It Could Happen Here - How an Eclipse Walkout Beat Nestlé

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Mia talks with Alex, Rocky, and Madelyn from Blue Bottle Independent Union about organizing an independent union and how they outmaneuvered Nestlé. https://linktr.ee/bluebottleunion  @bbiunion on twitter and instagram @bbiu16 on TikTokSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. podcast. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Hey, I'm Gianna Pertenti. And I'm Jamee Jackson Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions. So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down. Looking at the numbers is one of the most

honest reflections of what your financial picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone Media. It's It Could Happen Here, a podcast where I didn't come up with the intro, so you're getting this one. I'm your host, Mia Wong. This is the podcast where, actually, this is the part of the podcast where after things have fallen apart, you put them back together again. And yeah, the thing that's being put back together here, you know, I really should have planned this intro more,

but this is what happens when we get night recordings. But yeah, the thing we're putting together today is a union at a really interesting kind of, very interesting kind of coffee shop. So with me to talk about this is Alex, Rocky, and Madeline from Blue Bottle Independent Union. And yeah, thank you all for joining me. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you all.

So I guess the first thing that I want to start with is, can you talk a bit about what Blue Bottle is? Because this is a really weird story that I think kind of reveals a lot about the way, I don't know, in sort of lofty terms, it's like the direction that capital has been moving in the past like 10 years. Absolutely. Yeah. So Blue Bottle is a specialty coffee chain founded by James Freeman in Oakland, California,

like 2002. James Freeman in Oakland, California, like 2002, like most specialty shops starts off as like this small little cart where, you know, one guy is doing all the parts of production, roasting, serving the coffee and all that. And then throughout, you know, uh, the early aughts 2010s, uh, they do lots of rounds of, uh, venture capital financing with like fidelity and other firms until 2017. When Nestle purchased a 68%, uh, majority ownership in blue bottle at, I think a $700 million evaluation.

And since then, um, no, no, no. The, it was a $700 million evaluation. They paid $400 million. Uh, no, no, no. It was a $700 million evaluation. They paid $400 million.

Ah, Jim. Yeah. Isn't this great? Yeah. And since then, they've expanded from, you know, the tiny little location in California to 70 stores in the U.S. And then over 100 globally, including in China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea. And am I forgetting anywhere else? I think that's, I think that's it. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a fun time to be a coffee worker, I guess.

Yeah. It's interesting to me the extent to which this, it has, I mean, okay. So like a hundred shops is like a lot of shops, but it's not 700 million dollars of shops. Like it really seems like this company has like it really has like tech valuation, which is alarming. Yeah. And I mean, it's not uncommon for specialty right now, which is also concerning. Like as far as I understand, Intelligentsia and La Cologne are also owned in part by venture capital firms. And this is really confusing, especially because for anybody that knows anything about, like, the economics of coffee shops, the margins are terrible. Yeah. The only value that Blue Bottle offers to Nestle is brand and like the ability to eventually grow to the point where at some point in the future, they'll be able to make a little bit of money off of it all.

Which is a deeply weird business strategy. because it feels like a very different organizing terrain than a lot of the shops that we've talked to on this show because it's like the value of this company is only kind of tangentially, on a sort of macro level, the value of the company is kind of tenuously connected to your labor. But on the other hand, at the individual shop level, you're still dealing with all of the same sort of like, you know, like hyper exploitation,

trying to like wring every cent out of stuff. So I guess I wanted to start by kind of asking like, how did that, the weirdness of what Blue Bottle is influenced, like how this campaign started to be pretty frank about our campaign like there was a crop of organizers before gonzo myself um who i would say at this point are kind of the longest running organizers on this campaign like there was a crop before us so we joined um we did not start the campaign here at blue bottle um but i think i mean it was difficult in the very beginning,

like, you know, Blue Bottle, it pays now, like, I think starting wage for baristas, like 18 an hour. You know, we just got to pay up in April. So it's like, I, you know, I do make more than minimum wage. It's, it can be a tough sell for people to be like, oh, but you know, it's like marginally better. Like, oh, I'm working at this like fancy coffee shop. Don't they treat us a little better? But when you look at like also the coffee industry has a whole on like on a global scale, incredibly exploitative industry that like we are both we play into as people like in the US who make incredibly expensive specialty coffee, but also like as workers who are exploited ourselves, like this is something that I think we have to think about often as like how, I don't know, how can our union affect this industry as a whole? How can we affect,

you know, Nestle as a conglomerate as a whole, but also how can I afford my rent next month? And so, you know, having those kinds of discussions with workers, like putting our day-to-day labor into this kind of larger context, both of the company and of the industry. I mean, I think this campaign, you know, we didn't, we didn't start out independent. We had a little bit of shopping around almost of different unions. I think we were also largely inspired here in Boston specifically. Like it is kind of a hotbed for coffee organizing. A lot of shops around here are organized. There've been some incredibly like militant shops out here.

