It Could Happen Here - How Unions Can Protect Trans Rights

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Mia and Gare talk with Starbucks Workers United about their fight to secure gender affirming healthcare through unionizing and how you can too.  Solidarity Pledge:  https://crm.broadstripes.com/ctf/SJID0H  Sources:https://sbworkersunited.org/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-sign-orders-ending-diversity-programs-proclaiming-there-are-only-two-sexes-2025-01-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-orders-end-federal-support-gender-affirming-care-minors-2025-01-28/ https://www.wjhl.com/news/regional/tennessee/bill-would-block-insurance-companies-that-cover-gender-affirming-care-from-contracting-with-tenncare/ https://www.npr.org/2024/12/24/nx-s1-5238169/starbucks-strike-christmas https://www.them.us/story/starbucks-threatens-to-take-away-trans-rights-at-stores-that-unionizeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn, an investigative journalist, and this is my journey deep into the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy, my doll. He was like, I'll take you to the top, I'll make you a star. To expose an alleged predator

and the rotten industry he works in. It's honestly so much worse than I had anticipated. We're an army in comparison to him. From Novel, listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Callzone Media. This is It Could Happen Here, I'm Garrison Davis, and yeah, it's happening.

The past few years I've been writing about how the religious right has been trying to roll back trans rights, take away gender-affirming healthcare, and essentially remove trans people from public life. And the day that I'm writing this, President Trump just issued an executive order aiming to ban gender-affirming healthcare for everyone below the age of 19 in the United States, with promises to weaponize the Justice Department and alter the National Health Guidelines for Gender Affirming Care. And unfortunately, this is just the start. But this won't be a wallowing in the doom and gloom episode, nor will I be laying out the foolproof solution to get us out of this predicament. Instead, we'll be hearing from two people

who are trying to do something to affect change in the physical world. Last month, Mia and I talked with Neha and Cassie, who are organizers and baristas with Starbucks Workers United. And they also co-facilitate that union's trans rights action committee, called TRAC. And specifically, the topic of this episode is how to use union organizing as a way to

fight for trans rights and secure access to gender-affirming healthcare. Which is, unfortunately, an increasingly critical issue. We've already had conservative states like Tennessee pressuring private insurance companies to drop covering gender-affirming care by blocking insurers from contracting with the state's Medicaid program, basically holding it hostage. And now, with the federal government threatening gender-affirming care and seemingly more and more restrictions kind of on the horizon, working outside the state and not relying on government programs like

Medicare and Medicaid will only become more necessary. And union organizing is one way to do that. A union contract, union infrastructure, and the collective resources of you and your fellow union workers can help protect trans people in the workplace and get us the things we need. If you already have a union at your workplace you can get more involved and fight to prioritize trans rights. And if you don't have a union you can work to secure access to gender-affirming

care through unionizing your workplace and having health care protections as a core part of your contract. For more on that topic I'm going to play the conversation between my fellow union member, Mia, and Neha and Cassie from Starbucks Workers United. And I'll occasionally pop back in to provide some context. Here's Cassie. When you fight for a collective bargaining agreement, a contract between union workers and their employer, you can fight for gender-affirming care to be included in the health care that's

provided and make sure that that health care is affordable and actually usable by the people working there and that their wages are adequate to cover out of pocket expenses, including travel expenses if you live in a state that's coming under threat. But it is not just health care that is under threat right now. Just days into office, Trump already started to roll back Biden-era federal discrimination protections. Last Monday, the Trump admin sent a memo ordering a freeze to all federal grants, loans, and aid, requiring a sort of audit to ensure the recipients of those funds use the money in a way that, quote, conforms to the administration priorities, unquote, and not to promote, quote, DEI and

woke gender ideology, unquote. On Tuesday, a judge temporarily halted the order, and on Wednesday, the White House revoked the directive. but this clearly demonstrates what the new priorities are for the conservative government. And they will most certainly try this again, probably in a more targeted, discriminatory fashion to limit the general backlash. But even as the government starts openly allowing discrimination, or even encouraging it, discrimination protections is still something that unions can write into their contract. Having non-discrimination language in a contract that covers gender identity is a really critical

