It Could Happen Here - Starbucks Union Busting

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Mia Wong talks with Tori Tambellini, an illegally fired Starbucks union organizer about Starbucks' anti-union crusade, organizing Starbucks workers, and her personal experience with their crimes and depredations. https://www.gofundme.com/f/wrongfully-terminated-market-square-supervisors?utm_campaign=p_lico+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=customer  https://secure.actblue.com/donate/starbucksworkersfund-tw See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy

Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Or whenever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back. everything. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about fighting your bosses. This is your host, Christopher Wong, and with me today to talk about fighting bosses and uh bosses doing incredibly illegal

stuff bosses doing incredibly shady stuff and why you should fight them more is tori tambolini who is a partner organizer from pittsburgh starbucks workers united and uh was fired from starbucks like very illegally under very sketchy circumstances. Tori, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, I'm really, really happy to have you here. Okay, so I guess we should start with the whole you were denied your legal rights and then fired presumably for union organizing thing yes

absolutely so starting from the beginning there was like i was so a month ago my store manager sat me down and i like he asked me to come downstairs for a conversation so i brought a witness with me and we went downstairs and i found out that I was being investigated because there was one day that I had written down my weekday start time instead of my weekend start time. They just recently changed things at my store so that we open at, we start opening shifts at 5.30 on the weekends and 5 on the weekdays. And this was a recent change after I'd been there for three years. So I, out of habit one day had written five in the book instead of 530. A couple months later, it seems like everything has blown over. They accepted the fact that it was just an innocent mistake. I really wasn't

trying to steal 30 minutes of time, which comes out to like, what $6? Yeah, like, yeah, I was really desperate for that $6. So I figured they just, they knew it was an innocent mistake and it wasn't going to be a further issue until I saw two managers in my store. One of them was my store manager. The other one was, her name is Brittany. And what Starbucks has done recently is that they've created this new position

in the company from my understanding. It's called support manager. And they're basically like an assistant district manager and they go around to stores where there's any sort of union activity and they try to talk about strategies to squash it. So it's like basically the store manager that did the most harsh union busting at their own store gets promoted to this position. So in my district the person's name is Brittany and And I saw her in my store, which is always a bad sign. And at one point, they asked me to have a seat for a conversation. So I sit down and before I sit down, I say, is this a disciplinary conversation? said to me yes this is solely a disciplinary conversation and I said I would like to invoke my wine barton rights I'm going to go out to the floor and bring somebody back as a witness

and they said you can't do that today and basically what they did is they like held up a piece of paper like with a wall of text on it like this far from my face they're like it says right here that we can't we don't have to do that for you and I was like that's really illegal yeah and I'm not comfortable having this conversation right now at all and they said well we're gonna hand this to you anyway and handed me a notice of termination yeah so i walked out and walked back to the front of house and i said a little bit loudly definitely not like shouting but kind of loudly i said just got fired. And is it okay if I swear to quote my friend? Yeah, please. Okay, cool. So my best friend Kim was working at the time. And she

loudly said right in front of our new store manager, what the fuck. And I just kept walking because I was so upset. I didn't want the managers to see me cry. So I walked to the front of house or walk outside. And Kim follows me. me and she was like we're gonna fix this i'm gonna go ask to leave early and i'll drive you home and we'll talk about this kim goes back inside looks at my assistant manager and says i'm requesting permission to leave early and the assistant manager literally couldn't even look her in the eye and told fired kim as well jesus yeah yeah and and i i think one other thing about the story i think is worth talking about is that like when when it comes to union busting it literally does not matter how good of an employee you are unless like you not

being there will literally cause everything to collapse yeah But yeah, don't talk about like, you were really good at this. And they were still just like, No, fuck you. Yeah. So I was voted by everybody at my store. I was voted partner of the quarter. In spring of 2021. I was also promoted to shift supervisor within that same week. And later that year, I participated in a barista competition for my store and I won barista champion for my store level and I also tied at the district level for barista champion for the district so um and then in addition to that I had dealt with a situation where somebody like leaning against the front of my store had overdosed on heroin and i gave him narcan and basically saved the guy's life and then like a month or two later they fired me so yeah which like i i'm trying to

think of if like any other way you can possibly go like above and beyond what anyone could reasonably require you that is more than i saved a dude's life it's like yeah okay like you're welcome guys someone would have died inside your store if i wasn't there but um okay bye i guess yeah i wanted to talk a little bit about about that specifically and about sort of the conditions of the store because one of the things that seems really clear from, from listening to you talk about it and from reading stuff about it is that it's not just, I mean,

even if you were just like, you know, doing kind of regular ish serve, like service worker stuff, this would be unacceptable, but it's also like there there's, there's this way in which you and your coworkers have sort of been turned into social workers and are being sort of are being forced to like deal with just all of the people

who sort of capitalism to say i've just like spat out absolutely yeah and sort of like fill in the gaps of of just the collapse of american social services and yeah i wonder yeah i wonder if you could talk a little bit about the stuff that you've been having to do and what that's like. Yeah, absolutely. So something I've noticed in MarketSquare is that it feels like there were some sort of resources for the unhoused community that existed before the pandemic that straight up just don't exist anymore. So a lot of that work to be done falls on the Starbucks employees employees most of us are completely unqualified for that like i have a degree in psychology but sometimes that's just

not really enough yeah most of us are film students at point park so none of us are at all equipped to deal with any situations where somebody is under the influence of something and maybe becoming aggressive or somebody's having a mental health crisis or there are people that are sleeping in the cafe and we're asked to pick them out if they're sleeping but that feels really really bad because there's not a ton of other resources especially during the day i know the shelters closed so when it's like winter or it's like 90 degrees outside and someone is just trying to get like a tiny little bit of sleep it feels really bad to kick them out um so we dealt with a lot of situations that we were just completely unequipped to handle and starbucks would send us de-escalation training but most of the de-escalation training revolved around if a customer isn't happy with their drink and they're shouting at you yeah

so it doesn't even begin to cover like any of the stuff that we deal with at market square we had like we've we've seen a lot of customers having mental health crises in the cafe like what do you do like don't want to call the police that's definitely not going to help yeah um in the situation where i had to narcan somebody the we had called for an ambulance and 20 minutes later the ambulance still wasn't there And there were even managers at the surrounding businesses calling and calling and calling, trying to get an ambulance to Market Square. And it ended up like being me

that had to give the man Narcan. Overall, like something that we were pushing for with Union, the main thing that we were pushing for was better training. Like we want Narcan to keep in the stores and we want all the shifts to be trained on how to use that. And that doesn't have to be through Starbucks. There are, I know of a lot of organizations throughout Pittsburgh that would be happy to train our staff on that. We need like better resources.