Like I think Gans and I first got introduced to the Blue Bottle campaign from the Starbucks 874 picket line. And they were out there for like two months. And I think that that, you know, those kinds of things have really influenced this campaign and really influenced our organizing as we go into this like really kind of corporate bougie coffee shop that is hard to hard to reconcile with like hey i am also an exploited laborer i you. I am forced to make coffee all day

for customers who are frankly quite rude. And having to have this conversation with your coworkers of like, hey, we deserve better. It might be marginally better than some other place. We still deserve better and we can fight for so much more.

So I feel like I went on for a little bit there, but I hope that that answers that question. One thing to kind of add on to that is when organizing in the stores, part of the fact that we're owned by Nestle makes it actually much easier because people aren't like easily fooled. We understand that Nestle is putting a lot of money into this company with the hope of future returns, you know, in the short or medium term. And also people implicitly understand that the current model that the cafes operate on is kind of reckless, like because we're owned basically as a venture capital scheme. basically as a venture capital scheme, this means that, you know, we're constantly trying to cut costs that shouldn't be cut. Like even today, uh, Madeline and I ran out of decaf coffee beans because they hadn't placed an order for them. Oh my God. Yeah. Uh, and you know, we've run out of, you know, milks fairly frequently. Um, we've run out of things like cups and lids and very basic things that you

need to run a coffee shop. As far as I can tell, only because, uh, they need to keep operating costs comically low. So that way they can appease their Nestle overlords, which is pretty funny. Cause the math doesn't make any sense on that.

Right. Cause it's like, okay, you need to find a way to make like $400 million. Your solution to this is we're going to delay ordering more coffee beans. Is there anyone who like, no, this isn't even an accountant situation. This is like, is there anyone here who understands what an order of magnitude is? What are we doing here? Wait till you hear about the saffron latte.

Oh God, what a disaster. Oh yeah, so they don't have enough money to pay us a living wage, but from January until April of this year, we were serving a saffron vanilla latte with, and I kid you not, real saffron, both in a syrup and also in a powdered, yeah, no, no kidding.

It tasted like Play-Doh. I kind of like that, but not everybody does, apparently. You know, this is the first time I've ever said this in my entire life, but I sincerely hope that they were buying the fucking cheap fake stuff. They were actually real saffron. Oh, God. Well, to be fair, to be fair, a lot of the stuff people think is real saffron oh god well to be fair to be fair a lot of the stuff people think is real

saffron probably is fake so maybe the scammers were getting something out of this but dear god that doesn't make them look good but yeah no real somebody who's good with the economy help me out here you know $3,000 a week for saffron and

$18 an hour for baristas. God, that's going to haunt me in my dreams. Someone ordering an ass of saffron. How much did that cost? $8.56. Jesus Christ.

Oh no. But not enough money to pay us a living wage no i that's i don't know that is that is that is genuinely disgusting like how you know when you think about it we can like buy a little over two of them every hour we work so like that's all we need yeah yeah that's also got to be like a kind of radicalizing moment of oh my god yeah it is our time is worth so little to these people this is actually one of the biggest conversations i would have with my coworkers that i had to stop having so it'd make them incredibly upset was i would break down the math with them. I'd be like, you can make a latte in about a minute, two minutes, like, and those lattes are $7. You make 17 an hour, make three lattes. And that's more than

your hourly wage. And you're making what a hundred of those an hour in a rush. Like people would get really upset when you're confronted with like the, Oh the money coming in and then the money that i'm receiving it'll drive you crazy yeah and i i think i don't know that's one of these things where i think in a lot of industries it's kind of that kind of value thing is is abstracted because like i don't know like you're like i just talked about like an accountant earlier right like you're an accountant you have no idea how much of well i guess maybe an accountant would know exactly the amount of value yeah like that example okay i don't know you work in like you you you you work in a factory that produces an auto part right like one thing that goes into an assembly of an auto parts like you have no like there's no good way for you to like actually