way to improve not just for yourself, but then also we talk about these things like hiring discrimination. If you get that kind of language in a contract at a union job, that's going to help everyone who comes after you. Because additionally, as a union, you have the mechanism of enforcement of a grievance and an arbitration procedure, right? That's sort of the critical in addition to obviously all the kind of actions you can perform. And we can talk about what things might look like without the NLRA, but for now we have grievance and arbitration procedures still. And even in states where there are

legal protections against employment discrimination for trans people, like here in California, the bar to defending yourself legally is obviously a lot higher, including financially, than defending yourself through a grievance procedure at a union job. A grievance procedure at a union job is way more accessible to the average working person than hiring a lawyer and going through a legal system that is totally stacked against you and in favor of the wealthy. Having a union to defend you with the collective resources of your union that you're part of, and having your shop steward or you be a shop steward and filing those grievances yourself, it's so much more accessible for regular workers to get enforcement

when they are discriminated against. And that's obviously not only relevant for trans people, but it is certainly relevant for trans people. Now, if you don't have union organizing experience, this could all seem a little intimidating, even if you already have a pre-existing union at your workplace. Mia has done a whole bunch of episodes on unions and labor organizing on this podcast, you could certainly look to for more information and a bit of encouragement. In 2023, Neha co-founded TRAC, the Trans Rights Action Committee, which is a subcommittee of the Starbucks Union that was started to help advocate for trans rights

within the union and share information about the challenges trans workers were experiencing. We asked Neha about the process of getting this focus on securing trans health care through your union to be something that the union collectively fights for. The way that, like, our union started focusing on trans health care as one of, like, the core issues is, like, we were organizing around. It all started with a conversation

with, like, a regional staffer here in Oklahoma. I had, like, a regular check-in call with my staffer and this was like two, two and a half years ago and he was just like asking, you know, what's going on? What are you concerned about? And I was like, well I'm having some issues with like accessing health care and he'd not heard like how difficult it was for like trans people to access healthcare at Starbucks. He wasn't aware of how expensive it could be. And as I started talking to him, he was like, hold on, let me set up a meeting with some

other people. I think they need to hear this too. So then we had a follow-up meeting with more staff and other organizers. I talked about these issues again and one thing led to another thing and they ended up encouraging me to form a subcommittee with our union for trans workers to kind of like build community for us and connect us but also hear more stories from trans workers about the struggles that they were facing specifically in accessing health care.

And so that's kind of how TRACS started. And it's been really moving to see how over the past two, three years, this went from an issue that was affecting a minority of a minority of workers. It's not like every single work at Starbucks is trying to have facial feminization surgery or anything like that, right? This issue that was affecting a small subset of us

ended up becoming one of the biggest issues we were organizing around. It makes me really emotional when I think about how much my union coworkers and my comrades actually fucking care about trans people, right? That's kind of how TRACS started and how we started to organize around trans healthcare specifically. It's been a focus for us for a long time, also in part because the initial, you know, our public bargaining proposals that were released early on when we first formulated our demands included improvements

to gender affirming care at Starbucks. And part of that's because there were trans people involved in writing those initial demands, right? And, you know, Neha was involved nationally in the campaign and had the opportunity and the encouragement to start track. We have to be part of it, I think, is on some level the most basic prerequisite for everything that came after.

Because trans people have been involved with this campaign from the beginning, we do have so much support and solidarity from our coworkers and from our fellow union comrades, regardless of whether they're cis or trans. And I think part of that is because we've really showed up and done the work. This again goes to that false narrative of there's some kind of contention between workers' rights and trans rights. It's like trans people have been super motivated to get involved in this campaign and fight for the rights and benefits for every worker at Starbucks. Other workers have seen that, seen the way we've been involved and dedicated,

and that's given them the sympathy and solidarity to stand by us for an issue that affects us very directly and somewhat narrowly compared to a lot of the other things we're fighting for. So, yeah, on some level, I think it comes down to unions are a place where trans people can get involved in political life in a way that's hard to do in other parts of American political life. And you get to build that solidarity. And if you're there at the table, you have a chance to highlight the issues that are important to us. And if you're fighting for everyone else, they're going to want to fight for you too.