I know at one point we were falsely promised a social worker that would sit in our cafe for at least one day every two weeks. Never got that. And yeah, I feel like my staff just deserves better. Community deserves better. And it shouldn't be Starbucks's job. But until we have something better, I think that we should be a little bit more equipped to handle situations that, frankly, we do have to deal with at some point, just by the nature of our work and our location. I also think something really funny to mention here is that we got a new store manager at the, I want to say the beginning or like mid-June, we got this new store manager. Her name was Sarah, and she has already transferred to a different store because she felt so unsafe working at Market Square. She got her first Market Square death threat and was like, I'm out. So even the store manager can't deny that our working conditions are bad. So the fact that they're still fighting against the union, even though management is well aware of how terrible our conditions are, just baffles me.

Yeah. Okay. I want to take a second and go back to something that you said, which is your first market square death threat. How common is this? I think I received a total of four to five and um then i received my very last one the day that my store went on strike and i was standing at the picket line and i was like wow it's just like the good old days before i was fired yeah yeah market square is a lawless land yeah and i mean like i don't know like i feel like this is like every time i do this is like a recurring thing every time i do a labor story, it's like, oh, this is a labor story. It's like, no, but it's also the story of a bunch of, like, a bunch of people whose job this, like, isn't, who just wind up having to deal with all of the shit that the state doesn't want to do, that corporations don't want to do and it's like the the fact that starbucks employees have to be

the like the starbucks union has to be the group in like in this place that is trying to get people to get dark hand training is nuts like just just audio like there's only any like sort of just macro taking a step back level like what on earth is going on in this society i've been thinking a lot about lately like i think a lot of journalists and reporters have asked me like why do you think that the younger generation is the one like leading this like why are unions making a comeback now and why is the younger generations like so ready to lead this i think it's because we've spent our entire lives watching politicians on tv make all these promises and continuing to do absolutely nothing and we're all sick and tired of it we are all ready to take it into our own

hands and fix it in any way that we see that we can yeah it makes yeah it makes a lot of sense i mean like i my you know my my first ball case my first political memory was the iraq war but like i was like a little baby child but like like you like, you know, like I remember like the, the, the thing I grew up on was like, yeah, it was Obama. It was, uh, it was hope it was change. And then it was like, you look at the world now and it's like, it's like, oh, it's, it's even bleaker than it was in 2008, which is like, yeah. Yeah. And then. Absolutely crazy.

Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense and i think also just like like the last two years have been so brutal yeah yeah absolutely um and i was wondering yeah i'm wondering if you could talk about like what effect the um what effect the pandemic had on y'all's workers and what effect that had on union organizing yeah absolutely so um i think that it really pulled the mask off the company which ironically while everyone was putting their masks on the mask off was coming on for starbucks because they always really pretended to be this really awesome progressive company yeah and it really revealed how performative the company is because they gave us all these

covid benefits for like two three months and then took them right away from us like before obviously the pandemic isn't even over now it definitely wasn't over back in i think it was october they took away like our jesus yeah that's right before like the spikes too exactly and right around that time we were also watching our ceo our now former CEO, Kevin Johnson, get like a $40 million raise while they had just taken away our hazard pay and our free food benefits, even though we were all still struggling. So then I think that us seeing those benefits being taken away and realizing that the company doesn't care about us in that sense made us start looking harder at everything. Like the company doesn't want to increase our pay. They don't want to give us credit card tipping. They don't want to make our stores safer. And every other reason that any store could see to unionize, like it really highlighted all of those reasons and all the ways the company doesn't care about us as much as they should and how they really do just see us as

a number. So I think that's what really, really pushed us all towards unionizing it's like if the company doesn't care about us and the people in our stores then we're going to rely on each other to care about us and um push reunions so that we can take matters into our own hands yeah and yeah and i think there's there's a lot of the stuff that you've been talking about that highlights how important that is which is that like know, you have this combination of management, either like the management immediately above you understanding what's happening and being like, oh, we'll just throw you guys at it. We'll just literally bail and run away from how bad it is.

And then you have the layer of management like above you, which is it's a bunch of bureaucrats who like couldn't find their ass if you drew a map and you know or like oh hey here here's your de-escalation training it's about person mad about drink and it's like i am getting multiple death threats it's like it's i don't know we literally had a like someone from i think either regional management or maybe a level higher than that like area management came into our store the other day like as a customer and there was something going on i'm not sure if it was like somebody shouting in the cafe or like two customers were fighting but this like upper level manager who should know about our store said to one of my baristas um so is this like a high incidence store and we were like i don't know dude isn't it your job yeah like really like wow yikes yeah that's something that like

you know it's something i learned like it's something like you learn intellectually and then you just see like and then yeah it's something you learn intellectually and then you just sort of viscerally begin to understand when you know you're doing work and you're watching what your managers do it is it's that like yeah like the people who actually knows how the production process works and how the stuff actually goes and what's happening on the shop floor like are the people are the workers there and it's like everyone above them is just doing some other shit they're just making everyone's lives worse and it's just literally infuriating the start that nobody the reason we need a union and i tell people this

all the time whenever i'm going into new stores nobody knows your store better than you nobody knows like the inner workings of it how busy you are what the needs of the store are better than the people that are there 40 hours a week and so another thing we talk about a lot in like our like our city-wide meetings is like what do the managers even do all day like what is their job what are they working on nothing it's like what does michelle the district manager do all day in her cushy little corporate office i mean i guess she does union busting now even that they're delegating to another manager below them so yeah apparently yeah did you ever see the fake tweets the fake workers united tweets that starbucks published no oh i missed this i'll have to email you oh my god a copy of them but they literally made this