understand the sort of value things i mean you can get kind of close but i think it's less visceral than just yeah this is an item of food that i'm watching all of these people like consume that i'm making and it's like yeah sure obviously there's like you know like back down the value chain there's also probably like nestle doing like slave labor like child slave labor to get chocolate or something right but i don't know there's there's something really kind of just viscerally horrifying about like i produced 800 of coffee and they're paying me 18 yeah so speaking of 800 of coffee this show actually i don't think we've ever gotten a coffee ad which is sort of remarkable you'd think at some point i don't know i don't drink coffee you know if if on the ad that we're about to go

to it's you know like the black rifle coffee company or some shit oh god wait no what i i think i think one of the i think one of the insane it might have been the other one so there's like black rifle coffee which is the right wing coffee thing but then they they condemned kyle rittenhouse murdering all those people and so then there became a second even more anti-woke coffee shop that was even shittier i i think those people might legitimately have tried to sell an ad to our show at one point we were like no what the fuck that's crazy what there's we had so many insane ads we had uh the famously the washington highway patrol put one on here so all right let's let's hope you have a reasonable ad instead of that hi i'm ed zitron host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to the leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just

hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment.

I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and

a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting Thank you. Stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back uh luckily this is uh podcasting are not regulated like radio so i could just fucking say shit it's great we love we love we love to be we love to be in podcasting so yeah this this brings us in no particular by no particular rhyme or reason this brings us to another thing i wanted to sort of talk about, which is about the decision to go independent and about independent unions versus sort of the traditional business unions

that have been trying to run a lot of these campaigns. So yeah, I guess wherever you want to start in that whole sort of thicket of issues. Yeah, the decision to go independent was maybe eight months into our campaign. We did pivot to go independent. We were, you know, kind of, we had not affiliated with anyone. Some weird stuff had happened

with some previous business unions. And so we were kind of in a shopping around phase. And a good friend of the union and someone who has helped us incredibly throughout the campaign um said hey can i pitch you guys on going independent like and at that time i i mean i can't speak for the other folks like i did not know anything about independent unions um this campaign has also been an incredible like learning process for. And so we talked about a little bit of like, hey, unions, everything that a union does, workers can do. And really trying to instill this, we can do it ourselves. Because I think that for me, the dream of independent unionism

is having autonomy and control of our lives, both in the workplace and in our unions, like as workers. And so, you know, this idea of like, oh, yeah, this, the union just takes care of it. Oh, you pay dues and the staffer does all these things for you. But when, you know, when we filed our petition, you know, I filled that out. It's not that hard. You know, there are so many things where it's like, oh, yeah, the union will take care of it. Or, oh, this is what dues pay for's like, oh yeah, the union will take care of it. Or, oh, this is what dues pay for. Oh, we can have a lawyer look at it.

At no part of this process was there really anything that workers could not have done. Did we seek legal advice? Absolutely. Did we have people help us out who maybe knew more than I did? Yes. But that isn't to say that we were not learning

the entire time. So to me, that's like the big ethos of independent unionism of like learning it, doing it, teaching others. I think it has been an incredible opportunity. I think also like we really are committed to like rank and file democracy. And so having workers have a say in all major decisions, especially like now that we have had our election, we're going to be moving into bargaining, hopefully soon, like being able to have workers submit proposals, have workers look and do open bargaining,

have them look at every, at the contract at every step of the way and things like this. Having people participate in their unions. I mean, I think that we are in a time of like the revitalization of the labor movement and I don't want workers to get left behind in that. Like I think that we of the labor movement. And I don't want workers to get left behind in that. Like, I think that, you know, like we are the labor. And so being able to like control our

unions and lead them in the ways that we want to as democratically as we can, to me, has been what it's all about. Did that mean that it was an easy campaign? No, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of work that maybe a paid staffer would have done, but we did it ourselves. And it took longer. And it took a lot of education as well of explaining to my coworkers of like, hey, we want to form a union. And it's not just this thing that kind of happens to you. Like actually you have to make it happen now if you want to do it. So I think that for us, the choice to go independent has like only reaped benefits so far. It's been this wonderful thing. I think that we are all much better for it and much closer like as co-workers. I think that people

are more excited about their union. But it certainly, you know, it took a lot of work. It took a lot of time. It took a lot of trust from our co-workers as well. Yeah. I mean, one of the most formative experiences that has stuck with me, and I think I to have rank and file control of our own campaign? Would we be able to, you know, legitimately examine unconventional tactics for launching or sustaining our campaign? You know, what is the actual process for requesting finances from the larger affiliate if we needed it. And more or less what we were told by the staffer was that none of this would be in the hands of rank and file.