Trax logo says trans rights are labor rights, a phrase one of Neha's coworkers came up with to express the idea that even if your state becomes an unsafe place for queer and trans people, trans people will still fight to ensure that their workplace, their store, is a safe place for any trans person who works there. As the functioning of the state and the federal government becomes more and more alienated and distant, or in many cases increasingly hostile to the likes of you and me, one of the few ways we can still exert power over our lives is through unions, regardless of whether you live in Portland, Oregon or Oklahoma City.

And specifically, as access to trans health care becomes more and more of a growing issue, this is becoming more of a core issue itself that you can organize around and can actually build a union around. Lots of different struggles have been highlighted in our campaign. We have really made racial justice a major priority as well. I mean, obviously, economic justice is at the core of any union struggle. But we're really invested in making sure all workers are included in this movement and their specific concerns are represented as well as our general shared concerns. And as more and more things get taken away at the level of

federal politics and state politics in many places, people will be looking for recourse. It's like, how do I get back the stability, the protections, the dignity, the power that I've lost? Particularly if some of these folks are not super democratically accountable, people will be looking for how they can build power and how they can find security when the state is not providing it and when the state's actively undermining it actually. And unions are one of the truly critical

irreplaceable answers for protecting yourself, for protecting the people you work with, for protecting your community, and for taking back some of the things that they're trying to take away from you. Whether that's on the from you, whether that's on the job protections, whether that's economic equality, whether that is your access to trans healthcare, whether that's protections from racism or misogynistic discrimination in your

job and harassment, all of these things, if the state steps away, people should and will look to labor organizing as the answer instead. Our ability to like build power in this way is a way that we maintain hope so that we can keep organizing for a better future. I think one of the best tools like these fucking fascist freaks have is making us feel like there's no hope. It's beating us down. It's making us feel like we have no power. It's making us feel completely disconnected from the government, our workplace,

all of these different things that exert power over us. And I think labor is such a direct way to give people that power back. Yeah, morale is a tyrannical struggle. And this is a way that you can fight there that does other things too at the same time, which is critically important. And do you know what else is important? Being subservient to the capitalist impulse of pivoting to ads. Experiencing the news each day can feel like a journey.

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Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we are back. Here's more of our interview with Starbucks Workers United. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you because things have been very bad. And one of the specific ways that they've been very bad is that there's become this framing, and this has been around for a while, but it's getting sort of increasingly adopted in mainstream circles that trans rights are opposed to workers rights and that's just nonsense. So I wanted to sort of start there with a bit of a discussion about the ways in which the trans struggle is a worker struggle.

The trans community is like disproportionately like impoverished. Like a lot of us are struggling to just pay for rent or basic like needs, right? Yeah, I think this framing assumes that like all trans people are like, I don't know Rich working in tech or some shit like that, which just is not true Yeah, the actual stats by the way, these are running from the US trans survey Which is the largest survey of trans people in the US? 34% poverty rate and the national number for cis people is 11%. The unemployment rate is 18%. The US unemployment rate for cis people is 4%. 18% is 1936 Great Depression levels of unemployment. 30% of trans people have experienced homelessness

in their lives. The national rate is about 7%. and those numbers are actually very misleading because it's actually much worse than that because these demographics skew young significantly because of both the shortness of our life expectancy and how often we get killed and also There's more people who are realizing that they're trans now than there ever has before so those homelessness numbers We are we are racking up a rate of homelessness that is four times higher than the regular rate, and we're doing it in significantly less years than it takes the cis population to rack up these levels of homelessness. So things are extremely bad for trans people. Trans femmes make like 60 cents on the dollar of like the average American worker. Yeah. And I think you see that in our union, we have a lot of worker leaders who are trans. It's a noticeable, obvious fact about our unions that trans people have really been deeply