handout with a list of fake tweets from workers united and like the company's responses to them but if you look up the company's twitter account um it just doesn't exist and the tweets from workers united that they printed out on these handouts also don't exist and i think maybe three copies of that got handed out to my store oh my god we all made so much fun of my boss that he stopped so um i guess that's my boss's job. I can show these to you. I keep them on hand. Oh my god. They are amazing. This is like

it's the biggest energy of like oh I thought of the perfect argument seven hours later except the argument's not even real. They're just making up a guy to argue with. And he didn't even try that hard because these were handed to me back in April. It says that all of these were handed to me back in April. It says

that these, all of these tweets were posted on June 1st. So the day that they claimed that this was tweeted hadn't even happened whenever I received the handout. I mean, Hey, if y'all, if y'all have access to a time machine, I have some work I need to do. Yeah. Yeah. They say things like in collective bargaining, you start with everything you have and negotiate for more from there, from Starbucks workers United right there. And then the company's response was, and then the, we are one Starbucks account said in collective bargaining, everything is up for negotiations. If you get more of the same or less. And once you negotiate a contract, you're locked in, which is also funny. Cause it like like okay you are looking at that like you think that that

is actually like a thing that makes you look good and not like a super villain it's like no no no if you try to negotiate with us uh we will make everything worse for you it's like really this makes you look good i know they try so hard to union buster they just kind of suck at it yeah so it's been it's been comical to watch it's very funny which is really funny because like i remember like i didn't know the super bowl but like i remember i knew some people who were doing starbuck union organizing like way about like like 2006 or something yeah and they were like you know it was like they were kind of better at it like they they were willing to just like throw resources at it in a way that like they don't seem to be able to now i think maybe just

because like there there's so many organization so many organizing efforts happening at once that it's harder to sort of just like throw all of their stuff at one store but yeah it's just it's like incredibly funny watching them just sort of like flail and like you know i guess like like all all all corporations that you need must eventually resort to breaking the law because you know the law yeah yeah it's designed for rich people my district manager um came into my store screwdriver in hand to personally make repairs at my store it was the funniest thing i have ever seen it's probably my favorite union busting story but she was like yeah i'm here to cover up the electrical outlets in your bathroom we were like cool why and she was like so that the homeless people can't like

plug in their electric shavers and shave in there we were like wow we've she was like so that the homeless people can't like plug in their electric shavers and shave in there we were like wow we've seen we've seen people do a lot of weird things in the bathroom and that's like not even one of them yeah like you are so out of touch oh my gosh it's been hilarious to watch like wow that was really some effort but really no absolutely not immediately now That was really some effort, but really, no, absolutely not. Immediately, no. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning

of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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 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. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. There's another thing I want to talk about that Starbucks is – you talked a bit about earlier about starbucks sort of like having this image as like a like progressive organization and okay like one of the things they've been big on sort of recently is like portraying themselves as this like pro lgbtqia plus like thing and and i think like okay so there's something that like traditional media has finally discovered

because they haven't covered labor organizing in 40 years and they suddenly started doing it again. And they were like, oh my God, all of the union organizers are queer. And it was like, anyone who's ever organized a union or anyone who knows anyone who's ever been in a union could have told you this like 30 years ago. It's incredible stuff. It's like, wow, congratulations. You've discovered this but yeah i i wanted to ask about sort of i i don't know this kind of binds that like i i i feel like queer people doing organizing are

in right now which is that like okay so on the one hand you have like in you know in the last sort of year or so this like incredible increase in sort of rampant homophobia but then simultaneously like so you know you have to fight that fight and then simultaneously you have these corporations who are trying to you know like yeah they're like nominally on our side and that they're not well i mean they are they are they are funding the rampant homophobes but like publicly they don't you know publicly they're supportive but also you know that like they're supportive because they're trying to sell our identity as a brand and then you know when queer people are like hey can we like have stuff that lets us live?

They're like, no. And I was wondering how you've been sort of navigating that. Yeah. So that's been really tough because a lot of our queer partners in Pittsburgh get their health insurance through Starbucks and get gender affirming care through Starbucks. And the biggest union busting tactics is hour cuts. And if you cut someone's hours, then they're not eligible for healthcare. So they're really just like, dangling the carrot on the stick in front of our faces, like, oh, if you unionize, then we're going to cut your hours, and then you can't get your gender affirming healthcare.

So that's like, that's really, really sucked. In addition to that, there have been now four people about to be five. We think one person is going to be fired when he's back from vacation. But out of all of us that are fired or about to be fired, we are all queer people. So I think that really shows how much Starbucks cares about their queer partners. shows how much Starbucks cares about their partners. And since I've started organizing, in addition to homophobia and discrimination against the queer community, I've also heard just rampant stories

about microaggressions and racism. I actually met a partner that was fired from a store in Virginia, I want to say. She was, I believe, from from my understanding she was the only black woman that worked at her store and she was fired for aggressive behavior and when I heard that I was like yeah she's kidding me so just like and also that support manager that I was talking about I've heard rumors that like she was transferred from one store to another because she was like caught being racist at the first store so instead of being fired she was transferred from one store to another because she was like caught being racist

at the first store so instead of being fired she was transferred and now she got she was promoted to store manager and then she fired a trans partner at her store and now she's our support manager and fired me so so it's like it's it's the homophobia yeah yeah it's like it's it's the catholic church for racist homophobes well okay the catholic church for racist homophobes well okay the catholic church for racist homophobes but corporate and well okay i i i am not going to make a claim on the air that they're not also doing this with sexual assault because i they they had like there's no way that they're not right but yeah, that is, yeah, that, that, that's incredibly bleak. And I want to go back a second to sort of the gender affirming care stuff,

because like that stuff, it's like, like, okay. The thing that they are doing is just like, we are holding the genocide button over you. And it's like, yeah,

if you, if you don't comply with us and you don't like accept the like absolute shit and scraps that we give you uh we are going to try to kill you and that is just indescribably horrific absolutely yeah um i know it's something that partners there's at least one partner at my store that's dealing with that right now she's 25 about to be 26 and she is trans. And I know that, um, she's on her parents' insurance at the moment, but in less than a year,

she'll have to find insurance elsewhere. Most likely through Starbucks. And it's something that really got her into organizing. I know that for sure. Um, yeah, it's, it's been a really scary moment for her.