And it would either be determined by what this particular staffer thought was best, or they would have to get approval from whoever was above them. Which, despite the fact that this person was within the reform caucus of their union, did not strike them as being anti-democratic at all. Yeah. Yeah. And at that point, I mean, you know, we'd been talking to our coworkers for months at that point, you know, hanging out with them, becoming, building community. And it didn't seem like there was really anything that, you know, a larger business union would have had to offer to begin with.

In fact, in my own experience, the idea of affiliation has more or less come across as an implicit threat of how else are you going to take on nestle without all of the money and resources that we have but won't let you use anyways yeah which is like not a thing i don't know if you're if you've gotten to the point where your union is threatening you and this is something that like happens more than you'd think like i you know i but listeners of this show may or may not have listened to some previous episodes talking to some of the reformed nurses slates that we've had on the show where that's happened. But if your union is threatening you, something has gone very badly wrong. And you're probably you're in a position where you're probably going to be having to fight yourself out of a deep hole.

And one way you can avoid getting in there in the first place is by not digging the hole and building something yourself. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, you know, one of the things that we heard a lot about at Labor Notes two weeks ago at this point was people within larger unions talking about how to fight off staffers or bureaucrats. And I'm personally very glad that we are not in that fight ourselves

because we have Nestle to take care of now. Yeah. Yeah, the sort of two-way fight between you, your boss, and then also your union staffers is not a thing that usually goes well for you. It's a bad situation to be in. I would recommend avoiding it yeah

yeah so i guess the the next thing that i i'm sort of interested in is you know so you talked a bit about how sort of being an independent union like made the union closer how else did that influence how the campaign went and how is like how how has it been going in the past like i know i know you won your election yeah it was it was an election sorry it has been this has been the most chaotic two weeks I've had in several

years so I mean it's just like Lennon said there are years where you fuck around and weeks where you find out sorry I'm gonna get so much shit for that comment now um anyways cool so media does not endorse lettuce yes maybe two good lies i promise i only said it for the joke yeah our campaign started april 3rd there are six uh stores in the greater Boston area with roughly 67, 65 workers across all of them. On April 3rd, 50 workers from five of those stores handed cards like union authorization cards to management announcing our campaign, our union, and asking for voluntary recognition by noon on April 8th.

Management accepted the cards, but then did not recognize the union voluntarily by noon April 8th, and instead they put up a flyer in the back of the house of all the cafes saying that they would respect the outcome of an election, at which point... Oh, no. Yeah, they didn't

even publicly acknowledge us. So at that point, across five of the six stores, we had a walkout on the 8th. And then that same day, went downtown to file for an election with the NLRB, which despite the fact that we called them a week in advance to be like, is it okay if a lot of people show up kind spontaneously uh to file for an election and despite the fact that the person in the office said yeah it's fine so long as like less than 100 and you don't have like a soundstage or anything you got to set up and if you do get a permit um once we walked up to the office at least four dhs cop cars like swum in front of us and they would only let rocky go into the office to file for our election while being escorted by a dhs agent the entire time you know sometimes you get just these this is something that's been happening so like i have no idea when this episode is going to go out this is being recorded in the

middle of the protest like literally today 70 year old professors are getting dragged out of like protests by cops but and like this is one of these moments where when when when things actually happen you get these really visceral demonstrations of like what the society you actually live in is and i i don't think there's like a more perfect demonstration of the the national labor relations board sometimes will help you but also also is very clearly a bureaucratic mechanism of a police state then the cops show up and only one of you can go talk to the NLRB person escorted by

police that is wild it was also the same day as the solar eclipse oh my god it was a really magic day it was a very magic day yeah nothing was more enchanting than the fact that we got to watch the eclipse when we otherwise would have had to have been at work.

That rules. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I guess that's another way to get to get turnout for a walkout. It's like, hey, look, we're going to do a walkout. And also you could go see the eclipse instead of serving rich people coffee. And it worked. Hell yeah.

Yeah. serving rich people coffee and it worked it worked hell yeah yeah but all that is to say is i think being independent lets us do fun and creative things yeah yeah thank you for remembering what the actual question was we got it all together like i think we're allowed to be a little silly with it um and we're allowed to have fun and we're allowed to come up with ideas that maybe other like haters would shoot down. But when me and my co-workers say, yeah, that would be cool and fun. We just get to do it. And I think that there's like joy and creativity in all of it.