involved since day one at all levels of this union. And I think part of that is because Starbucks has been associated as a place of economic stability and opportunity for trans healthcare for a community that has relatively few opportunities. I mean, if you're talking about 18% unemployment, then you're talking about people who certainly are going to have difficulty getting employer-provided healthcare, let alone employer-provided healthcare that's going to include gender-affirming care, right? And so Starbucks has been held up as an opportunity for that for a lot of people. It's obviously drawn a lot of us to the company.

Many of us started working there for that exact reason. And then, you know, have discovered in many cases that it's actually not so accessible. You know, I can say in my case, it's definitely one reason I started working at Starbucks because I heard like, hey, if you want facial feminization surgery, go work at Starbucks. That was a community tip.

And then it turned out that I made so little money that I qualified for Medicaid. And in California, where I'm lucky enough to live, for now, Medicaid covers those things and is more affordable and accessible than the Starbucks healthcare actually was. So I ended up relying on Medicaid instead. And I think a lot of us have felt and seen that dissonance between coming to this company, looking for opportunity, looking for a place that is inclusive and will hire trans workers, it says, and ostensibly offers trans healthcare, but then finding out where those

gaps are and realizing like, actually, it's better for me to stay on Medicaid, which is easy to do because I make so little money at this job. It takes that shine off. And I think, you know, our economic vulnerability as a group is precisely what drove a lot of us to seek improvements here. It's related to our transness, sure, but it's also like just fundamental working class issues. We need better wages. We need better health care. You know, that's something everyone benefits from and everyone can relate to. And I mean, I can also attest to the fact that I started Starbucks five years ago because I needed to have access to gender affirming care. I was coming from a situation where I came out as a teenager, I was disowned and kicked out by my family, I didn't have access to college, I was basically on my own, right? And I had no idea how I was gonna medically transition.

And like older trans women in my life told me to apply to Starbucks. And it was also like one of those things where like, again, I live in Oklahoma. It's not like there's a ton of employers who are like super excited to hire trans women, right? That's something I also wanna highlight because I don't think people understand this at all if they're cis is that the level of employment discrimination is staggering.

It is however hard if you are a cis person you think it is to find a job. It is like 30 times harder if you are trans. It's unbelievably difficult and the promise of just like any job that will hire a trans person is a huge deal because you know, otherwise odds are you walk in the door and they take one look at you and like, you know, you're fucked. Right. And I think that's how Starbucks kind of like advertises itself to queer and trans workers,

right? And I think this is reflected in the demographic of my store. 99% of my coworkers are queer. A lot of us are trans. There's a lot of trans women who work at my store. I actually don't even know if we have a single straight coworker, actually. We have our one token diversity hire,

but he literally just transferred. So I think it's all gay people. But no, all of us applied to Starbucks because what other options do we have, right? And again, in my case, I applied to Starbucks because I needed access to gender affirming care. And over like the five years that I've worked here, I've realized that while that benefit might look good on paper, in practice, it's hard to actually qualify for that health care. It can be completely unaffordable for a lot of us, right? Like last year I made $16,000 in total

from Starbucks and like a disproportionate amount of that income was just going towards health care, which doesn't even take into account rent or bills or anything else. We're struggling to just fucking get by. Something that Mia pointed out is that one of the few places trans people are actually overrepresented is in union organizing. Because trans people don't really have a safety net. Fewer of us can

turn to or rely on family support. So union organizing is one of the ways we can directly fight for a better life. With the current political climate as it is, it's even scarier. I mean, Cassie was talking about not being able to actually access the Starbucks healthcare and having to find other ways to pay for gender-affirming care. But I mean we're looking at like a Trump administration that could possibly be trying to make it impossible for anyone to use Medicare or Medicaid to cover gender-affirming care. We're looking at state-by-state like healthcare bans, right? I think it's more important than ever to

organize and focus on trans rights and our access to healthcare, our wages, our safety at the workplace. Where else are we gonna protect ourselves like that? The Starbucks Union is also fighting for guaranteed scheduling and better staffing at stores. And this relates directly to a worker's ability to access health care and gender-affirming health care. Part of Starbucks Health Care being somewhat inaccessible is that employees have to work a certain threshold of hours to qualify for benefits, including health care.