Definitely something she's worried about. Yeah. Yeah. Just the risk of being fired the risk of having your hours cut and not being eligible for benefits it's awful and like she doesn't feel like she can get a job like anywhere else just because starbucks is one of the like starbucks offers like decent health insurance so it's like i'm kind of trapped here until i can get out until i can get another job with insurance benefits yeah and you know that's

incredibly it's incredibly hard especially right now i mean yeah i don't know it's i mean it's not really surprising that they're doing this but it's yeah it's it's really depressing and it sucks and absolutely the fact that they're you know like sending sending racists to do homophobia is like it's yeah it's like dystopian like we watched this happen and been like is this real life like this is crazy and um they just fired another black queer organizer in fitzberg just yesterday and they're trying to make it look like he resigned um but really they gave him like a couple like options like you need to have at least one weekend day available or you need to demote yourself or you need to transfer to a different store and they were like i can't really do any of those options like none of those work for me and then the company said

like oh yeah jimmy resigned like we totally didn't fire them but they just resigned and sorry you can't appeal it because you resigned bye yeah it's a real uh we didn't fire you we simply forced you out by making utterly impossible demands yep i mean it's like it really reminds me of like it's the kind of stuff a country does when they want to go to war where it's like yeah we're gonna we're gonna give you a bunch of demands that it is literally physically impossible for you to comply with and then because you don't comply with and we're going to invade yep exactly exactly although i did just find out some good news today so there's this one bar where most of the union organizers hang out all the time and they messaged us on twitter today and they want

to throw a queer dance party as a fundraiser for like our solidarity fund and strike fund i was like it's literally the most us thing i can possibly think of like a queer dance party fundraiser at our favorite bar that rules so much the bathroom attendant from the bar like showed up to our strike at my store i'm friends with like the bartender there it was like the best twitter dm ever i was like that's so funny i'm literally going there with the other person that got fired from my store like tonight nice so we're very excited for that yeah and i guess that brings something else i want to talk about which is um yeah do you want to talk a little bit about like what happened after you got fired and the support you've been getting and the like the backing from other unions that

you've been getting oh totally yeah so my store is actually just like a block away from the United Steelworkers headquarters, which is incredible because anytime we have any sort of direct action, we get like 40 steelworkers. Hell yeah. In my store. Rules. Yeah. The day after I was fired, I have this very funny picture that's on my Twitter of me just standing

with like 40 steel workers sitting behind me. They found like the two biggest dudes. Yeah. That's me on each side of me. I'm like wearing my Starbucks apron in protest. It is my new favorite picture of myself. That's so good. So that was day one.

We had a rally. We had a really good turnout with all the steel workers and a bunch of other community allies. Our symphony musicians have a labor a labor union oh that's so cool to the library workers um they all came out for the first day of the rally at market square and my city-wide organizing committee was actually able to pull together a total of four strikes that happened within the course of two days the planning happened in like basically under 24 hours. That's incredible. Insane.

Wow. So yeah, I got fired Wednesday. Thursday was the rally at my store with all the steel workers. Friday, the East Carson store in the South side of Pittsburgh went on strike. The East side store and the Bloomfield store all went on strike for the full day um the south side store continued their strike into Saturday and then um

Sunday my store went on strike finally so um it was incredible we had we have a labor choir in Pittsburgh which is incredible it's just like a dude with a guitar he's my favorite person ever um so we had the labor choir out at all of our events and um we had like i said the library workers the steel workers the symphony union um we have ue we have dsa which is democratic socialists of America. We have the Party for Socialism and Liberation, who are really strong allies to us. And we had like a lot of the regular, my favorite customer showed up at my store, of course, which made me cry. One of my customers, one of my favorite customers who comes in multiple times a day said, you shouldn't be standing out here on the sidewalk.

You should be back there behind the counter making coffee. And I was like, I know. Thank you. We had a couple of our regulars change their mobile order name to Tori and Kim, so that every time he orders a drink to my store, they have to call out the name Tori and Kim. Amazing. That's great. And we set up a GoFundMe and we received way more donations than we thought that we would get. So for all the workers at my store that went on strike, in addition to the 70% pay that we received from the union for the day, we were able to pledge $20 to each of them

to try to make their paychecks full and cover some of their lost tips. That was incredible. And really just a demonstration of how much support we have in our area you know they say pittsburgh is a union town yeah it really is it turns out yeah and it's really cool to see i don't know i like one of the things that i keep seeing is this sort of like like one of the sort of right-wing tactics that I've been inundated with in the last couple of years has been trying to separate out like, oh, here are these people who are workers

but they're not workers because they're doing cultural stuff or they're like, oh, they just serve drinks. You look at actual labor and it's like, no. None of these division things are real. People show up for each other it's all bullshit i always get worried that people will be like judgmental about that like i'm always kind of like surprised when the

steel workers show up i'm like i know i'm not a steel worker i don't make steel i don't work in a factory or anything i just make coffee but um everyone's so supportive and they are always so willing to stand in solidarity with us which is really cool but it's something i'm always like worried about like i i know it doesn't feel like i'm a real worker but like we're a union i mean i i'm in a podcast union so like yeah like i i have i have like arguably like if if if, if, if, if you're going to use the really silly, like, like, I don't know, sort of like cultural analysis of what a worker is like a podcast union is like the silliest union ever.

