coworkers supported unionizing by default, meaning

they would have supported a union effort if it had happened before I got there. Um, but they had no idea how to get it going. A lot of them knew about spot coffee unionizing, but didn't quite know how to translate that from spot into Starbucks. They were worried about how big Starbucks was. This wasn't the first attempt to organize Starbucks. There had been previous attempts both in the seventies, which Howard Schultz fought when he took over Starbucks in the eighties and decertified. And then the IWW had tried in the early 2000s in New York City, workers had been fired, folks had been fired in Philly the summer before.

So people knew that Starbucks had retaliated against workers who'd tried to organize in the past. There was a lot of fear. And so I feel like, you know, I spent those eight months building relationships with as many workers as possible, helping cover shifts, trying to make sure that, you know, I was there for people and listening to what their concerns were. I mean, I think, you know, like a lot of folks, I have a personal ideology of what I think we need to do to, you know, save the country from fascism and save the climate and the world from just being a hellhole created by our corporate overlords.

But that's not what I told my coworkers. What I talked to my coworkers about was what would make their lives better, what their thoughts and concerns were in the workplace. And people had a very strong sense of justice. I think I was at work on January 6th and my coworkers were all talking about it and comparing the government's lack of response to the January 6th protesters,

to the brutality they had encountered during BLM protests. And so people understood that we were on a downward path created by increasing corporate power over every aspect of our lives and that unions were a way to push back against that. My coworker, Michelle, I talked to her about, very last minute in the campaign, about what we were trying to do and whether she would be supportive of forming a union at Starbucks.

And her family were from Harlan County, Kentucky, and had been involved in the coworker organizing. And she was like, of course I would support this. So folks, I think, had that within them. Assault isn't to come in and. You know, suddenly create something that isn't there, but I think the desire to form a union is latent within a lot of folks and assault can just help people understand it's possible.

But if the companies will always say, Hey, union organizers are outside agitators and that specifically their whole framing of unions generally, right? Is that the union is a third party. It's not the workers. It's not the company. It's some other people. They just want your dues, money, da da da da da. And look, if you're coming to it from not within the labor movement, it can look

like that, right? Because there's not that many unions in America. They have their own politics. They have their own way of doing things and they seek to represent more people. And so they sort of come into a situation, right? And so you are in this case, joining in order to agitate, right, in order to help these folks.

So how do you combat that impression that you are an outsider, right? When you are a little bit coming in from, you know, from an outside angle. Well, I mean, I think a couple of things. One is you have to be really good at your job. You can't go in and expect to agitate people if you're not actually doing the job, doing it well,

being able to help people. Exactly. If I had been bad at making drinks, this would probably have gone differently. You have to be good at your job so that you have the respect of people. I think one, another point, like it's not that different from what any worker would do who's pro-union. And I think often the lines are actually very blurry between thoughts who are almost always volunteers. I was actually working with the union because I had been an organizer before going to Starbucks, but almost every single assault is a volunteer.

Um, you know, they're taking the job because they also need a job, but they want to get a job where they can actually, you know, link up with a union and start working on a campaign that will change the conditions that they would be working in, you know, in any other non-union job. So like Cory, who was one of our salts in the Buffalo campaign, had worked at Starbucks before, not as a salt, just as a worker. And he tried to reach out to the UFCW about organizing and they ghosted him. And so I think faulting is kind of just like a shortcut to getting a union to take on the campaign.

And also, you know, it's not usually that different from the jobs people would have anyway. And I think the final thing is, you know, people aren't going to do it just because you go in there. And also, a lot of unions really aren't that interested in new organizing. So it's a really small group of unions that are even committed to organizing the unorganized, to faulting, and using these very effective tactics to start campaigns, because it requires a commitment from the union to, you know, go through

the organizing campaign, um, bring down the hammer on a company and actually win the right to organize because you can't just go to an election and then expect the company to, you know, come meet you at the table in good faith. You actually have to make it more difficult for them to keep union busting than to just deal with the union and sign a contract. That's a huge commitment from the union in terms of time and

resources. So there aren't that many unions that really will take on a campaign like this. I mean, even Starbucks, our tiny region of Workers United in upstate New York and Vermont, um, had committed to organizing the industry, um, with spot coffee and with the other coffee shop campaigns. Um, the rest of the union leadership was like, that's crazy. Like, what are you doing? Good luck. You'll never win at Starbucks. And so that was kind of the common thinking within the labor movement was this is an uphill battle. You're not going to win. Why would we put resources into something that's not going to work? So.

Yeah. That's such a struggle within the labor movement is, look, and it makes sense. There's limited resources. So you need to triage. You need to put your resources where they're going to be most effective. You don't want to just like tilt at windmills

and not win battles, but then you can end up being too conservative to be most effective, you don't want to just like tilt at windmills and not win battles, but then you can end up being too conservative and not actually going after organizing targets, right? You limit the scope of possibility. How do you think that the labor movement should think about those challenges differently? I mean, I think organizing is the most important thing that we need to be doing. I think a lot of unions end up getting sidetracked into, you know, fighting the existing battles of maintaining unions and existing shops. And that's, that's really important.

And it's often hard enough just to do that. No, it is. That's really important. And, you know, I think running a great local union is also a very hard thing. In some ways it's easier to take on the company and win the initial election than it is to actually run a great and militant union, you know, over decades or even years at a time. But, um, we keep dropping in union density.