Failure to get enough hours of work scheduled means losing access to your own health care. And this kind of reflects a more subtle form of employment discrimination. I can speak to this. I've heard this from many other workers. It is such a struggle just to get the minimum amount of hours to keep your benefits. I was talking to another worker who was telling me about how she had to like literally cry and beg her manager to schedule her enough so she didn't lose access to gender affirming care. And of course, this manager was scheduling enough hours for other workers who weren't trans women,

right? And so I think having like protections in a contract that guarantee a certain number of hours, better scheduling, that kind of thing, also makes it easier for us to like maintain and keep the benefits that we need. And obviously this benefits all workers because everyone benefits from having enough hours to actually get the money you need to live. The Starbucks union started the official bargaining process with the company last April, and they were supposed to have their final bargaining session last December, based on a shared expectation that the contract would be closed and ratified by the end of 2024.

So after nine months of bargaining, it's December, we're expecting to finish up contract bargaining. And after like a few months of like delaying and not really giving us a counter on wages or benefits, Starbucks like finally gave us a counter proposal. And I mean like counter proposal. It was literally like a page. And their counter proposal was basically no changes to benefits whatsoever and a 1.5% raise if non-union stores received a raise that was less than that. And for context, 1.5% for most of us is 30 cents. So yeah, after nine months, that was the best they could do. So yeah, after nine months, that was the best they could do. So it wasn't really a serious, like, counterproposal. I mean, frankly, it was a fucking insult.

So with less than a week's notice, they organized the biggest ULP strike in the Union's history, resulting in 5,000 baristas at over 300 stores across the country going on strike on Christmas Eve. Now this is not the kind of open-ended ongoing strike that you're probably more familiar with. A ULP strike refers to a short-term strike action directly tied to an unfair labor practice, which is any act by an employer that violates a worker's legal rights. which is any act by an employer that violates a worker's legal rights. And unlike ongoing strikes, ULP strikes can happen anytime, not just during contract bargaining. In fact, the Starbucks union has utilized ULP strikes the past few years to address unfair labor practices.

Part of the shared agreement to finish the contract before the year's end was to also resolve outstanding unfair labor practices by the end of 2024, which did not happen and thus the strikes. And this was a super tight turnaround to organize strikes of this scale. By having a representative or delegate from each store in the union present at bargaining, which is hundreds of workers, that provides a direct link to every store in the campaign. This was how the union was able to pull off a mass mobilization on an extremely tight turnaround. So when it's time to vote to go on strike, there's already workers across hundreds of

stores around the country ready to organize their coworkers and get the word out. Contacts with union advocacy groups and a network of allies ranging from campus activists to LGBTQ organizations can also help spread the word about these strikes, raise awareness, and pull more numbers onto the picket line. On more of a big picture note, once you get these sorts of structures and networks from union organizing,

you also gain the actual capacity to deploy them quickly in a way that actually lets you do rapid responses to changing situations. And that capacity is something that trans advocacy just hasn't really had in a long time. These sites are directly connected to the broader political situation in America, right? I think that a big issue that trans organizing has right now is that there's not a lot of on the ground reaching out, connecting to, mobilizing people who are impacted by these policies that are like negatively impacting trans people. And so I think the kind of organizing that unions are doing, right,

that we've been doing this entire time, right, where we're speaking to people directly, where we're getting them organized, getting them involved is really a helpful starting point for like turning discontent and turning anxiety and fear around issues into like actual action. I think it's like super essential that we have this contract now. We're heading into 2025. We're heading into a frankly pretty fucking scary time for trans people. We need