And it's great. No, it rules. It turns out we're workers. We go fight for other people to other people fight for like the, the, when, when, when we, when we were trying to get union recognition like the nfl players association was like hey you guys need to recognize this we were like yeah hell yeah that is awesome yeah we just um we've been going to a lot of rallies for the planned parenthood union in hell yeah i didn't i didn't actually know that they existed that was

yeah i actually well it wasn't pittsburgh but i i was just talking actually probably well i don't know what order these are going to air in but like yeah i just talked to two people from that union oh my gosh yeah they were cool got to see the labor choir there again i was like hell yeah solidarity all around love to see it yeah that that's really cool yeah lots of unions in pittsburgh it's a good time met a lot of really cool people i feel like all the people i've met since i've been involved with union stuff have been like really cool yeah the first time i like talked anywhere it was at the pennsylvania afl cio convention and um whenever i was told that whenever i talk my speech was supposed to end with uh brothers and sisters can i count on your support because they were passing a resolution

for us but one of my baristas told me it would be funnier if i said can i get a hell yeah so i said some very serious words to this room full of serious looking people and then i said on behalf of all of our partners at the market square starbucks can i get a hell yeah and they all they're all so happy and they all clap for me and i was like cool i found my people yeah that was like the first time i talked to anywhere that was funny that's awesome yeah this is another reason to unionize you get to meet a bunch of really cool people and then they show up for you and it's yeah a just incredible experience yeah on my last canvassing trip we went out in teams of two and when we reconvened at the end of the night for dinner we were like oh we should stop at our one store that we visited again like all four of us and i

was like yeah we should like go in and be like, look, guys, I joined a union and I made three whole friends. Yeah. I was also just talking at the I was on a panel at a women's labor school, which is really awesome. It was at Penn State University. And that was a really, really cool experience. I met all the all the female union leaders. It's a really great event. Overall, it's really cool people involved. all the all the female union leaders it was a really great event overall it's really cool people involved here yeah hell yeah ah love unions good stuff absolutely i got a cool pin that says labor women get in good trouble and i was like yeah that's what i'm doing hell yeah absolutely hell yeah Hell yeah. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories. Inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Ches Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the

iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Yeah, so these days I'm just working with some other stores in the greater Pittsburgh area, helping get them filed. I won't be too specific about this, but we are going to see some stores picking up in D.C., which is really, really exciting. We've been doing some canvassing trips out there. Well, at Starbucks Workers United, we call it a clean play. Because in Starbucks, what a clean play is, is that one day a week, all the closing crew is scheduled for an extra two hours at the end of their shift to clean the

store. They call that a clean play. So we like to take Starbucks language and throw it right back at them. So we call like our little canvassing blitzes clean plays so for the dc clean play we've been i've been out there twice um we visited a ton of stores definitely some interest there seems like the union busting has been really tough but we have we have one store that's making nice and you'll see it in the news soon hell yeah hell yeah I'm very proud. It was one of my DC leads. They'd reached out to us on our website for an organizing request.

And they've just been super strong leaders. And they've been incredible. And Eugene Busting really hasn't faced them at all. And they're going to be the firstborn. That's awesome. I'm very proud of them. A little bit proud of myself. But they can have all the first one that's awesome i'm very proud of them a little bit proud of myself but they take they can have all the credit for that they they really like

stayed strong for all the union busting doing good stuff it's scary to be the first store in your area to to actually make moves like my friend jake welsh he was the first store in pittsburgh his store was the first in pittsburgh and i know that's like really scary. And I'm glad that it's happening because it feels like once the one store goes, then the dominoes start to fall. So once we see that one store in DC file for the union election, we're going to see a lot more go down there. Are you able to talk at all about what the sort of organizing process has been like? And, and, you know,

if you can't talk about like what it's been like as an organizer just like like what it was like at your store and what it's been like going to other stores totally so at my store we started we had heard a little bit about what buffalo was doing we started very casually talking about it at my store like yeah if any store needs a union it is this store like we are it is an absolute shit show here so we could definitely unionize that would be awesome um really had no idea how to get started though until a couple weeks later i get a panicked phone call from one of my baristas and she was like tori this weird guy came into the store when i was on register today and he started asking me questions about unions. And I know he wasn't a barista.

And I think he was a corporate spy. And we were like, oh, okay. So we Googled the guy. Start to, like, get some information. We found, like, his LinkedIn or his co-worker's LinkedIn account. And we were like, okay, they seem trustworthy. We're still not sure. So we emailed the guy from a burner email account with a fake name.

I think the fake name was, like, Darren or something. Even though or something, even though our names are like Tori and Kelly and Kayla. So we emailed them from a fake name and a burner account and eventually got in contact with Daisy Pickens, who is now our national campaign director. But at the time, she was working mainly in Pittsburgh. And from there, she taught us everything we know about organizing. We built an organizing committee consisting of me, Kelly, and Kayla, because the three of us were pretty good friends. And we got cards signed. We were able to get 100% of the people at my store to sign a card. Incredible.

And we filed unanimously. Wow, that's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. So something that stores do right before they file is they write a Dear Howard letter. And you might have seen these on Twitter. If you haven't, you can find them on the Starbucks Workers United, like national, like official Twitter. They always post those there. So we wrote our Dear Howard, we turned in our cards to the NLRB office. And right after I finished turning in the cards to the NLRB, I walked right back to my store and I printed out a physical copy of our Dear Howard and I handed it to my store manager. Joe, I wanted you to hear it from me. And he was like, okay. From there, the union busting started. We had captive audience meetings, which I believe, to my understanding, the company has stopped doing because they were kind of declared illegal. Or maybe it was just that the information they were sharing was so misleading that it was

declared illegal but they handed us like a bunch of really really misleading handouts saying things like withdrawn petitions if workers united thinks that you're going to lose your union election they will withdraw your petition and abandon you, which is crazy. Another thing was that like if the union thinks that you're going to vote, no, they're going to try to talk you out of voting. But Starbucks is the one that really cares about your voice and we want to make sure everyone has a voice. We were like literally you can look objectively at this. You can see starbucks has done to try to prevent you from voting like they were pushing for in-person stores or in-person elections in

stores where most of the partners don't have cars are um busy with other things have second jobs and just couldn't feasibly vote in person um they challenge ballots left and right they think i think they challenge a total of nine ballots at my store, including Kelly's ballot. Even though Kelly was literally like working at the time of our ballot count, she was literally behind the counter. And like you can see her like in the Zoom call when she came out to watch the ballot count on her break. They tried to challenge her ballot, claiming that she didn't work there. So there's just like hard evidence that the company is the one that doesn't want people to vote. So we got through all the union busting. It was it was tough. It was an uphill battle. And eventually we won our

election eight to one on May 26. So after that, I became an intern with Workers United for the Summer Solidarity Internship Program. And that's when I started really getting into helping other stores file. So there was one out in the Pittsburgh suburbs, like the greater Pittsburgh area. Peter's Township was the first store, like my first really solid lead that I ever took on. They filed. I helped them write their Dear Howard letter. We were interviewed by the Washington Post. It was super cool. So they have their ballot count on August 18th.