We talk about a general strike all the time, you know, like, um, but we keep dropping in union density. We talk about a general strike all the time, you know, like. Some people talk about it, but not enough. True, but like historically, the labor movement has had, you know, many landmark general strikes that have won really important victories. You know, we talk about,

the UAW talks about going out in 2028. I think a lot of folks are calling for one in response to our fascist society. Sarah Nelson called for one during the first Trump administration and helped break through the government shutdown. But we don't have the power or the union density to really run an effective general strike.

And so I think if we actually want to have, you know, unions as a safeguard of democracy, we have to organize, you know, many, many more workplaces at record speed. And unions have to be less worried about losing and more worried about the actual loss of not trying. Yeah. Um, like when we launched the campaign at Tesla, some folks within the, the

labor establishment were like, you're setting our strategic plans to unionize Tesla back by 10 years. And it was like, we have a campaign at Tesla. Like workers are here. Um, we need to have union campaigns that are much more response or union leaders who are much more responsive to where workers are and willing to, you know, let workers lead their own campaigns, but support them and hold companies accountable when they try to union bust instead of, you know, coming up with strategic campaigns in DC boardrooms, but not actually understanding that workers.

Yeah, they developed a campaign. They made a PowerPoint. rooms, but not actually understanding that workers are ready. They developed a campaign. They made a PowerPoint. They all discussed it among themselves. Here's our 10 year plan, our 20 year plan. Uh, and maybe they think that they're doing organizing by doing so, but meanwhile they're organizing, they're missing the fact there are workers currently there who are like, we want to organize what, you know, help us out.

We're, we're fomenting, we're agitating, and they're not connecting, oh, you guys aren't following the PowerPoint. Well, those are the workers you're seeking to represent, right? Like maybe you should listen to what they wanna do. That's the disconnect. Exactly, exactly.

Yeah. I mean, it can, look, it can go bad though when a union tries to organize a sector and it fails, there's been, at least I know among the Hollywood unions, I'll talk to people about, hey, why isn't this or that sector organized? And often they'll say, well, we tried 15 years ago, we got our asses kicked

because it was a different climate, whatever, we gave it our best shot and then not gonna do it again, you know, or whatever. There's like battle scars, right? There's old wounds, it actually made us weaker for a little bit and so now we're a little gun shy. Like it is, it's a lot to take on. It's easy for us to sit here and go,

hey, yeah, let's organize as much as we can, right? But it's a battle that you have to actually fight, and when you lose, you can lose something, it's a big that you have to actually fight, and when you lose, you can lose something. It's a big thing to take on. I'm not saying don't do it, but I'm just trying to do justice to the reality of trying to win a campaign. No, I mean, of course it's an uphill battle,

and companies, I think, are extremely emboldened, especially now, but it wasn't so different, in my opinion, to organize under the Biden and LRB. I have many stories of that, including they let Elon Musk fire 40 workers in Buffalo with no accountability. But, you know, I mean, like we had a coffee shop campaign in Vermont where super embarrassing. We lost after this company in Burlington, Vermont, where like, you know, super progressive, every other person is an environmental studies major. The coffee shop owner herself was like,

I'm from Spain, I'm kind of an anarchist. She was married to an AP journalist. They hired this union busting consultant called Sparta Solutions from Oklahoma. Lists on their website, enemies list. The media, environmental groups groups and labor unions. And we still lost because they were like putting 16 year old baristas into broom closets and like,

you know, having one-on-ones about why they shouldn't unionize. There's a whole expose that Dave Jamison did for HuffPost of this exact consulting firm and their tactics. We lost that. Not a fun feeling, especially to lose to those clowns, but, um, a year later, we got a rerun election and workers who had been anti-union the first go around suddenly were like, wait, the company promised all these things

and they didn't do it, so now we're pro-union. So I think there is a tendency for unions to lose an election and then walk away, but it's almost always easier because people, you know, will have heard the anti-union messaging one time, they'll have seen how the company responded after. So we have to, we do have to make a deeper commitment to trying again, um, to keeping in touch with people afterwards. Um, and I mean like, you know, the, the RWDSU and their campaign in Bessemer, Alabama at Amazon faced tons of criticism for losing.

But, you know, of course it's likely that a company that's going up against Amazon, which will do literally anything to try to crush the union, might lose. But not trying is much worse for the movement. Like the specimen campaign, you know, was on the front pages of the New York Times, Starbucks workers and Buffalo were like, Hey, did you see this? Like, how do you feel about this?

It helped us have initial organizing conversations and suss out where our coworkers were. Um, and I think it showed, you know, you don't have to just accept this. You don't have to just take this for granted. We can try. I think it directly led into ALU being able to win in Staten Island.

And I think, I say in the book, it's a relatively recent idea that union campaigns or struggles for liberation are going to win. I don't think James Connolly thought that he was going to, you know, immediately liberate Ireland during the Easter rising, but you know, that was a necessary step. I think most revolts among enslaved people, you know, were met with brutal repression and didn't immediately lead to liberation, but we can't just take oppression without trying to fight back. And I think especially now as our political climate is getting so bad, you

know, we, and we're seeing some unions like the teamsters and even the UAW starting to flirt with the Trump administration. Um, not just work with work with. Yeah. Yeah. Or like, you know, endorse parts of their, their administration, their policies. Um, and I think that's incredibly dangerous move because we need to be. You know, saying you can't divide the working class.