Yeah. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to the leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough,

so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world

as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting

or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, so I guess, you know, do you have anything else that you want to make sure we get to before we sort of wrap things up um yeah so i mean as much as we talked about a lot of the benefits of independent unionism uh one of the downsides uh is that we have no money and if people would be so gracious as to give us some of their money um you can go to uh link uh

tr.ee slash blue bottle union um so link tree slash blue bottle union uh where there will be a link to our gofundme um i'll also say that since we don't have staffers our overhead is incredibly low and this once again allows us to um you know actually do cool and fun things like we were able to pay everybody that did the walkout because we were able to raise enough money um in the in between from april 3rd to 8th which was incredible i i have like some personal stuff when it comes to like filing independent and talking with a lot of people that I know, I feel like it actually helped the fact that we were independent because, you know, there was none of that background. Oh, unions, you know, there's this big influence when it comes to like unions and like big,

scary unions taking all your money through union dues and yada yada. But, you know, with filing independent, you know, we can just be like, actually, we don't have to worry about anything like that. We set union dues democratically and like, and so it's just been like really helpful for when we were getting organized and everything, just relaying that idea to co-workers, to family, friends, and everyone just kind of like helps them be like, oh, that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, the old like, you know, anti-union talking point of like, you know, there being an outside organization um really falls flat with an independent union because it literally is just you and all of your friends and then on top of that it also means that management hasn't known how to respond to us because in the week leading up to

our election which we won 38 to 4 this past friday may 3rd yeah Yeah. They put out, like, three or four different flyers, one talking about business unions that have signed management's rights clauses in the most fucking, like, I'm not owned, I'm not owned, I'm still going to get my management's rights clause.

Like, ever. And then also another flyer about union dues and examples of business unions that, you know, to anybody that doesn't know anything about unionism would seem high. Yeah, they also in a letter that they sent out to all of us the night before our election talked, complained about us seeking external assistance. And all of this just completely falls flat because, you know, it's literally we've done this mostly by like having potlucks together to talk about all of our issues at work and or like movie nights or some shit and it's much tougher

to convince people to vote against the person that they're on the floor with eight hours a day. Yeah the overall like way that these papers were received is has been like met with kind of like a lot of skull emojis in group chats and like just kind of like

generally making fun of the whole thing um and i think that like that's been really good for morale as well because like you know it's just not getting to us. It's goofy and like, just doesn't work. So, and also the way that they've been handing these flyers out, I don't know about like other cafes, but at mine specifically, it's been kind of awkward. Like, haha, cover my eyes. Here's this flyer that I have to hand you kind of thing. cover my eyes here's this flyer that i have to hand you kind of thing and it's just like okay yeah yeah it really seems like this is something you know okay i'm not i'm not i'm not i'm not

gonna do my my tangent about the infiltration of political parties here but yeah i mean really political cults within the greater boston area um continuously subvert and undermine union elections and not just elections but campaigns as well i i won't name examples because these same cults are also incredibly vindictive and they will try to dox me but um this is also the implicit threat that you know like if you know they can't turn a union into their own stupid vanguard then they will try and push through something that rank and file don't want and try and undermine or tank the campaign yeah and that's that's something i think like to take a okay so to take a little step back

so yeah one of the things that's very common in union in sort of like local union spaces is there will be like uh there'll be like a local of a union or like maybe sometimes its own union that's just run by a cult and these sort of like these sort of like i don't know sometimes they're stalinist under trotskyite sometimes like it depends the ideology changes to some extent but because because of like the you know the because because you can run like a staff union with like five people right um this is this is a pretty good way for them to sort of like like you know gain something that looks like political power and like it's a way for them to bring other people who don't know what's going on into like the

influence of their organization and they this can get really bad they're really dangerous at least the stuff you're talking about where yeah they start trying to sabotage campaigns because they're not, you know, like these groups aren't actually in this for, you know, like they're not in this for class struggles, but whatever they will say about it. They're in this specifically to expand the influence of their own party. And, you know, when you try to like actually do your own thing, this stuff happens. Yeah, 100%. It's also really telling that despite the fact that, you know, some of these groups are, like, known for undermining campaigns in this way or for harassing staffers that, you know, don't play ball with them or whatever, that they continue to do the entryist thing. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have any