I'm very excited for them. I have my stores in D.C. that I'm working with and a lot of other stores throughout Pittsburgh. And just going on a lot of Queen's Day trips, whether it's a big one to Washington, D.C., or just a smaller local one. But we'll go out in teams of two, visit as many stores as we can possibly get to in one day. And we wear our Starbucks Workers United shirts.

So immediately people know why we're there. We basically just go up as if we're going to order a drink and be like, hey, so like we heard about what we're doing in like downtown Pittsburgh. We're like the stores in Buffalo that unionized. Yeah. So like, what do you guys think of that? And typically our approach is to find the gayest looking person yeah we got trying to find like the young like maybe like 20 something person with like dyed hair and a septum piercing it's always the septum piercings let me tell you they're always the leader the ringleaders at their store I don't

know why but it's been funny so yeah try to find the gayest person and be like hey so what do you think about unions and that's how we brought in new stores hell yeah yeah and we've been pretty successful with it a lot of people either don't know what a union is or they really like their boss and that seems to be the company's best union tactic union busting tactic is by having good bosses because we always say that the sometimes the best organizer is the boss so sometimes the store is where they're like we love our boss our boss takes such good care of us i'm like darn it um like good for you guys but you should unionize anyway yeah which yeah i would also yeah like like i would say this like i i really like my boss and i am also still in a union because

yeah totally it doesn't matter. I try to explain to them too. Sometimes those stores, they say that they're hard to talk into it, but I always tell them what happened at my store. And what happened is that we had the same store manager for, I believe like five years. He was great. We loved him. He was cool. And when we unionized, it wasn't about him. It was about the working conditions at our store and that upper management had been giving us false promises. And the things that needed to be changed at our store were kind of out of my store manager's hands.

Like that was like above his pay grade. So he couldn't do much about it. And we made it clear like, Joe, it's not about you. You're great. We love you. Got to do it to you though. Sorry, buddy. Then we got, even though we loved Joe, we got a new store manager in mid-june and she was a little

bit less awesome and you know you never know when things at your store can change and even if you love the store manager you have now they could they could leave tomorrow so you gotta like the only thing that's guaranteed your store manager isn't guaranteed to be at your store forever what is guaranteed is a contract and that's something that's really important sometimes it's hard to get people to see the long term though yeah um otherwise we're normally pretty successful um we uh typically try to get like phone numbers at every store reach out to them within the next two days and then we'll hold like an intake meeting so whenever we have an intake meeting, we tell them, make a spreadsheet of every partner at your store, what shift they work, what their job is, like if they're a shift supervisor or barista, and assign one person on your organizing committee

to talk to that person. So every person at your store should have an organizing committee member assigned to them. From there, once they have a plan for who's going to talk to who, we get cards to them. And they can be either physical cards like my store did or digital cards. And then they start getting signatures, having little conversations like, hey, here's what a union is. Here's why we're doing this. If you agree, sign this card. Once they have 70% of cards signed, then we take it to the NLRB and say, hello, we would like to do a union, please. And then we take it to the NLRB and say, hello, we would like to do a union, please. And then hopefully they get a ballot count date. And the company always pushes for in-person elections. We always push back.

We pretty much always win. And we always want mail-in ballots because we do really genuinely want everybody to be able to vote. Whenever I was organizing at my store store i told everyone my best possible outcome best case scenario is that every single person here votes and votes yes my second best possible outcome is that everyone here votes and some of you vote no like i i want everyone to vote yeah i want every single person here to vote i don't want to be like there is one store in my district that did end up winning their union election but out of their i think 50 to 60 partners only 12 people voted and although they

won like that is not the way we wanted to get yeah we want everyone to have a day yeah which i think is interesting on sort of two levels one it's like you can see the exact moment at which corporations start caring about like start pretending to care about democracy which is like oh wait hold on our workers are doing stuff oh no we have to care about uh yeah suddenly we're like this incredible pro-democratic force we want everyone to have to say it's like that okay yeah it's funny they actually just came out with oh this happened after i got fired this happened in the past two weeks but they came out with I believe it's an app where partners can share their feedback and share their experiences so they they're trying to be so democratic like look at them just really listening to us wow yeah they also did this really fun

thing where even though hours are being cut across the company, people are having their hours drastically cut because this poor little billion dollar corporation can't afford to schedule us any more hours or properly staff their stores. We were all scheduled an extra hour for one of our shifts during the week so that we could sit down and watch an hourlong speech by Howard Schultz and do a survey about how much we like our jobs which was funny that wow that was like a kind of a new low for Starbucks like wow there's two people working on the floor right now one person like making drinks and one person on register and they're getting slammed out there but so glad you guys had the had the labor hours to be able to schedule me to sit here and watch this howard schultz speech yep great thanks it's very frustrating and like i think like just the scheduling stuff like everyone being consistently understaffed it's like this is something i was talking to the plant parenthood people about too which is

like there too it's like you get you get these managers who are like well okay we're gonna do cost cutting uh we're doing and you know the the price of cost cutting is we're gonna just make all of our people work impossibly hard because we refuse to put enough people in the store and then you know we're we're we're not gonna let you work long enough like we're not gonna let you work long enough to actually get benefits and then yeah it's like the worst combination yeah but but it's like you know okay you know like like they have the money they can schedule you it's like yeah i mean like like you know i think like in ideally in a society that wasn't just like like not even not even like a perfect society in a society that was not like entirely based on cruelty and violence they