Um, and we're the only hope of actually saving democracy and not just democracy and name, but actual democracy where actual workers are making decisions and not just, you know, voting for capitalist backed corporate candidates. As someone who's an active organizer, but you're also this deep student of like the history of the labor movement. Um, in my, in my dark moments, right. I really believe in this shit. Um, but then I think, you know, I do my history on, you know, basically a

hundred years of labor struggle that led to the 20 to 30 year blip in the 40s through the 60s where workers had power in America. We look back at that mid-century, we had high union density, we had high wages, we had the middle class. Also happened to be the post-war years when America was economically dominant in this way

that it never will be again but that was produced right by you know close to a century of You know like a labor activist communists right people being shot in the street, right? General strikes etc struggle struggle struggle and Those workers won to a pretty large degree. We did not overthrow capitalism, you know,

but we had labor peace and we had, you know, a lot of really powerful unions around the country. And now here we are today, right? Where we, in the 50 to 70 years since, we backslid to this point where we have very low union density, we have corporate dominance over our economy. And the labor movement is at its lowest ebb.

And so when I look at the sweep of history, I'm like, so many people laid down their time, their lives to build a labor movement that did pretty well. And then the capitalist classes rolled it back. And here we are today. And so sometimes it makes me go, why do it again? did pretty well, and then the capitalist classes rolled it back, right? And here we are today. And so sometimes it makes me go, why do it again? Right?

Even though I know it's the right struggle to have, even though I believe it's the way out of where we are, right? I'm like, there was this brilliant movement that put in maximal effort, and yet it was rolled back over the course of decades. There's been other rollbacks in American life. You can look at the civil rights movement

for African-Americans and look at the progress made and then the fallback, the progress made, and then the fall. But it's nothing like with the labor movement, right? We're not back to where we were 100 years ago, which is how it feels off with the labor movement. So how do you contextualize today's struggle with that somewhat depressing history, right?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of things that have gotten us here, including unions, often gaining acceptance into society and governmental recognition by purging the most left-wing members. You know, I think a lot of the downfall of the labor movement was really, you know, in the half-heartly era of purging anyone who was, you know, fighting for, you know, the broader economic liberation, you know, purging communists, purging, you know, folks who were really fighting to make the labor movement into a much broader social force and, you know, the basis of a different society and not just a counterbalance to capitalism. So I think we're in this weird, weird moment where, you know, our current position, you know, is negotiating contracts,

eventually being a counterbalance to capitalism, but we also have to figure out how we fundamentally change society instead of just participating and making it slightly less bad for people in the moment. And yeah, I mean, I think we can't think about it in even a hundred year span. Like I think about can't think about it in even a hundred year span. Like, I think about labor history, you know, I mean, there's that Marx line about, I think, like everything.

All of recorded history is the history of class struggle. The first recorded strike that I'm aware of was in the mortuary of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, where the workers just, like, threw down their tools and had to sit down and strike, and we're like, we're not building this until you pay us. So I think, you know, from the beginning of time, there's been a labor struggle. Exactly. Exactly. But I think since the beginning of time, there's been labor struggles and like brought more broadly the struggle to be more fully free and more fully human. And I think we can't separate, you know, the labor movement from other struggles, whether it's, you know, trans rights or international solidarity and standing with Palestine

and resisting genocide. And the people who are profiting from all of these things, whether they're the union busters, whether they're the military industrial complex, whether they're, you know, Palantir and its surveillance state, whether they're, you know, ICE and its, you know, Palantir and its surveillance state, whether they're, you know, ICE and its, you know, allies, are all, they understand that all of these struggles are linked and we have to actually

really believe in solidarity and, you know, truly confront the core of all of this, if we're going to be able to get through this. if we're going to be able to get through this. You use the word solidarity about two dozen times so far in the interview. Most important word, what does it mean to you? I mean, I think I go back to that Eugene Debs quote about, you know, we're not one bit better than the meanest on earth. And, you know, we have to recognize our fundamental interconnectedness and so much of the media and I think US society is structured to make us

accept the dehumanization and the death of so many other people, like whether it's, you know, kids who are mining for cobalt in the Congo or kids in Palestine, or, you know, unhoused folks on the streets of San Francisco or New York City, like, you know, we are conditioned to just become numb to some people, you know, not having as much humanity as we do. And I think that's where society dies. Like the second that we see some people as less fully human than others, which is certainly what capitalism is designed to make us believe, then we've lost something as people. And I think the whole labor movement, which I'm also incorporating as like the struggle for freedom and for humanity and for justice,

is a fight to actually respect and have and defend humanity and the idea that some people's lives aren't worth more than others. Well, yeah, you're making me a little emotional. That's really beautiful. That's really beautiful. I just had this left-wing academic named Vivek Chibber on the show. The episode just came out.

As we're recording this, it came out yesterday. And he has his own analysis. I thought it was really interesting. I agreed with a lot of it and that we had some differences. Um, but, uh, he talked about, you know, a, his, his two big points were a, we need a movement that like. Where people go into working class, you know, places and build a left-wing movement there.

And that's the fundamental thing that needs to be done to win class struggle. It strikes me that that's literally what you are doing, right? And the labor movement is the one place where that happens. And so I would like to introduce you, but look, I got one. I would love that.

Yeah. There's more, there's more. I mean, that's what I'm doing right now is working on the Inside Organizer School, which recruits and trains and places folks as inside organizers, whether they're salts, which is a lot of who we're recruiting or folks who are already working in non-union jobs

and trying to organize. But we've actually seen an increase in folks who are coming to the school and applying, you know, to salting programs because of quote unquote everything going on right now. But I think that, yeah, there is a growing idea that that is what it's going to take to actually get us out of this. That's amazing that you're doing that work. I wanna talk about that more in a second, but the question I was leading to was,

he also had the belief that the left went wrong on, he went on and on about wokery, right? That like there's, that people hate all the ideas that are associated with woke, right? I was trying to drill down on what do you mean by this, that people hate all the ideas that are associated with woke, right? I was trying to drill down on what do you mean by this, right? And he sort of narrowed it down to,

there became this sort of obsession with issues of discrimination in like elite spaces, right? Which I agree with to some extent that like, for some reason our quest for social justice ended up focusing on, you know, who's getting promoted in elite places rather than, you know, real struggle. But I'd love to hear you talk for a second about how you think about that, because you connected labor struggle with the struggle for trans rights, for instance.

And in that conversation, I want to hear more about how we positively show up for trans folks, for people of color, for other marginalized people who are being attacked by their government right now, but by doing it via labor struggle or class struggle. How do those things connect for you? Yeah, I mean, I think there's been a very intentional, by the ruling class

effort to separate out these struggles and also to platform the most establishment or conservative examples of, you know, marginalized folks achieving status or power. And so you have, you know, companies like Amazon and Starbucks receiving awards from the human rights campaign while workers in cafes and Amazon warehouses are facing discrimination, losing access to gender affirming care, et cetera. You have, I think, the girl bossification or the, okay, Obama's president, so now racism is solved kind of things. I think on a fundamental level, we can't separate out the struggle for trans

rights, for queer rights, for, you know, gender justice, an end to the patriarchy and racial justice and an end to white supremacy from economic liberation because, you know, I mean, I think, you know, the whole idea of Martin Luther King's Poor People's Campaign was, you know, what's the point of being able to eat at a lunch counter if I can't afford to eat at that lunch counter? I think Leslie Feinberg, Buffalo icon,

author of Stone Butch Blues, you Blues, has written incredibly well about the ways that queer workers are marginalized by capital and used as fodder in the corporate or capitalist machine. And, you know, they worked in like, steel mills, they worked at the AKG Art Museum, which just unionized in Buffalo and like had this profound moment when Nelson Rockefeller came in and like treated them like a piece of furniture. But I think, I think the most fundamental question is, you know, how do we actually get people free on any of these questions? And it all boils down to class. And I think there's this idea that, you know, we have to be class reductionists and not talk about these other topics because that's a distraction or, you know, that's going to dilute the movement. You can't, it actually dilutes the movement not to understand how interconnected these

things are, but also that corporate pink washing or, you know, the other kinds of washing aren't going to get us out. Yeah. See, I think we need, when we're talking about these things, like, we can draw a distinction about the sort of false social justice missions that are presented to us in, you know, commercials, right. Or by, uh, you know, corporations or, or by the sort of parts of our political culture that don't want to deal with those issues. But we also need to be on the left, providing a positive case for how our program is

going to be like actually inclusive and actually bring people into it and be intersectional is the word I want to use. It might be, um, but like, uh, because that, that is the program, right? Um, no, exactly. I mean, I think it goes back to the idea, like we can't accept the idea that anybody is less fully human. And I think, you know, some of the class reductionist arguments are basically, okay, put this on hold and like, let's win, you know, the economic battles and

overthrow capitalism and then everything will be great. And I will say like, as a, as a baby organizer, I was on that page. I was like, we're going to, if we unionize every workplace, we will fix great. And I will say, like, as a baby organizer, I was on that page. I was like, we're going to, if we unionize every workplace, we will fix racism. We will fix all these things. Being around the leadership of the labor movement has maybe made me a little bit more understanding of, okay, we actually can't just organize every workplace and then everything else will be solved. We actually have to, you know, keep explaining to folks and keep teaching folks why these struggles are so connected, why you can't actually have, you know, a labor movement that's not fighting for trans rights, especially when you're, you know, organizing workers who are both, you know, working class

and like trans workers are predominantly going to be in, you know, working class and like trans workers are predominantly going to be in, you know, service sector jobs or, you know, back of the house jobs. There's all of the stratification that's happening within the workplace that is fundamentally connected to people's, you know, life at work, economic livelihood, but also to who they are. And so trying to separate out those issues means, basically conforming to the capitalist program

of dividing people based on identities or, constructing race and other social constructs to pit people against each other. Yeah, this is why I think we need to be careful when we're too dismissive of racial divisions as being something that we should care about because it can end up bending to, I think, the capitalist impulse to divide us, right?

No, no, if we say no, no, we shouldn't talk about these things. One thing I've noticed in the Starbucks campaign is I've just, I've seen a lot of trans people leading it. Why do you think that is? Well, I mean, I think if you're not on the LGBTQ spectrum when you get a job at Starbucks,

you will discover this about yourself by the time you're done. This is not something I grew up with. I mean, again, like conservative Southern upbringing in a lot of ways. I didn't even have the language about like being non-binary, et cetera. I came out over the course of the campaign

as many Starbucks workers did. But I think there's also- I literally was in a coffee shop with my opener, the very funny comic, non-binary comic, Sammy Mowry. We were in a coffee shop somewhere and we went to get a coffee. And I was like, there's no trans people behind the counter. I'm not gonna get a good Americano.

You know what I mean? Like it just seems to be part of coffee culture is like, is gender fluidity is happening. That's who you want to be making your fluids. You know? Exactly, exactly. It's very true. But I also think on a slightly deeper level,

like Starbucks Workers United grew the most and like the people who wanted to unionize the most and who were reaching out in the greatest numbers after we won the first store in Buffalo were in places like Florida and Tennessee and Oklahoma, where, you know, it is a deeply hostile environment for queer and trans workers. Starbucks had always marketed themselves as a safe space and then was rolling back, you know, everything from their pride displays to their actual coverage of gender affirming care

and other health benefits in response to, you know, society's backwards moves around trans rights. And people saw organizing as the only way to push back against that and ensure their own safety and their co-workers' safety. You know, Starbucks doesn't protect you for refusing service to customers who are abusive. A lot of workers were getting threats and abuse at work. And, you know, sometimes we would take it into our own hands

and serve people decaf, but that's not really gonna keep you safe. It's just satisfying in the moment. But I think. A lot of bigots with like headaches that they can't explain. Exactly, exactly. Why do I still feel a little logy?

I'm well, whatever. I can still yell a couple slurs out my pickup trucks window. It's all right, go for it. No, I mean, so I think like Maggie Carter in Knoxville, Tennessee, who helped unionize the first Starbucks in the South, you know, it was basically, we were talking about why

so many of the union leaders were queer. And she was saying, you know, she's had to fight every moment for her right to exist, for her right to hold her girlfriend's hand in public. And that fight, you know, translates into being able to stand up to a company and being able to, you know, understand against everyone telling you that you're nuts or you're, you know, off base or why can't you just put up with this and not rock the boat, that you have to rock the boat and you have to make a better world.

boat that you have to rock the boats and you have to make a better world. Um, and similarly like in Oklahoma city, um, or the organizing committee leadership was largely trans because they understood so well that, you know, you can't appease people who are trying to deny your very right to exist. You have to stand up and fight and, you know, organize folks. And I mean, I think there's an interesting distinction between we have to make these fights core to our fight, but we also have to make sure that we are bringing people along. So, you know, I think a lot of us, especially queer organizers, understand, you know, we want to make, we have to make this part of the movement, we have to have the solidarity, but we also have to organize people who aren't there yet. And I think one of the best ways to change people's minds who aren't already agreeing with us about trans rights or about any of the other issues is to actually bring people into community and into solidarity with their coworkers and help people understand, you know, the company actually doesn't have your back. You know, who has

your back? Your career coworker, your immigrant coworker. I mean, that's how we move people. Like union membership is directly correlated with people being less susceptible to authoritarianism, less likely to, you know, go for right-wing demagogues because they have that experience of solidarity, even if they aren't there to begin with. That's a wonderful answer. I think it brings us back to, you said, there's unions like the Teamsters that are flirting with the Trump administration. I think if you look at the Teamsters' membership, let's just say anecdotally, a lot of teamsters

are Trump supporters, right? They've got over a million members, people drive trucks, they're working in blue collar jobs, and a lot of that union's actual membership has become more conservative. And I think some of the leadership as well is probably genuinely conservative in that way, right? Or at least maybe on culture war stuff, whatever they're listening to Tucker Carlson, um, who knows? Uh, so one of the principles in unionism is like, Hey, the workers are the ones that you listen to, right?

You know, you as an organizer, as a leader, you can lead and say, here's where I think we should go, but like, ultimately it's up to the workers and you're sort of an expression of their will, right? So when we're talking about unions as the pushback to authoritarianism, but then we've got, let's say a couple million union members in this country who are like fans of the authoritarian president, right?

How do we grapple with that as a labor movement? Because it's something I haven't really known how to think about myself. Yeah, I mean, I think there's some amazing examples from the labor movement currently of unions with whiter and mailer membership, although not exclusively, but the sheet metal workers have taken really strong stances

in favor of immigrant rights and against ICE and the deportations, especially after the Abrigo Garcia kidnapping because, you know, he was one of their members. But I think, I think unions that are trying to flirt with authoritarianism or that aren't doing political education or where the leadership is like, you know, basically being pick me. Um, you know, I'm the good union, you know, I think, I mean, there's a, there's a strategy that the Republicans have written about openly from, or in cast to, um, who's an influence on people like Josh Hawley, um, to try to divide

the labor movement into, you know, the, the woke unions, like the Starbucks Workers United and the non-woke unions. J.D. Vance has a speech where he's like, you know, there's good unions, like cop unions, and bad unions, like Starbucks Workers United, which is supporting Palestine. So you have to make this distinction. I think unions that are falling into that, because they're on the favored side,

are going to realize, you know, it's kind of like the leopards eating faces party. Like we're still in a class struggle. Um, whether or not you're on the immediate receiving end of a system that's designed to crush people and crush humanity. You know, once they crush everybody else, then you're going to be next on the list. And so I think it's, um, you know, very short-sighted at best're going to be next on the list. And so I think it's, you know, very short-sighted at best for unions to be trying to get gains from an administration and a party that are, you know, totally beholden to corporate interests and trying to use the

right-wing unions to legitimize, you know, crushing the other unions, you know, deporting people, going after immigrant workers, you know, trampling on human rights, and then not expect that eventually, when you're in a fight with, you know, a Bezos who's a major Trump backer, or, you know, some of these other billionaires, that they're not gonna crush you too.

Yeah. I know there's plenty of unions out there who are pick me unions, I love that phrase, with the government or with their own employers, right? That play along with the company in order to, it's a lot easier if you cut a deal, you don't take the fight, you know? We have unions in Hollywood who take that strategy

almost overtly and I'm sure in many other industries as well. But I think one of the things that I run into thinking about the labor movement is that when good militant unionists get together, right, will complain about, well, there's the unions that aren't really doing it right. There's the leaders that are not taking on the tough battles. There's the members who don't really understand unionism and they haven't been

educated by their own leadership because their leadership hasn't bothered to. And, you know, we could go down that list. Right. Um, but then I think about the fact that like, Hey, Humans are Humans everywhere. You know what I mean? Humans are flawed. Uh, like every, every problem created on earth, right. Was created by people, you know, capitalism was created by people.

So is unionism, right? And so within unionism, you're going to have people who are collaborationists or people who are selfish or people who are self aggrandizing people who get into leadership for the wrong reasons, people who will take the benefits the union provides but not show up for it, right? All the sorts of bad behavior that exists within the world are gonna exist in the labor movement as well. And so we sort of can't sit there and go like,

ah, man, it sucks that like, this or that leader is shitty, because of course there's gonna be shitty people everywhere. It's like bad drivers on the road. of course there's gonna be shitty people everywhere. It's like bad drivers on the road. Yeah, there's gonna be bad drivers. You're not just gonna complain. Once we unionize everyone, there will be no more bad drivers.

This is the class reductionism we can get behind. Right, I mean, we always have this like, oh my God, I can't believe that people are being shitty out there, you know? When of course they are, they're people, you know? And so, like, how do we, how do we, you know, get around the labor movement is the most human of all enterprises, right? Because what we are doing is marshaling human solidarity, human community

against the forces of capitalism, right? And just literally in the writer's strike, it's like us using our bonds as a comm, you'm a writer you know me you know when i'm talking to someone in the writers guild sort of the first thing i try to do is reestablish the human connection you know me i'm adam i know you we do some what's going on your job etc right that's like your main tactic. like your main tactic. And so we're marshaling our humanity and yet the soul of humanity is to be flawed, to be selfish, to sometimes be bigoted, to be, uh, you know, um, a complicated person in all the ways that cause all of our problems. And so how do we get, how do, how do we get across that? You know, um, that that's like the, to me, the promise and the peril of the entire enterprise.

I mean, I think human nature contains the potential for the very best and the very worst. And as a result, so does everything else. I mean, there's been unions that were lily white or even associated with the KKK, but then there's also been unions like the Gulf Coast Polport Association in Mississippi, which were able to form really strong,

really interracial unions in Mississippi in the 70s, largely by telling the white workers who needed to get on board that, you know, there was either gonna be a race war or a class war, and it had better be a class war, and that, you know there was either gonna be a race war or a class war and it had better be a class war and that you know the same people who are. Trying to persecute black workers you know what eventually also be trying to persecute the white workers once they had stopped being useful in putting down. You know more oppressed workers. And so I think people come around when they realize their own self-interest

and their own survival relies on solidarity with other people. And so whether it's the miners strike in Alabama where a lot of miners who were, you know, initially Trump supporters ended up seeing huge support from the DSA and from other groups and, you know, understood that the coalition that was going to, you know, potentially save their lives and their jobs, you know, was relying on these folks who they probably had heard all kinds of negative propaganda about before, or whether it's, yeah, workers in any industry who, you know, are brought into proximity with people that they probably wouldn't know otherwise

without the union and the struggle. You know, a much smaller example, but like one of our coworkers who became a leader of the bargaining committee at Elmwood came to our first planning meeting and she had been hired right after the union vote so she hadn't been there for the union busting and she was like, guys, you're being too negative. Like, it can't be that bad. And then like, after going through some of the bargaining process, like she was super radicalized and right there with us.

And I think people change over the course of struggle. I was just doing an oral history project with Richard Bensinger, my organizing mentor about his first union campaign at the head ski factory. I got to talk to a lot of other workers at that factory and they're all in their seventies. This was 50 years ago, but like their experiences of that campaign and that strike are totally

engraved into their minds. Like they all have talked about how they transformed as people. And I think the process of organizing a union and going through that fight changes people and really incredible and fundamental ways. Um, and also breaks through a lot of the conditioning that people have gotten. That's a wonderful answer. And what it makes me think about is that,

human nature contains all these bad qualities, right? Selfishness and bigotry, right? And it always will. Each person will be born with some measure of that stuff within them, right? But we build systems in our society that bring those qualities out or dampen them. And the corporate structures tend to bring them out.

They support selfishness and self-interest and division. And the job of unionism is to build systems that bring out those better qualities that bring out solidarity and solidarity is like the antidote to bigotry. And if you can build a system that makes people feel more solidarity with each other, then you are, you're, you're fighting back against those, those negative human tendencies. And so that should be our goal as union leaders or as unionists is to like, you

know, how do we build structures that, except that people are gonna come with all of those less than ideal qualities, but that support them in being the better versions of humanity. No, exactly. I mean, I think also like the antidote to cancel culture is solidarity,

where people should be allowed to have redemption. And in fact, my favorite labor story is our redemption arcs. One of my closest friends in the world was anti-union in the beginning of the Starbucks campaign and then came around. And the fact that she came around meant that she was able to tell us and tell the labor board about, you know, what Starbucks had done to try to fight the union. Um, but also the depth that she has as a person having gone through that, I think is greater than a lot of folks who just were automatically on board because the, the learning and the, I think psychology of what she went through is so fascinating. And so, yeah, I mean, I think we have to give people

the ability to change and not be like, you know, Google exists, it's not my job to educate you. Like, we have to actually commit to helping people work through these things, and, you know, you're not gonna get some, it's like any organizing conversation, you're not gonna get somebody from a five, a hard anti to organizing conversation, you're not gonna get somebody from a five, a hard anti to a one,

but you can move people by degrees. And I think organizing also moves people by degrees on all of these other topics. And eventually there's a better world to come in as Woody Guthrie says, we're a union men in a union war, it's a union world we're fighting for and we will get there.

We have to believe we'll get there. It took us over an hour to get to the Woody Guthrie quotation, I think that's honestly too long for this conversation. I was trying to see how long I could not be a labor nerd. I think you've been failing every moment of the conversation. The Starbucks organizing drive has been successful

beyond anyone's wildest ambitions, I think that, or maybe not yours, but many people's expectations. I think there's a couple hundred stores now that- 600. 600 stores. But out of 10,000, we have more work to do. But still, I mean, 600 out of 10,000, and the union is now fighting for a contract

for those stores, which is dragged on quite a bit, right? But what do you credit that success to? It was an accident, but it was an accident that proves the power of solidarity. So from the very beginning of the campaign, we had thought that we would win a contract at Starbucks by, you know, bringing down the hammer, the leverage on Starbucks, that would make them realize that they should respect the right to organize. We thought that that hammer was a boycott and was tarnishing their public reputation as a progressive, you know, different kind of company. as a progressive, different kind of company.

In retrospect, and at the time, we wanted to call a boycott when Starbucks fired the Memphis Seven, an entire organizing committee in one go, also the most racially diverse organizing committee in the country at that time, in February of 2022. So a much longer story, there were differences of opinion within the union leadership versus the folks on the ground who were pushing for the boycott. So we didn't get one at that time.

Fast forward to October of 2023. And as Israel was starting to carpet Gaza, I made a post on the Starbucks for Christian Aid Twitter account that said solidarity with Palestine. And it wasn't a controversial statement. It's important to ground this in the culture of Starbucks workers was we had taken stances against copy unions being in labor federations. We had been super outspoken around trans rights and queer rights. This was not out of character for the union. I knew from Albany to Cleveland, all around the country workers had been wearing Palestine

pins for years. It was part of the campaign for some of the organizing committees. So it was not a controversial statement among Starbucks workers. Starbucks corporate, break down union leadership was not too happy either. Um, but Starbucks started suing the union, you know, for copyright infringement

because they said like, then it looked like Starbucks was supporting Palestine and we couldn't have that. Um, they started, you know, directing, literally directing people to, you know, direct their hatred toward the union stores. They published a list of unionized stores. People are getting death threats phoned in. And all of that, their response prompted a global grassroots, unofficial, never endorsed by the union, boycott of Starbucks.

And so, you know, in the US, they were losing tons of business in countries like Turkey or Morocco or Malaysia. They were losing all of their business in the Muslim world. Yes, they were losing entire contracts. You know, it crushed a lot of their franchisees in these countries because people, you know, the boycott, divestment and and sanctions movement was a very strong force and people reacted to Starbucks actions by saying,

okay, why would I go get my latte from a company that's going after the union for supporting Palestine? So all of that combined pressure ended up driving Starbucks back to the bargaining table. I think, you know. And you know that that was the source of the pressure. There's different opinions, there's different party lines. I do know that that's what they've told reporters

who asked about the pressure on the company. They lost billions of dollars in market value. I mean, that's just, it's just really fascinating on a number of levels because you make that, and you wrote the tweet that kicked it off. And then they, as an American company, was this like October of 2023 that you wrote this tweet? I should say that the union deleted the tweet

within about 30 minutes, but within a week or so, Starbucks workers around the country voted by 97% of a vote of open to everybody in a union store to release a stronger statement, actually explaining why we were in solidarity with Palestine. And that statement is still up. So you released that statement.

And I want to remind people of the political climate in the United States in October of, of 2023, things have shifted since. But the first union to say anything by a large margin. And so every other union was like, we stand in solidarity with Israel at that moment. Yeah. Um, or, or said nothing. Um, but I remember seeing your statement and saying that's, that's a very bold, brave statement. Starbucks sees their, I'm assuming,

American leadership in the American political context. It was Howard Schultz. Yeah, oh personally. Howard Schultz went to the Orthodox Jewish Jewish Chamber of Commerce and said that he would like to close every single unionized store in response to our solidarity with Palestine statement. Legally, he couldn't do that,

but that was when he released the list of unionized stores and told them, you know, here's the targets. This is when he's still in power at the company, because he was eventually, well, I'm sorry, I don't want to get too far afield. I'm trying to remember the timeframe. He was either the CEO or the chair of the board at that time.

Okay. So, but he sees this as a wedge. Um, he's personally angry about it, but he's also like, ah, I can use this to tar the union. Um, which at the time there were, there were other similar political pressures being put on people who were speaking out against what was happening in Gaza. Um, uh, and so he tries to do the same thing and it actually backfires so hard because I assume partially forgot the context in the rest of the world where

they do business, but also there was enough support in the United States for you that it actually backfired and forces them back to the bargaining table. That's fascinating both in terms of the labor politics and the US Israel relations, Israel's war against Gaza, a bit of it. Like it's, in both ways, that's somewhat of a surprising outcome if you think about what was going through their minds in 2023.

I mean, I think it shows why we shouldn't compartmentalize our struggles because that was what, I think we, I don't know if our boycott would have been as effective if we'd launched it over just their union busting. I think it was the combination of their union busting and their support for a genocide that actually made people be like, okay, I'm done, I can't go to Starbucks anymore, made it embarrassing to be seen with a Starbucks coffee cup.

And I mean, I think- I mean, among some people, right? Like I will say the number of people in the United States who feel that way about that is not overwhelming. It's, you know. But I think it also correlates to who Starbucks customers are because a lot of their business comes from TikTok. A lot of TikTok teens are extremely supportive of Palestine

and they're a company that markets themselves as progressive. And so I think even a lot of folks who, you know, maybe are not fully on board with Palestinian liberation, certainly don't support what's been going on. Yeah. Don't support Starbucks suing their union and, you know, targeting baristas for taking a stand.

Um, and I mean, a lot of people, um, even like, you know, within the labor world, they're like, my kids won't let me go to Starbucks. So there's certainly this generational youth component, but that's a big part of Starbucks. Yeah. So it became enough of an organic boycott, um, among people who care about this, that it forced them back to the table. That's incredible. The struggle continues now. Yeah.

Now there is still gridlocked in negotiations. So very important when you have a moment like that to keep the pressure up and keep escalating. Yeah. So let's talk, first of all, let's bring ourselves in for a landing here. Let's talk first of all, in terms of the Starbucks campaign, how can people be helpful?

And then second of all, tell me more about the Inside Organizer School. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, my opinion is boycotts work and whether it's Starbucks or, you know, any other campaign, um, like, you know, supporting boycotts, supporting pickets and strikes when they happen, um, and bringing down the hammer on the company is the most important thing that people can do. Is there currently a boycott being called for by, uh, workers United? Not by workers United.

Um, there's still a lot of folks who have not gone back since October of 23. Got it. Um, my opinion is, I mean, we once bought coffee in Buffalo through a boycott that actually the union never officially called, but that the community of Buffalo and a lot of the political leadership, you know, instituted, um, which gave the union room to ramp it up. So I think boycotts that are called by the community are incredibly useful and powerful. Um, and yeah, I mean, I think building the infrastructure to be able to mobilize a consumer boycott

or other campaign to hold any company accountable is really important because we've seen, you know, Starbucks do the same playbook and then Chipotle and REI and Trader Joe's and all of these other companies learn from that same playbook, do the same things, try to isolate union shops. And so we need to have, you know, transferable accountability mechanisms that can go to all of those different campaigns. So my work now is largely helping other unions set up organizing and salting programs. I'm doing a lot of work with United Food and Commercial Workers in Los Angeles, and I'm working on expanding the Inside Organizer School, which is the training program that was the basis of the Starbucks campaign.

And it's scalable to any other company, any other industry. We train people how to unionize their own workplace from the inside, whether they're assault or someone who's already there. And we're always recruiting. If folks wanna come to a training, they can get in touch with us at the Inside Organizer School and come on board. And this is something that people who are listening,

they can just sign up for and take your training. Is there a fee to take it or anything like that? We have scholarships available. So if folks are already with a union, then often the unions will help support people. If folks wanna come and learn what this is, then yeah, we have funding available to bring people on. Amazing, and where can people find it?

Inside OrganizerSchool.org. Amazing, and you have a new book out. Just tell us the name of, where you talk about all these ideas. What's the name of the book? Yeah, my book is Get on the Job and Organize, Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World. And it's out, it was out just in time for May Day.

Good, I'm sure that was an important day for you. Well, folks wanna pick up a copy of the book, they can of course get it at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com, factuallypod.com slash books, if you wanna support the show and your local bookstore. Do you recommend any particular place where people can buy it or where else can they find your stuff on the internet?

Yeah, I mean, Green Apple Books in San Francisco is a unionized bookstore that's running a partnership so that if you order it from them, I will go in and sign it for you. So there's a way to get signed copies through them. And then, you know, please support other indie bookstores. Don't give your money to Jeff Bezos if possible. Yeah, okay.

So don't use our special bookshop this time. Go to Green Apple Books. But if you do go to... No, no, no. This is the first time I've ever asked an author this and they've had a specific like local bookstore that you can get it shipped from that they are supporting.

So in this case, go to Green Apple Books, but we'll also have it on our online bookstore as well. Jess, thank you so much for being here. It's been so wonderful talking to you. No, thank you so much for having me. Thanks for everything you're doing. And the labor movement could really use you as you should be president of the AFL-CIO.

We have a very different world. the labor movement could really use you as, you should be president of the AFL-CIO. We'd have a very different world. You know, let's have it be Sarah Nelson or someone like that first. Sarah Nelson would also be wonderful, but you and Sarah can tag team maybe. Oh my God, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much.

Thank you once again to Jazz for coming on the show. If you'd like to pick up a copy of their book, Get on the Job and Organize, Standing Up pick up a copy of their book, get on the job and organize, standing up for a better workplace and a better world, head to FactuallyPod.com slash books. If you'd like to support the show directly, head to Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name in the credits on the show. This week I want to read some of our oldest Patreon contributors,

because we normally do the newest ones, but let's shout out some of the older folks. They're not older in age, not that that would be bad. They're older in how long they've been supporting this show. Alan Liska, Kelly Seeger, Antonio LB, Spencer Campbell, Paul Mauck, Tom Picone, Andrew Corliss, Mari David Conover, that's my dad. He's very supportive. Lacey Tiganoff, Samantha Schultz, and Kelly Lucas, thank you so much for supporting the show these many years. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover if you'd like to join them.

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