good ideas for how to subvert that. But I'm sure dear listeners will send me many of them. Yeah, I think also at some point we're going to do the microsect episode so we can introduce people to the to like to

introduce people to the basics of like hey here are like the range of tiny political parties in the u.s that are actually cults that show up at protests all the time so yeah maybe maybe that will help too because i think a lot of it is people just you know they're you run into like the world workers party and like you don't know that this party is a weird cult right they're just sort of talking about workers stuff yeah so i think education will help with it too but the bureaucratic maneuvering stuff is like the only thing they're good at because they're all these like weird micro party formations so i don't know yeah 100 i only way that i uh think might help is uh you know horizontalizing the structure somewhat but then you still run into like the issue of like social capital within that structure

so if you know somebody is savvy enough they can still indoctrinate people into silly cult yeah i mean i don't know that's that's just something that you're gonna have to i mean and we should also mention too like these thing these groups like they work with larger unions too sometimes like so one of the most famous examples of this is uh pride at work which is a really big uh afl-cio thing but it's also jointly run with the party for socialism liberation which is another one of these cults because of a bunch of like long-running actions even though like a bunch of their really senior staffers um unbelievably transphobic and you know there's there's a whole thing there but yeah this is something that is not just a problem with independent unions and not just a problem

with sort of like random locals uh it can and does get into actual like national unions. On the other hand, one way to avoid this is to in fact organize your own union and don't let them in. This is actually something that we've thought consciously about with our own union. Is that on the we sent out a community support form for people that wanted to show up the day that we announced our campaign. And on the form specifically, we made people tick a box saying that they wouldn't endorse

or try to flyer for or otherwise promote any group that they might have affiliation with, including political parties or otherwise organizations that are not you know our specific union uh and so far that's worked hell yeah i would also say like in our constitution bylaws i i don't know if that if it's in the current ones we're revising them soon anyways but it's a conversation that we've had before also like people in like eboard positions um what yeah what kind of

affiliations can they have to outside uh political parties like where where are we drawing the line on that like that's something that I think we also considered very early on as well for people in the union yeah and I think there's another aspect there too which is like the another thing that can happen to your Union is that it gets eaten by the Democratic Party machine and that's happened to i mean like this is this is a lot of how like these giant business unions became business unions as they became basically these like lobbying firms on behalf of like whatever random like local democratic machine is running like this happens in chicago like all the time you get these like just like the most

abhorrent machine like candidates you've ever seen come out of the democratic party who are like guys who are like so comically corrupt that like you know they seen come out of the democratic party who are like guys who are like so comically corrupt that like you know they're like walking down the street and like like bundles of cash are falling out of the suitcases they're getting endorsed by like the teamsters and it's like well you know okay i wonder i wonder what happened there legally legally legally conjecture but you know who's to say really yeah it just so happens that they have these large briefcases full of cash nobody can really say where the cash materialized yeah but amazingly i was actually going to go on a different rant about political parties so i'm going to circle back to there to

close this out which is one of the nice things about independent unions is that you know it's something that all three of you were sort of getting at which is that like employers have been fighting these sort of large corporate unions large business unions for like a hundred years now right they know how they operate they know how their campaigns work they know what levers to push against them on the other hand they have not been fighting you specifically random listener of this show and you specifically random listener of this show and your co-workers can do things to surprise them and can do things in ways that they don't understand and you know you have we have a moment like right now like in in like five years they'll probably have worked out a bunch of stuff about how to break independent unions but right now like literally right now we have a we have a massive strategic advantage because their playbook wasn't written to deal with people who are running these sort of like

very low to the ground very agile very nimble very sort of like you know these spontaneous and creative campaigns and you can use that to beat the crap out of your boss and get more money from them. So this is, this is the VA endorsement of, of doing, doing fun things with unions that your bosses don't expect. Hell yeah.

Yeah. So I think unless there's anything else, um, where, where else can people find you? Uh, we'll, we'll,

we'll have a link to, uh, your link tree in the description. Is there anywhere else like social media stuff where people can find the union yeah our social media um for twitter and instagram is bbi union and then on tiktok i believe it is bbiu16 cool we will have that in the description too um yeah and thank you all so much for coming on and yeah make make nestle bleed for us yeah thanks so much for having us uh we can't say how much we appreciate it yeah thank you of course and yeah this has been it could happen

here you can find us in the usual places and yeah you too can also go start your own union and make your bosses suffer. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the

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