wouldn't even be able to do this at all everyone would just have a fixed schedule yeah just like exactly but it's so it sucks so much because it's like i barely get to go to work even though i ask for full time i'm scheduled 17 hours a week when i am there i'm like so freaking stressed because there's just not enough people to make the number of drinks that need made and all the customers are super pissed off because they've been waiting 10 minutes for their drink and like corporate's just watching this happen i'm sure they're they have to be getting bad reviews like there's no way people aren't calling corporate to complain about the wait times because there's only two of us working

on a sunday morning and like they're really just shooting themselves in the foot just all around all around shooting themselves on the foot yeah but i think also like there's a part of this which is just like like they are insulated from this like you know i don't know it's like the managers don't have to fucking deal with this shit and it's like yeah they're gonna they're just gonna throw all of the angry customers like people who are angry because of decisions of management do they throw at you and it's like this is this is fucking bullshit like it's yeah it's like here's a coupon for a free drink go bully the baristas again yeah yeah it's like michelle my district manager doesn't have to come in and deal with like 40 angry customers staring at her

while she tries to frantically make drinks like yeah it's like i don't know like there is definitely a part of me that is like i mean okay like i i know on the one hand this isn't true because there have been a lot of terrible corporate people there but a lot of like i don't know like terrible world leaders who actually had to work real jobs but like okay like like some part of my soul still holds on to the belief that if like these people actually had to work in these conditions like consistently that it wouldn't be like this because they they wouldn't be completely insulated from just the absolute horror they're inflicting on everyone and it's yeah you can see whenever my store manager is scheduled to like be on the floor like scheduled for a coverage shift

which means that they're like required to be out on the floor making drinks and doing register they were always very fully staffed whenever whenever the manager is scheduled for coverage yeah there's always at least five other people on the floor but whenever it's like me on a sunday morning opening the store and there's like a steelers game and a convention in town and everyone like the city is packed and all the hotels around around my store are packed everyone's gonna want coffee there's like three of us so which is just like it's really frustrating to sort of like on a political level it's like every job that i've ever worked it's like if it was literally just us running this and there was no management everything would work 100 times better yeah and it's like yeah that's just yeah yeah it's like

okay like at a certain point you have to just be like get rid of these people like what why why why are we doing this yeah our new new store manager since our recent new one quit because working visions are so bad our new new one is an outside hire who doesn't know how to drink oh my god how to make drinks doesn't know anything and they just put him in my store as a store manager and my roommate is also a barista and she's been like having to coach him every day which is a really awkward situation because she's not even a supervisor she's like a barista and she has to be like hey there's a difference between nitro cold brew and regular cold brew like keep hitting the wrong button very frustrating and they sent this

guy in to run my store meanwhile like he probably knows less than everybody else that works there yeah he definitely knows less than you do like yeah definitely knows less than me it's so funny since i've been fired i still like every time there's an emergency at my store my baristas call me it's wild like i got a call at five in the morning the other day from one of my like favorite baristas and he was like hey tori i know you don't work here anymore but sal was supposed to open and he's not here yet and i'm locked out of the store what do i do or like another barista called me when i was in dc and he was like tori i just showed up for work and the store is closed what do i do i'm like i don't know guys like i i can do my best to help

you but i there's not much i can physically do i don't have keys anymore sorry so yeah and it's really like you know one of the things that i mean i guess you get this in both sort of like like when i want to like so i went to the university of chicago and you know i was like okay so these are the people who infamously produced all of the terrible economics to make the world suck right and it's like okay well you take econ classes there and it's like everything is about sort of like i like you're doing all this because i like okay so like the you're doing all this under the assumption that if you let corporations run in a free market they will do everything optimally and they will produce the lowest prices and they will

produce everything as efficiently as possible. And it's funny because like, you see this in like Marxist theory too. And then it's like, you look at like any store place and it's like, no, no, no. They're firing their most competent workers and hiring people who are incompetent because like the, because the thing that they actually like care the most about even more than efficiency, even more than like making more money is maintaining their power and it's like yeah it's something that like is really obvious when you're working but somehow like the people who write about this stuff has like diluted themselves into not being able to understand yeah they have absolutely no idea it's like it feels like they almost don't want the experienced workers to stay i've seen like so

part of my internship project is keeping a database of the fired partners and the anti-union firings which is kind of ironic because i was like well gotta add myself to this spreadsheet now but i've seen i see people in the spreadsheet who've worked the company for five years. There's one person on there who worked for the company for 17 years, but we don't get raises or anything for seniority or anything like that. There's actually a cap on how much you can make in each state from Starbucks because they don't, they don't want you to work there forever because then the frustrations start to come through and then you,

then you unionize and it feels like they, the high turnover feels really intentional sometimes. I think it is. Like, I think that that's, that's like a pretty common, like Amazon does this too, where it's like,

like their whole, their, their whole business strategy is intentionally on working everyone so hard that they quit so they can get a new group of people in so that people can organize. And it's, yeah, yeah. It's really brutal and horrific and i hate these people yeah same it's like if i keep

this person here for 10 years and make this look like it's a sustainable career then oh then we have to make it a sustainable career and don't want to do that so i gotta force people out after like two or three so very frustrating which i think i guess also helps them with the sort of like like the way that people look at like i mean minimum wage workers and also just service workers in general where they're like oh well yeah you know we don't need to raise minimum wage it's a bunch of teenagers like these people don't need like good wages because this is like you know you're not actually supposed to be doing this this is like a transition thing it's like that's not how any of this works like, you know, you're not actually supposed to be doing this. This is like a transition thing. It's like, that's not how any of this works.