a contract that protects trans healthcare. We need a contract that guarantees better wages. We need a contract of only for the protections that it guarantees workers in terms of like safety at work in terms of making sure that they're not being taken advantage of at work, right? What Starbucks offered us, again, was an insult. It wasn't a real counterproposal. We're more ready than ever to like finish this contract and to have something but like, we need movement from Starbucks, we need a serious counter proposal. 30 cents and no changes to benefits isn't going to fucking do it. We're gonna go on another ad break and return to finish up our interview with Starbucks Workers United. Experiencing the news each day can feel like a journey. With Up First from NPR though, it doesn't have to be.

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Wow, very powerful. I'm Ellie Flynn and I'm an investigative journalist. When a group of models from the UK wanted my help, I went on a journey deep into the heart of the adult entertainment industry. I really wanted to be a playboy, my doll. Lingerie, topless. I said, yes, please.

Because at the center of this murky world is an alleged predator. You know who he is because of his pattern of behavior? He's just spinning the web for you to get trapped in it. He's everywhere and has been everywhere. It's so much worse and so much more widespread than I had anticipated. Together, we're going to expose him

and the rotten industry he works in. It's not just me. We're an army in comparison to him. Listen to The Bunny Trap on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. I'm now going to throw to Mia for a discussion on how union organizing can help strengthen trans advocacy in general. We're in this kind of crisis period of, I don't know, what you call the national trans

movements to the extent that it exists where the advocacy orgs and legal strategies they've kind of crisis period of, I don't know, what you call the national trans movements, just the extent that it exists where the advocacy orgs and legal strategies they've been pursuing are not working. We're losing in the courts all the time. Their electoral strategy of kind of burying themselves to the Biden administration has failed. And I think this is a moment where we need a new plan. And this is as good of a plan as I've ever seen. And I think one of the things that we're going to see, we're going to need to see, and we're literally just going to have to sue over the next few years. I mean, ideally over the next couple of months, because we don't have we don't have much time until these people take power, is more sort of, you know, not just intra

union coordination of organizing a trans workers but is organizing transworkers across different unions and trying to figure out how we leverage our power like more broadly to You know protect ourselves and to fight for our rights and fight to be free. Yeah, I think That's something we're Still building in our capacity for that in this union, but we definitely do have relationships with other trans union activists and organizers. We're affiliated to Workers United, which is affiliated to SEIU. So obviously, that's kind of the most direct and easiest way for us to get in touch with other trans folks that are in the labor movement, get

support, get feedback, get ideas and share in turn what's been working for us. But it is a capacity we want to build out even further because we are going to need that solidarity between and among labor unions in order to form a coherent response. I mean, as you're saying, the response hasn't been working the kind of problem solving we're seeing from a lot of politicians basically amounts to sidestepping the issue, pretending it doesn't exist. Maybe not throwing trans people under the bus explicitly by actively supporting our elimination from public life, but certainly not standing up and defending us. And unions are one of the only ways that

working people can come together in large groups and pool resources for political activity. And we know there are a lot of problems with how many unions currently do that. But for those of us who are, you know, very committed to struggle for equality,'s not gonna compromise and throw some group under the bus, we understand that we have to get involved and be part of labor in order to improve how labor does politics in this country. If we want people to stand up and defend trans rights and defend trans healthcare

and defend our ability to exist in public life, then we have to be the ones to do it. We have to do it. And getting involved in your union is one of the only accessible ways that trans people are gonna be able to build that kind of political capacity and find allies. We have an opportunity here because, you know, to do a version of Zizek's

mistranslation of Antonio Gramsci is like, you know, the old trans movement is dying and the new world struggles to be born now is a time of monsters. But I think this means that, you know, you like literally the people listening to the show, the people on this now, we are going to be the people who define what the trans movement is going to be going forward. Right. And we have to because we have no other choice. But this also means that, yeah, we are going to be the ones who get to set the tone of what we're doing, get to strategically decide on how we're going to do this. And I think we have advantages too, in the sense that

there are ways in which our economic marginalization is sort of helpful in that, you know, if you look at the sort of independent unions that have been forming recently, right, even more so than in conventional unions, unbelievable numbers of those people are trans, right? Because, you know, okay, you're dealing with a population where it's very easy to get salts, it's very easy to send people into unionized stores, because no one has jobs anyways. And so the, you know, the risk of you losing it is like lower because you're already taking a low wage job, et cetera, et cetera. And I think, I think there's, there's things about these movements and the way that we're

embedding ourselves in also sort of new movements, like the Starbucks unionization thing is not that old, right? I think we're well positioned on on on the sort of front of a bunch of different changes that are happening in both union organizing and in how the American working class works to build something together that can actually go back on the offensive for the first time in like a decade. Right, and I think we're at a moment where we actually have to like fight for ourselves, right? Yeah.

Again, we're at a point where no one else is going to fight for us. We have to be willing to take that step and fight for ourselves, advocate for ourselves. At this moment, it's up to trans people to get involved, especially with the labor movement when there's so much opportunity to advocate for trans rights, to build up the trans liberation movement in a way that hasn't been done before, I think it's so essential for us to not feel hopeless and see the potential here and get involved.

I'm not necessarily telling people that you should go apply to a Starbucks and like convince them to unionize, but also like I'm not not saying that, you know? Trans people are getting that opportunity to actually drive our own liberation. And there's just so few places in society where we get that. That's been one of the most exciting things about being part of this union for me. And yes, you should consider going to work at Starbucks and unionizing it. And certainly, you know, to directly plug a little bit, if there are baristas in your audience,

they absolutely should go to our website. I think there'll be a link, like, in the description of the episode or something. Go visit our union's website, get in touch with an organizer, and start organizing. I know it can like sound daunting in theory, like what does it mean to start organizing my workplace? But there is a template, there's a plan. You know, we've done this a bunch. We've done it at over 500 stores, at least 512 at this point nationwide, which is pretty incredible, especially to have done all that without yet having even secured our contract. So we have a good template for how to win. And if you just get in touch, then people will reach out

to help you. And that does include professional staff, but it also includes people like us, who are workers that will be peer-to-peer, worker-to-worker organizers, because that's what this campaign has been built on from the beginning, is workers organizing each other. So yeah, I mean, there's really truly never been a time that's better than now, and also never been more essential. It's never been more needed than now. So this is the time. And if you're not a barista or you can't become a barista, then we still really need people to sign a solidarity pledge with our union and get involved that way as allies, as supporters. Community support is always critical to union struggles. We are bargaining our contracts with Starbucks right now,

and community support is a huge part of what's gonna get us the contract that does deliver the kind of protections and benefits we're looking for, that does set a precedent for what trans-inclusive union organizing and union bargaining can look like in this country. It's kind of a terrifying responsibility sometimes,

but the thing about this union is because it is one of the exciting bright spots in American labor right now, I do think a lot of people are looking to us to figure out, well, what are they doing? What's working? What's going well? And I certainly think, you know, the results we get for trans workers in our union have some precedent setting importance. So it is really critical, even if you're not in this union, even if you don't work at Starbucks, to support this struggle, because it will have ripple effects. There will be ramifications for American labor and for the struggle for trans liberation as a consequence of how things turn out with us.

So yeah, we could really use your support. Earlier this episode, we talked about hope and as important and as useful as that can be, it is also super crucial that people know how they're actually able to organize and actually try to get things done. After this last election, I'm sure many of you, like myself, were flooded with posts and performative calls to action.

Now is the time to organize your community, but never with any real information on what that actually means or how to go about it. But something like the Starbucks union is actually a very direct way to do that, especially if you're a barista. I think I have to emphasize how achievable that is. Like it is possible. 500 plus stores across the nation have done it in this political environment, right?

I'm gonna shout out one of my coworkers. She transferred to another store in Oklahoma and I was jokingly telling her, I was like, well, you're allowed to transfer as long as you unionize your store immediately. And she was like, okay. And she did it. Within a week of being there, she talked one-on-one with everyone at that store, people who were all already wanting, you know, better wages, better healthcare, better staffing. And through these conversations, she organized that store. And that is so fucking amazing to me. And it makes me feel so, I don't know,

I don't want to sound like patronizing or whatever, but it makes me so proud to like see that, right? To see that she's been able to see how our store has organized, how we've spoken to people, how we've reached out to like her coworkers, and she's been able to take that and replicate that so easily and so quickly. Like when I stay with them like a week or two of transferring to the store, I am not exaggerating. She was fucking on top of it. If we can do this in fucking goddamn Oklahoma, we can do this anywhere,

right? It is possible. You can do it. If you can have a conversation with your coworker, if you can have a conversation with multiple coworkers, if you can develop relationships with them, friendships, if you can establish that you have like a common issue, right? If you can make it clear that like the struggles we're facing at our workplaces have a solution, you can do this. All you have to do is actually fucking take that step to make it happen. Every single union that has ever been formed was made by people exactly like you.

You the listener listening to this right now, right? You are exactly the person who has organized every union that anyone has ever done, right? It's not something that's like the domain of pure professional organizers. You can do this too. Yeah, you really can. And I mean, you know, at my store, I was the only trans person at my store. And despite being a transsexual communist,

I was able to organize a successful election at a store that includes, you know, half of people being Trump voters. Like the idea that you have to hide or diminish yourself or that because, you know because you're trans or otherwise marginalized that it's impossible for you to build that solidarity with your coworkers and come together for your common issues. It's just not true. People understand their own economic liberation. Even if they don't fully just yet, there's always an intuitive level that you understand you're getting screwed over. You can tell that the system is not set up fairly and it's not set up for you

to succeed as a working person. And with the right conversations, with the right information, with the right relationships and solidarity that you build with someone else, people can be brought to understand what the solution is and that the situation you currently live under with shareholders and capitalists stealing all of this value from you is unacceptable and that there is a way to fight to get back what you've earned with your labor. So for those of you who are listening, you don't have to hide who you are politically or personally to do that work, to bring people along. And in fact, if we do hide who we are, then we're not really going to be getting people all the way to where they need to go.

We're not going to build a movement of people committed to liberation by sidestepping issues and hiding pieces of who we are and saying that, oh, well, you know, trans liberation is not really important. That's not how we're going to build like a durable coalition. I think this is a problem that politicians in our country keep making. It's a mistake they keep making of thinking they can ignore or downplay certain issues, tensions within their coalitions to keep those coalitions together. But when you ignore it, you don't address it, it just blows up later in the end anyway. Yeah, get involved that you really have nothing to lose and nothing, you know, except your chains

not to be. I mean, I just realized halfway through I was like, well, I might as well finish the quote. So. I got more like such a scary point for trans people. And I know that that's terrifying, but that's also an opportunity to pivot and to like actually make meaningful change, right? Again, I cannot emphasize enough. We create our own hope for a better future and has to be on us, right?

We can't just, I don't know, depend on other people to do this work for us. We have to show up and do this work. And I don't know, personally speaking, I am fucking tired of liberals who want to just ignore trans people and pretend we don't exist as like, I don't know, our TVs are flooded with anti-trans ads. I'm tired of depending on people who aren't advocating for me, right? I'd rather fight for myself through my union. So. Yeah, I think that's a good place to close on. It is in some sense a cold world that has left us with no one to fight for ourselves, but ourselves. But if we fucking do it, we can win and we can drag everyone else along with us.

On that note, I'm going to close out the show here with a few plugs for Starbucks Workers United. You can find their website at sbworkersunited.org and sbworkersunited on social media. I'll have a link to their website and their solidarity pledge in the description below. See you on the other side. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

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