Like, it's just not, that's just, you're, you're, you're making excuses for corporations doing exploitation. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And it also seems like another thing they're doing is that we've seen a lot of really high manager turnover too. And I think that also is really intentional because they had to, even though the store manager that ultimately fired me was new,

like she could, she didn't even have the heart to like do that. She had to bring it. They had to bring in a support manager to like actually say the words like you're fired. Here's your termination notice. And it feels like the reason they're making the manager turnover so high is so that the managers don't like form those relationships with staff at their store because it doesn't feel as bad to fire them like i don't think this ever would have happened to me if my original store manager who had been there for five years and like knew me personally was still at my store i don't think

this would have happened and i think that's why they're doing this big manager shuffle right now at least i mean i'm sure it's happening in other places it's definitely happening a lot in pittsburgh i think there are very few stores in my district that have the same manager that they had three months ago so it feels like they're intentionally shuffling them around so they don't form like personal relationships or any sort of emotional tie to the partners at their store and they don't feel guilty firing them yeah it's like it's community is really dangerous to them. Absolutely. Like, I think I talked about this, like, some number

of episodes ago, but, like, yeah, like, this is a thing that's really common with, like, I'm just gonna straight up call Starbucks a dictatorial organization because it is, like, it is like it is just a dictatorship it's like dictatorships do this a lot we're like yeah like communities are

really dangerous to them communities with any kind of strong bonds with each other are really dangerous because people will fight for each other and you know you can't for example like i don't know it's it's really really hard to deport someone who has a strong community around them that will fight back but if you can isolate those people if you can like like physically isolate them if you can like socially isolate them if you can make sure that they don't have these support networks then you could then you can you know do whatever you want to them and absolutely that seems yeah it seems like it's it's a very deliberate like and everything is like you know this also like this just makes everyone's life worse right like yeah did you see what happened in Seattle with the new Starbucks Heritage District?

I think I vaguely heard about it, but. Yeah. So in Seattle, the three like original, I believe it's the three original Starbucks stores, like first ever Starbucks stores to open the three in Seattle. They've made it so that you don't the partners there don't have a specific store that they're assigned to they're assigned to the district and can be scheduled at any store at any time so you're not working with the same people all the time and you're not forming those relationships and if you were to somehow form enough relationships to start organizing um you wouldn't be able to vote as a store you'd have

to vote as a district which is just a lot more logistically difficult and there was a lot of pushback that happened but unfortunately those stores hadn't filed for an election yet and um weren't really able to do much about it but we're definitely scared of that happening like in pittsburgh and like at other starbucks stores around the country that they're going to make it so that you work for the district on this specific store and that's kind of terrifying so yeah i mean and i think that that's another thing where it's like okay that they have to have to weigh efficiency versus like their own power and they're going to choose their own power every time and it's also like there's just like an aspect of that too where

it's like the just incredible dehumanization of it yeah this is totally it's like really careless like you don't know what someone's transportation situation looks like um you don't know like if they feel comfortable working with like different groups of people like i don't know i know that like a lot of people at um so this is just reminding me of something that happened at a store in my area. So at Penn center East, the Penn center East Starbucks,

they're a union store. They decided they were closing and center East for like a, for an entire week and gave them the option to work at three stores that were like an hour away from them. And of course, like they were only given the option to work at other stores that were unionized. They weren't going to send the union people into the non-unionized stores and potentially influence them.

So one of the partners, the one that was actually fired yesterday, was like, I do not feel comfortable working at this store because I worked at the store one time. And I faced a lot of discrimination from the manager there, from the partners there. And I don't want to be put in that situation again. There's like a customer at this other store that said, or that called me a racial slur. And I don't want to be in this area. I don't, I don't want to go out to these stores and just like exposes partners to like a lot more like situations that they're potentially not comfortable with. They're with new managers that they don't have like a good rapport with yet. And it makes everything just a lot more difficult like just let everyone work at their own store like we all have friends all the partners at like my

store at least we're very very close i know a lot of the stores are the same way it just makes work worse to not be working with your friends i don't think anyone would work at market square if we weren't all really close with each other if we weren't all really close with each other. Overall, it's a worse situation. Yeah, and I don't know. Hopefully they're not able to do that on a large scale because... Yeah, that would be...

It just feels like a disaster. Especially since, I mean, there's a lot of Starbucks stores concentrated in cities, but I know the Penn Center East Starbucks was kind of out there in the suburbs. And another big issue that they faced was that some of us don't have cars and we just can't get to the city Starbucks stores because our parents drive us to work every day because we're in high school. And we just don't have a means of transportation. There's nowhere to park there. because we're in high school and we just don't have like a means of transportation there's nowhere to park there and it just puts them it just makes them face a lot of issues that they weren't really

planned on dealing with planning on dealing with and aren't really prepared to and they probably chose the store that they currently work at because of like they didn't just pick it at random they picked it so it was convenient to get to they like vibes there and it was like a good fit for them and forcing them to work at other other stores where they're a lot less comfortable not a good decision this feels shady very dehumanizing for sure yeah and so i guess i do i do have one last thing to ask which is uh if people want to support you and if people want to find you in places uh where can they do that oh yeah so my twitter is Tori underscore Tambolini.

And that's my personal Twitter. We also have a Pittsburgh Starbucks Workers United Twitter account. If you want to support me and Kim specifically, there is a link to our GoFundMe there. There's a link in my bio and somewhere in the Pittsburgh account as well. We also just released a national solidarity fund through coworker, but I'm actually not quite clear on how people can donate to that yet. I can, it's very new. So I can send you an email with a link to that. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. We'll, we'll put all the links in the show notes. Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us.

Yeah, it was really good. Yeah. Thank you so much yeah thank you thank you so much for joining us it was yeah it was really good yeah thank you so much for sharing my story i i feel like there's a lot of fired partners fired partners across the country and like we all kind of need to stand together and i like people hear my story and hear about how like the union has supported us and there's been a lot of community support and you know as soon as i was fired i was immediately hired by workers united you know they're really willing to take care of us and if i had like anything to kind of like like any advice to give to partners who are trying to organize like the union has your back don't worry too much about losing your job probably won't happen if it does the union has your back and all the other firefighters have your back as well hell yeah like hell yeah yeah and on that note uh yeah fight your bosses together you can beat them uh yeah go out into the world and make havoc for people who do bad stuff cause problems on purpose.

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. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow coolzonedmedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Blacklit 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 Blacklit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. I guess. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday.