Group of people marching in a protest for the IWW Starbucks Workers Union, holding banners and flags.

Before the current wave of organising at Starbucks, another group of workers in the early 2000s got together and formed a union at one of the most anti-union corporations on earth. They won better pay and conditions, and laid the groundwork for the unionisation campaign today. Learn their story in this three-part podcast series in conversation with Daniel Gross, one of the key organisers.

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Episodes

E121: IWW Starbucks Workers Union, part 1 – Working Class History

E122: IWW Starbucks Workers Union, part 2 – Working Class History

E123: IWW Starbucks Workers Union, part 3 – Working Class History

E123.1 [TEASER]: IWW Starbucks Workers Union, bonus episode – Working Class History

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Acknowledgements

  • Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands.
  • Episode graphic: Starbucks Workers Union members, including Daniel, holding the sign, left, march down Union Square, NYC, 2007. Courtesy IWW.
  • Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.
  • Edited by Jesse French

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Transcript

Part 1

In recent years, thousands of Starbucks workers have organised themselves at hundreds of locations around the US, and walked out on strike. But before the current wave of unionisation, in the 2000s, an earlier group of workers also decided to take on the biggest coffee corporation in the world. Through grassroots organising, and a direct action approach, they managed to win improvements on the job against one of the most infamously anti-union corporations in the world. This is Working Class History.

Before we get started, we just wanted to remind you that our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes every month, two exclusive podcast series – Fireside Chats and Radical Reads, as well as free and discounted merchandise and other content. So our supporters can listen to all 3 parts of this miniseries now, as well as an exclusive bonus episode with more information and context. So if you can, please join us, and help us preserve and promote our history of collective struggle. Sign up and listen today at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

In 2021, workers at a Starbucks store in Buffalo, New York, got together and officially formed a union at their workplace, Starbucks Workers United. Since then, workers at over 640 other stores around the US have unionised as well. As we are making these episodes, Starbucks workers are on strike demanding a union contract and an end to union-busting.

So we thought now would be a good time to explore the little-known previous wave of workers’ organising at Starbucks in the 2000s, and the lessons we can learn from it.

Starbucks was first formed as a single coffee shop in Seattle in 1971. They opened a couple of other outlets, and in 1982 they hired Howard Schultz, who led expansion efforts, and put together a group of investors to take over the company.

In 1985, Starbucks coffee roasters unionised with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, and store workers joined as well. But a union official reported Schultz “going ballistic” at them, and removing them from work premises. And soon, the union was decertified in stores, and in 1992 the roasting plant union was decertified as well.

With the union gone, the scene was set for Starbucks to expand massively, with no risk of its workers demanding too big a share of the pie. Over the course of the 1990s, Starbucks had a meteoric rise, growing from 84 stores in the US in 1990 up to over 3500 around the world a decade later, with a turnover of over $2 billion a year. By 2004, this was up to over $5 billion.

This explosive growth was built on the backs of its workers: coffee growers in the global South, and baristas in its stores.

A typical workday at Starbucks was rough and I was struck pretty quickly by that. Obviously, it’s 20+ years ago and I still remember, in particular, this thought: ‘Starbucks has really mastered how to suck as much labour as possible out of you to drain you each hour, each shift and each minute.’ I was definitely struck right off the bat that there was something really intense about the type of exploitation there.

This is Daniel Gross, who started working at Starbucks in New York City in 2003.

 This is in New York City where Starbucks paid a little bit more in New York than elsewhere but we were still only making $7.75 an hour. That’s not a good wage anywhere but, in New York, with the cost of the very basics like rent, utilities, transportation and food on the table, it was a very, very low wage for a global multi-billion dollar corporation with over 100,000 workers.

$7.75 an hour then is worth about $12 in current money – well under what is now the NYC minimum wage of $17 an hour

If you had opened my refrigerator at that time… this was not just me but so many of us, you’d see all the expired leftover Starbucks food. I’m not sure how it works today but then, if the food had expired, we could take it home. Baristas were loading up on egg salad sandwiches and caramel bars that were expired. That was a very big part of what we were eating. On this wage was the expired Starbucks food. The wage was very, very low. Were there tips? Yes, there were some tips and cash tipping but when you got your paycheck, basically, tips would usually be for a Metro card. Now, I could get my Metro card so I could get to work.

On 1 January 2025, MetroCards were discontinued. But until then, they were travel cards allowing you to use city public transport. They cost $70 a month back then, equivalent to around $120 today.

The pay we took home was even lower than one might think with that wage We were all part-time. One hundred per cent of us were part-time. There was no full-time barista role. This was not known to the general public. It was not known out there. We were the ones who brought it out into the world that this company had invented a hundred per cent part-time employment model. There were no guaranteed hours and they would max us out at 32 hours, I think. Sometimes, you might get more but, technically, I think it was 32 hours. I’m going by memory, so don’t quote me exactly on the numbers.

Workers would be scheduled for anything between 8 and 37 hours per week, and schedules would only be posted one week in advance.

That would be the maximum but, sometimes, you’d get 28 hours, 20 hours or 18 hours. You might pop back up to 30 hours. There was, literally, just no guaranteed hours but then you might think, ‘At least I’ve got Monday, Wednesday and Friday so I can get a second job.’ No, they always pushed you to have maximum availability and your shifts would fluctuate. You might be off this Monday and then back on the following Monday. It’s not like you can go to Home Depot and get a second job. The compensation was very low, unpredictable and unreliable in terms of your schedule. Our co-workers, who were single mums, would talk a lot about childcare. When you don’t know when your shift is going to be, the childcare question is much, much challenging. It’s already super-challenging but even more so when you don’t know what your shift is going to be. That was a huge issue and understaffing. you saw baristas constantly talking about understaffing.

Another big issue was workloads. Now today, in large part due to the campaigning of Starbucks workers back then, many people have an understanding of the fast-paced and stressful nature of coffeeshop labour. But at the time, Starbucks had successfully cultivated an image of a relaxed, bohemian, community space.

I think this is less true now but then, there was a popular imagination and the media that was pushed of the quaint coffee shop with the artsy barista and it’s a neighbourhood thing. Many people didn’t think about what it was, which was a fast-food chain with an incredible demand in many parts of the day. The shifts were very, very stressful. Just to illustrate that, from time to time and not infrequently, you’d see a co-worker at the bar literally breaking down in a total freak-out because it was so overwhelming. There was a big demand and they were understaffed. The company was pushing these time metrics down your throat and writing you up. They were really, really stressful shifts and very tightly controlled. I don’t know if this is still the case but we had to attach timers to our green aprons and it was a ten-minute timer. You pressed the timer and then, every ten minutes, you’d either clean the bathroom, stock the condiment bar or whatever else. They enforced it and said, ‘Do you have your timer on? Is it ticking?’ It was very, very controlled. You had to shake the iced-tea lemonade ten times. If you shook it nine times, the boss was coming for you. If you shook it eleven times, the boss was coming for you. ‘It’s ten times. Shake it ten times.’ I laugh because it’s absurd but it made for really rough shifts. Don’t get me wrong, many of us, including me… I think it depended but some baristas said, ‘Just put me on the bar. I don’t want to talk to any customers.’ I was kind of a mix and I liked the bar but I was also fine interacting with customers. I enjoyed the repartee with customers and just being there, joking with co-workers. I don’t want it to sound like we didn’t have many beautiful moments as co-workers and some fun and funny moments with some of the better customers because that was real as well. I think the final thing that comes up in the systemic issues of what it was like at work was the healthcare story which we would call the Big Lie.

As many people will know, the US is the only wealthy country which doesn’t have universal healthcare. Most people depend on private health insurance which is attached to their work. But some employers try to get out of providing this, while still trying to promote an image of themselves as benevolent employers.

Starbucks is remarkable. I think it’s one of the greatest corporate PR propaganda achievements, probably in history. They’ve got to study this in the PR textbooks where huge swathes of the US public believed that Starbucks was a leader in healthcare. It’s completely understandable why people would believe that because the company, via corporate media, had systematically repeated this lie and spin. You could literally stop someone on the street and ask them, ‘What do you know about Starbucks’ employment?’ They would say, ‘It’s great. The workers get healthcare.’ This was like clockwork.

As an example of the success of this PR campaign, we found one fawning article in the New York Times from 1992 talking about how Starbucks takes a “counterintuitive” approach and treats all their employees as a “resource rather than a liability”, and offers “a full plate of benefits” to all full and part-time workers. It goes on to talk about the “working class” upbringing of CEO Howard Schultz, describes his “passion on workplace equity” and says he sounds “almost too good to be true”.

But as the saying goes, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”. And so, it was.

Of course, we were there and many of us didn’t have healthcare. Why? First of all, you needed to work 240 hours a quarter even to qualify to purchase it. Remember, there were no guaranteed hours. So, some percentage qualified to purchase it but then, you have to go and buy it. On $7.75 an hour, it was very difficult to afford anything, even if it was important as healthcare. It was really interesting because, at the time, there was this huge discourse: Starbucks was the good one on healthcare and the poster boy for the bad one was Walmart. Walmart was beat up in the press, rightly so. Don’t get me wrong. Starbucks won’t release these numbers but we finally dug and we found that Walmart actually had a superior percentage of workers covered than Starbucks. The whole thing was a complete propaganda coup.

In reality, only 42% of Starbucks employees had healthcare – and that figure included management and office workers. So the actual percentage of baristas would have been considerably lower. Meanwhile, 47% of Walmart workers had health insurance.

Those are some of the big bullet points but another huge issue, and I was not directly affected by this but I definitely put it out there, was that Starbucks discriminated aggressively against workers of colour, particularly women of colour. Single mums had a lot of issues with Starbucks.

In the popular mind, Starbucks workers are often young, single people and students, working for a little extra money on the side, but then, as now, this was largely a myth.

You’re absolutely right. The popular imagination is, of course, shaped by the corporations, their lobbying outfits and their PR groups. It’s a very intentional narrative they push. Back then, arcade money was the thing and they would push that it was for arcade money or beer money type of job. My experience belied that completely. At my store, there was a very wide age range and we had folks in their late teens, early 20s, up to folks in their 60s and everything in between. Many of my co-workers were Afro-Caribbean folks, people from Trinidad, Guyana, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Dominican folks as well. There was a contingent of African-American workers and some white workers. It was a very different picture from what they wanted to push on the popular imagination. We had many mums and folks working to put food and rent on the table. Like you said, I’m sure other cities had demographics that tracked with their cities. What I can tell you nationally… because we would get hold of the data and track but definitely disproportionally, Black and brown workers were in the lowest-paid barista role. That was always stark. Every level you get above barista, you see the proportion of Black and brown workers going down dramatically. They paid a lot of lip service and said, ‘We embrace diversity,’ but the diversity they embrace is that they get you into the lowest-paid role where they’re as committed as humanly possible to keep a low-paid role and make sure they keep Black and brown folks out of the higher-paid roles.

From his previous work experience at the bookshop, Borders, Daniel had tried to organise with his co-workers before, and in doing so joined the Industrial Workers of the World union. He talks more about this in the bonus episode, available exclusively for our Patreon supporters, link in the show notes. We’ve produced a whole series of episodes about the IWW which you can listen to to learn more, like our episodes 6, 9, 16, 19, 52, 73-74, and episode 1 of the Working Class Literature podcast. But in short, the IWW is a revolutionary union. Rather than just trying to bargain for improvements, the IWW, or Wobblies, aims to organise all workers into one big union, to fight for better pay and conditions, and eventually take control of all workplaces and reorganise production and society democratically in the interests of workers, rather than for corporate profit.

So with this view in mind, Daniel started to think about trying to organise at Starbucks as well.

My store was on the Eastside of Manhattan on Madison Avenue. It was part of the advertising industry to add that little twist. Every barista, basically, was frustrated with the issues I mentioned, like being underpaid, understaffed and difficulty with the work hours. I think that motivated all of us. Speaking for myself now, in addition, for something that may have been a little bit more individually motivating to me and probably to others too… but I can only speak for myself. You can kind of acclimate yourself and say, ‘This is the staffing level. This is the bad wage,’ but then there’s that hot thing you can’t really ignore in a given moment. For me, one was that they would grind us down with the metrics during rushes. Still, to this day, I remember one occasion, when we’re flying to meet the rush, we’re totally understaffed and folks are at risk of breakdown mode and my manager, at the back of me and close to my ear, was repeating again and again like a mantra, ‘Speed of service, speed of service, speed of service.’ I think it was three minutes, at the time, if I remember correctly. It was just infuriating. It was so blatantly understaffed and on top of it, you had someone buzzing in your ear as you’re trying to deliver the rush. Inevitably, there’s a break in the rush but then your ten-minute timer goes off and now you’ve got to go and clean the bathroom, or clean the café, or stock the condiment bar. To round it off, ‘It’s time for your raise,’ a ridiculous six months or a year in. ‘Ah, you’re doing great. The customers love you. You make the coffee right. Here’s three cents.’ For me, that cycle was the motor which played into a general discontent that I had and a lot of us had with being underpaid, understaffed and having difficulty accessing healthcare.

This wasn’t at my store but at a later store where workers joined the union several years later. One of the workers there, Cason Bolton, Jr., said, ‘We would just like to be treated like human beings and not machines.’ That was a big part of it beyond the dollars and cents. There was just so much tight control all the way to the top and hitting us down… over 100,000 of us, as baristas. I think that was the motivation as I saw it.

How Daniel started organising is basically the way anyone needs to.

The first step I made is the same step, years later, working with union builders through Solidarity Union Network which is to make a list of your co-workers. All I had to do was get hold of the names. I think I took or copied the schedule or the roster, probably both. You need to have it on paper or have it in your computer who the folks are. Literally, you need the names of all the folks you work with and not just the ones you think will resonate. That’s what I did.

Part of that for those who want to do the one-on-one organising part and learning how to organise, there are so many nerves. Most of us feel a lot of nerves thinking about going and having that first one-on-one. You think, ‘I should just get over this. Why am I obsessing?’ No, this is totally normal. You’re going to get over it and it’s going to be hard for you to probably even remember how nervous you were for this first one.

Intentionally, over the years, I always kept in mind how nervous I was. For those first one-on-ones, I thought, ‘I’ve got to remember this because this is very real.’ Once I had that list, I was on the shop floor and in the café doing the shifts. I turned to my co-worker, Joy – shout out to Joy – I’ve lost touch with Joy but I do recall this co-worker by the name of Joy. I don’t know if it was Thursday or Tuesday but I said, ‘Shall we get together to talk about work stuff after our shift on Thursday?’ That was it! I got it out. I spit it out finally. We got together and did the same structured type of meeting.

Today, all these years later, I believe the A, E, I, O, U method, which is Agitate, Educate, Inoculate, Organise, Union, is basically a structured way to have a conversation for those who haven’t connected with that.

You explore the issues together, you get pissed off about them, you then go and co-create a union solution and in the next part of the conversation, you prepare your co-worker for the union-busting campaign. You offer up a concrete task or piece of work to advance the campaign. When it’s appropriate, you make formal invitations to join committees and the union, etc.

That was a thing and it went well. I got lucky. My first one-on-one ever went well and after that, it was just rinse and repeat with more one-on-ones. Not all of them went so well right off the bat because some were really challenging and required a lot of follow-up. One case involved going to a co-worker’s home, meeting their spouse and talking their spouse through it because the spouse is very influential in the decision one of our co-workers was going to make.

That led to group meetings, putting together plans and strategies, getting better acquainted, choreographing the campaign and getting clear on the priority of things. That was the beginning and we kept on building from there.

While I didn’t originally learn organising with the AEIOU method as such, the general principles I was taught, and subsequently used, were the same, and having later attended IWW organiser training, I did find it very useful. We have various books with guides to organising, including some written by Daniel, available in our online store. One of them in particular, Labour Law for the Rank-And-Filer, written with Staughton Lynd, has been very influential, especially in recent years, helping inspire a wave of organising at tech firms like Google and Kickstarter. We’ll put them in the link in the show notes.

After conducting one-on-ones in the store, building support for the union, and putting together a committee of co-workers who were prepared to be actively involved, the next step the workers took was preparing to go public.

That dynamic between what you could win on a store, district or regional level versus a national or corporate level was always a very important dynamic. You see this right from the very beginning… although, initially, we weren’t the IWW Starbucks Workers’ Union. This is a fun fact of history. At the very beginning, I think we were the IWW Starbucks Baristas Union but then, later, we thought, ‘Some shift supervisors may not know that they’re included,’ so we became the Starbucks Workers Union of the Industrial Workers of the World.

That’s a tangent. The main point is that, from the very beginning, we identified as something that would be open and inviting to all baristas. We didn’t have this notion that… ‘Hey, this is our union for our store.’ This was a starting point. The issues that we talked about were big picture and corporate wide, like the issue of the wage being too low for such a profitable company, the staffing and needing guaranteed hours. Those were very big. We needed to have a powerful voice of our own and not just to have stuff come down from Howard Schultz and trickle all the way down to the bottom of the pyramid. We needed fairness and, as I mentioned, there was a very disproportionate number of co-workers of colour who were targeted by management in different ways. We didn’t limit our vision or demands, thinking that we would be doing this just as one store, ultimately.

We’ll be right back after these messages. If you want to listen to our podcast without ads, join us on Patreon, where you can listen to all three parts of this miniseries now, as well as an additional bonus episode. Support from our listeners on Patreon is the only way we’re able to devote the time and money it takes to make this podcast. Learn more and join us at https://patreon.com/workingclasshistory. Link in the show notes.

One thing that I wondered was whether trying to organise as part of the IWW – an explicitly anti-capitalist union – was a barrier to trying to get other workers to join. But according to Daniel, it really wasn’t.

The IWW Starbucks Workers Union, from the beginning, was a campaign of the New York City General Membership Branch of the IWW. As the story unfolds, we’re going to talk about how we expanded around New York and then, eventually, nationally and then into Canada. Over time, it became embraced as an IWW campaign overall.

At my store, I’ll tell you the most ineffective union-busting was the red-baiting. I still remember… honestly, almost fondly, one of Starbucks’ union-busting memos which was posted in the back of the store. It said something like ‘The IWW is against the economic underpinnings of the United States, of private property and limited government regulation’. At least you could say that’s true.

It’s not like we were all radicalised activists. We were just different types of folks working together at Starbucks. I don’t think it resonated with anybody. It was just funny. It was a billion-dollar corporation paying us $7.75 an hour in New York and we’re all part-time and we were supposed to feel some type of loyalty to the economic underpinnings of all this stuff. I really didn’t see that part being too effective.

We experienced the IWW through the community that we had as co-workers showing up for each other. Maybe some people think that we [57:38 – unclear] and touchy-feely but if you heard and listened to how many people discussed their experiences in the union, it was about that. When you know the thing through experience, I think that stuff has less impact. Obviously, talking about it upfront is the inoculation part.

Inoculation is the I part of the AEIOU of organising – basically, preparing workers in advance for management retaliation, and anti-union management propaganda.

The first stores where workers got organised after New York was Chicago and they were doing the red-baiting there but workers were already dues-paying members and had their IWW red cards. The company was saying, ‘This is a radical organisation.’ It didn’t actually exist, other than everybody had their membership card. In terms of the IWW, to its credit and especially in its best moments, Local 8 on the Philadelphia waterfront is a great example of the longshore workers which really combined strong material benefits in their day-to-day gains and the control they had in their workplace and industry. That was the foundation through which to reach for a society beyond capitalism.

We tell the history of Local 8 and its leader, Ben Fletcher, in episodes 73-74 of our podcast.

It’s always the issues. I’ve also heard this from many workers, I have colleagues union building in many industries that have shared the same but speaking for myself, when I’m on a job… my thing is the issues. I’m not going around thinking, ‘Abolish capitalism.’ Issues are the way in. It’s my issue, my store, my manager, my district and my region. Over time, I’ll get to the company, the industry and then the economic system. Yeah, definitely beginning with the issues but always at least sprinkling in, from the beginning, some of the more visionary stuff just to set the stage. Over time, you can get deeper and deeper. It’s not like you sit down and say, ‘We’re joining a fighting force to take on capitalism,’ but sprinkling the vision and building up to it more over time. I think that was how we did it and how I still think about it. I’m no longer a Wobbly and I’m a proud alumnus but still a revolutionary. In my union building, I definitely approach it that way.

The fundamental principle of IWW and Daniel’s organising is “solidarity unionism”. Solidarity unionism basically refers to an organising approach centred on an organising committee within a workplace. Rather than focusing on official recognition through an election at the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), union staffers or contracts, it is focused on workers organising themselves, forming a committee, making collective decisions about what to do and what to demand, and when necessary, taking collective action in pursuit of those demands.

The IWW Starbucks Workers Union was a solidarity union from the beginning. It was worker-led, worker-operated, preference for direct action and aimed for fundamental change. When we say we’re union regardless of what the boss or government says – all those things. But, at the outset, with one of our first experiments, we wanted to say, ‘Hey, can we make this solidarity unionism thing fit with an NLRB election?’

Hopefully, you have some labour nerds listening because this might just be for them. This is important for the story and how it unfolds. In my store, when we went public, we were the first and last IWW Starbucks Workers Union store to file for an NLRB election. This really informs how the campaign developed and evolved because the experiment got an answer. If I may, let me get into that. It’s interesting that even observers, who seemed to be somewhat well-informed on stuff, haven’t really got the memo correct on how this all happened, so it might be of interest.

Now we think this is interesting to delve into – particularly because the decisions made by the IWW members in this campaign directly led to the legal precedent which was relied on by the current Starbucks Workers United union, which began successfully organising stores in 2021. And we would hope that any labour nerds out there would at least be listening to our podcast.

Alongside organising a committee, Daniel and his colleagues were signing up their co-workers with IWW red membership cards, ensuring they had a solid majority of the workforce on board before going public with their campaign.

At my store, we prepped to go public. There was the direct action plan, the media plan and there was all the things. Solidarity unionism is the model but we also go and take our majority to the NLRB and file our election cards. This is a big piece of what would happen later.

From organising beginning in 2003, the IWW Starbucks union eventually went public on 17 May 2004.

We filed for the election. Of course, Starbucks starts what truly would stagger the mind of anyone to really grapple with the scope of the union-busting campaign they launched nationally and internationally. That’s to come and we can get into that because that is an important part. The legal union-busting right off the bat is as follows. Starbucks is not only trying to break down our majority. It’s also doing something that’s probably even more sinister by simply saying that a vote can’t take place and there should be no vote. What it came down to was whether you could have a vote at a single store. Starbucks is saying no and we’re saying yes. It’s not like Starbucks was saying, ‘Okay, let’s have a vote at 50 stores or 10 stores.’ Starbucks is just saying, ‘No vote.’

So, it goes to the National Labour Relations Board hearing process, basically. We had gathered a ton of evidence about how stores were related, how they were organised, how we could pick up shifts at other stores and all these things to try to break down the store as this sort of autonomous entity which was at issue. We had earned the participation in the case of a brilliant labour attorney and we litigated the case. It was very, very hard-fought and we prevailed. We won the right to have single-store elections at Starbucks.

This was a huge win, especially given NLRB procedures, which don’t give employers the right to appeal this type of decision.

 With this type of victory over an election and whether you can have it or not, the company does not have a right to be heard on appeal. It’s not a right that it could be heard but you can ask to be heard and then the Labour Board in DC decides whether to hear your appeal or not. Typically, for something like this without some other type of agenda, the Labour Board is not going to hear it. This is why there’s a judge or a hearing officer at the local level who sees all the stuff and makes a decision.

But this was during the Republican administration of George W Bush, and in which the Bush-appointed majority now controlled the NLRB.

 Union-busting lawyers from private practice go on the Labour Board and serve there so they can deliver for their clients, go back later and get paid more to represent the same clients. This is the piece which I think has maybe confused some people. This issue of whether workers could choose the constituency in which to have an election was very hot in corporate America at the time. For the Chamber of Commerce, the world of union-busting law firms and their organisations, this is a really big issue. Of course, they didn’t want this. We spoke with our lawyer and tried to get the lay of the land on all this. What happens is that Bush’s Labour Board agrees to hear the case on appeal. At that point, the writing was on the wall. You don’t have to be a wonk in legal procedure, at that point, to understand that Bush’s Labour Board did not accept the appeal to affirm our right to have the election in retail chain stores.

Clearly, the board would only agree to hear an appeal it didn’t procedurally need to hear, unless it planned to uphold the appeal. And if the board decided that, rather than individual stores, votes would have to take place across a much bigger bargaining unit, like every store, or even an entire city or state, it would make those votes almost impossible for unions to win.

So, there, we had a choice and, while the appeal is heard, the election result gets stayed anyway and the company has two or three years to keep crushing you. Essentially, we had a clear choice. We could go to slaughter in the Bush Labour Board and fuck up the precedent for all chain store workers, or we could preserve the victory that we had won.

That’s what we did. We pulled the election petition once it became clear that it was a dead end and that preserved the victory or precedent that you could have at a chain store or fast-food chain stores and anything where there are individual stores, you could have an election. That was really good and really important in a couple of ways.

After that, the experiment was resolved. We were not going to mess with NLRB elections anymore. We were going to win on co-worker to co-worker solidarity, direct action, and other strategic leverage we could find and not get jammed up there.

This is probably only a decision that a union like the IWW would have made, and at least have still kept up the unionisation campaign. Without official recognition, there would be no way of setting up a union shop, which is the typical way unions work in the US, at least in the approximately 50% of states like New York which do not have so-called “right to work” laws.

So in these states, once union recognition is achieved, all workers in the shop must be members of the union and pay dues, and these will mostly be collected by the employer through dues checkoff and then paid to the union. Most unions in the US require this, in order to guarantee they can earn back the money they invested in backing an organising campaign.

But the IWW was a small, radical union, which historically often opposed official recognition, and even measures like signing contracts with employers. This is because of how signing contracts can tie unions to management in some ways. We explore these issues in some detail in our podcast episodes 99-100, about the wave of strikes in the US during the Vietnam war.

So, while it would make it difficult for the IWW to set up a stable, long-lasting basis in the industry, this legal precedent directly laid the groundwork for the successful recognition fights of today.

 The cool thing about how history works and how, in labour, we’re always building on a fabric of folks who have come before us… for me, it was the bookstore workers. The Borders’ stuff I got involved with and the IWW had reached out back to me in part because they had had bookstore organising. Around the turn of the century, there was a significant bookstore worker organising drive and that ended up impacting us at Starbucks.

Fast forward on this precedent to the recent present, the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) Workers United campaign begins at Starbucks. Of course, those of us who have ever worn the green apron can’t help but be really stirred and inspired when baristas start organising. The baristas are organising at Starbucks Workers United and they are going to file for a single-store election in Buffalo. Like clockwork, Starbucks, of course, goes to defeat their right to have the election but the nice thing was that our precedent was there. The actual question of whether a single-store election could take place at Starbucks had been litigated and won. The workers today were able to prevail and maintain that right.

A nice cherry on top is that, back in the day, we had fundraised to purchase the trial transcript. We had all the details and then, of course, all the legal arguments – ours and theirs, so when Starbucks Workers United campaigned today and asked for our stuff that we had developed, we were able to happily share it with them, of course. Not only did they win those elections, but they have also been able to leverage those election wins across the country. That’s the story of my store on the election part and, literally, that’s it. Starbucks’ workers organise in the IWW from there for a decade and a half run of strong unionism only to return to the NLRB around an unfair labour practice charge of litigation.

That’s all we’ve got time for this week. Learn more about what types of direct action the union took, and what they won in the rest of this miniseries, as well as how the union ended up, and lessons for today. You can listen to that now by joining us on Patreon, which is how our work is funded. There, you can also access loads of other great exclusive content, including an exclusive bonus episode with more information from Daniel about his work and activism. It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

Otherwise, the remaining parts will be out for everyone else in the next couple of weeks.

If joining us on Patreon isn’t an option for you at the moment, please don’t worry about it but please do tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

We’ve got books by Daniel and others available in our online store, including an account of organising at Starbucks, and a really useful book called Labour Law for the Rank-And-Filer, along with other organising guides. Check them out on the link in the show notes, and as a listener of this podcast can get 10% off them or anything else your first order using the discount code WCHPODCAST. Daniel also has a new book out now with Haymarket, called Unions of Our Own, so do get hold of that, and he is currently organising with the Solidarity Union Network. Links to them in the show notes.

Learn more about the IWW in our podcast series, including episodes 6, 9, 16, 19, 52, 73-74, and episode 1 of the Working Class Literature podcast.

To hear more about current organising at Starbucks, pop over to the Haymarket Audio podcast feed where Clarissa Redwine is releasing an oral history called Heat The Ground Up.

As always, we’ve got more information, sources and eventually a transcript on the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes.

Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Thanks for listening, and catch you next time.

 

Part 2

Welcome back to part 2 of our podcast miniseries about the Industrial Workers of the World Starbucks Workers Union, formed in the early 2000s. If you haven’t listened to part 1 yet, I would go back and listen to that first.

Before we get started, we just wanted to remind you that our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes every month, two exclusive podcast series – Fireside Chats and Radical Reads, as well as free and discounted merchandise and other content. So our supporters can listen to part 3 today, as well as an exclusive bonus episode with more information and context. So if you can, please join us, and help us preserve and promote our history of collective struggle. Sign up and listen today at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

With efforts to get official union recognition for the Starbucks Workers Union at the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), dead in the water, the IWW resorted entirely to solidarity unionism – organising on the shop floor, and trying to grow the union.

So, we’re done with the election stuff and we’re just pressing directly for our demands. At the same time, we’re working to build out in New York.

This is Daniel Gross, who we spoke to in part 1, who began working at Starbucks in New York and started organising there in 2003.

Working with union builders today, we grapple with the question and say, ‘What channels are we going to be able to use to reach our co-workers?’ It’s a key question in union building. Experimenting with what works is exactly what we did at the IWW Starbucks Workers Union. We didn’t necessarily have a framework for experimenting explicitly. That was something that was kind of developed by solidarity unions later but, absolutely, we did. We tried all the things.

One thing we tried, which I share as a cautionary tale because it was not the best channel, was just literally showing up at other Starbucks stores. I laugh because this is not something I would do today, just with a bunch of fliers and try to have quick conversations with workers on shift and give them a flier. There are all kinds of things wrong with this. What was absurd comedy was that Starbucks, with all their surveillance, had our number on the flier. It got to the point where managers would set up a desk in the middle of the café, waiting for us to come. We tried that and other things.

I’ll tell you what ended up being the most effective. I don’t know how it is today but, back then, assuming it would be similar, you could pick up shifts at other stores and that ended up being a really, really great way to connect. You then have time because you’re working together and you could talk about all the things, like life, the job and make connections there. That ended up being a really effective channel.

This is also the case in lots of other organising campaigns. And it can often benefit workers if you can use the employers’ own processes, infrastructure, and the ways that workers have to come together and collaborate to do the job to make profits, to organise and forward your own interests as well.

In addition to face-to-face organising, the union also tried reaching out through its own media, the corporate media, and through the social movements of that era – namely, the anticapitalist or anti-globalisation movement, as well as the movements against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, all of which the IWW and its members were embedded in.

In the campaign, we also generated a lot of media right from the beginning. I think the story broke in the New York Daily News. Someone was saying to me, ‘They marginalised the Starbucks Workers Union. There’s no reporting on it.’ I said, ‘No, you can’t hang that hat on the corporate media.’ Actually, there was very copious coverage in The New York Times, Good Morning America, NPR, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the local TV. You could say that sometimes they bought the company line and that was frustrating but there was a lot of media generated.

This was before social media but we did have a website, so folks could see something on the local news or read something in the paper, find our website and contact us through that. I guess that was WWW 1.0 and a way of getting in touch, so some folks got in touch that way. The other thing that happened as well is… There are movements like precarity, global justice and anti-war. In that milieu, there were publications like Indymedia that some listeners of a certain age may have heard of.

In the 2000s, Indymedia was a huge phenomenon within social movements. At the time its approach was pretty revolutionary. Its slogan was “Don’t hate the media, be the media”. And it called on participants in social movements, fed up with misrepresentation by the mainstream media, to report on our movements ourselves, through what became a global network of open publishing news websites.

There were other radical worker-run media projects as well.

There was retailworker.com. We would put out stuff through there and that would inspire some movement folks who also took it upon themselves to get hired as well at Starbucks. Those were, I think, the channels that started working in New York, basically. Again, it started in that one store but then we started to build out in New York and over the next couple of years – I forget exactly the timeline – we first started growing in New York and meeting as New York City baristas. We’re not just meeting as my shop on Madison Avenue but building out training, demands and actions across the stores and we started to get some early victories. I think it was in 2006…

I know Chicago was the first city outside of New York where workers went public. Chicago went and then, after that, it was wildfire. This is not in any kind of order but there was Maryland, Omaha… and eventually, they all came online. Twin Cities was very, very strong, Grand Rapids, New Jersey and then into Canada. That was the flow of it with the early victories, early organising, pushing within the movement media and corporate media and then being able to get in touch with folks there.

Other places workers organised included Fort Worth, Texas, Kansas City, Missouri, the Bay Area in California, Québec city in Canada, and elsewhere.

In addition, more unions and groups of workers also got involved with the organising effort.

Many, many groups supported the campaign, like the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Wisconsin grad workers, the CIW farmworkers in Florida and anarcho-syndicalist unions in Latin America and Europe. It’s really fair to say that it was the IWW folks who were definitely the vast majority of support and very motivated Wobblies were on hand to help out and spread the word in their cities. That was a growth channel as well with the IWW branches and their very active members. That was the growth pattern of how it went from that one store I was at into a national issue and, through coalitions, it became international work.

In the typical style of the IWW, or Wobblies, its members would focus on trying to win improvements by taking direct action on the job.

We were very action-oriented so there were a lot of short work stoppages to do delegations to management.

At some stores, there were quickie strikes to try to hit demand or draw down the ability for the company to sell on a given day. There were tons of pickets and marches. One nice little one we’d like to do would be to ask allies to come, order stuff and tip well but then pay in pennies and belaboureach penny as you count it out on the counter.

Often, the union would target Howard Schultz, the boss, himself.

We did home demonstrations at the CEO or Chairman’s house because sometimes, he was Chairman, sometimes, he was the CEO, or sometimes, he was both. We bird-dogged them too, which is activist jargon for going wherever the target is. We would hit up Howard Schultz at his appearances and he’d inevitably behave very cowardly and try to escape the scene. We would attend shareholder meetings.

There was so much shop-floor stuff. These are maybe not the flashiest things but a culture of solidarity and standing up for each other. ‘They haven’t trained us in that particular solvent. We’re not supposed to be on our knees scrubbing that drain in that way without the right gloves. I’ve got your back if you want to refuse this.’ It’s things like that.

Many of these on-the-job actions were around individual cases. While employers’ procedures, and often union contracts, try to individualise problems and channel them into official channels where workers are atomised, like disciplinary or grievance procedures, the IWW or solidarity unionism approach is to try to collectivise and organise around these issues. Especially because these so-called individual problems are rarely actually individual, and often are the result of systemic issues. I talk about some of my experiences organising like this at my work in our Fireside Chat podcast episode 105, available exclusively for our supporters on Patreon.

 Doing direct action and grievance handling was a really key part of our work.

If you look at the direct action against individual grievances that we fought through in the IWW Starbucks Workers Union, a huge number were women of colour and single mums who often were messed around with on their shift, disrespected, denied any opportunities and wrongfully disciplined. A huge percentage were our co-workers of colour, particularly a lot of women of colour. That was definitely a thread in the work experience that was part of and animating our struggle.

An older worker, Sherry Brown, who had been part of the Black Panthers’ free breakfast programme in Baltimore, was later a barista in DC and an irate customer threatened his life. Basically, he calmly attempted to de-escalate the situation and stood up for his life. They put him under investigation and, ultimately, they fired him. It was really rough because he was then put into an eviction situation because his neighbourhood was gentrifying rapidly in DC. That’s an example where we hit the company with pickets in Washington, DC and hit them with pickets more broadly. We probably did legal stuff but I don’t exactly recall in Sherry Brown’s case any media stuff.

That’s one example of hundreds of so many struggles like that. There were many, many cases of racial aggression and cases of discrimination against women workers. Another one that comes to mind was a co-worker in New York who was denied the shifts that he needed or some type of advancement to a different role. The company had told him that he was ‘too ghetto’. Of course, you might imagine that he didn’t take too kindly to that. We would have it out with the company.

We would do delegations, pickets, media and legal stuff and we resolved hundreds of discrimination issues and retaliation issues. This happened, I think, in response to some anti-union discrimination against Sarah Bender, who was a very active IWW Starbucks Workers Union organiser at her store and nationally. I think we did it elsewhere but I believe the first was with her case, where we developed a Union Buster of the Month award. Actually, we made a certificate and I think we framed it. We’d get a huge community delegation always led by baristas and we’d choreograph what we wanted to say. We’d hit the store and go right up to the district manager to deliver the gift and keep pressing. There are just so many.

Another case the union took up was around workers’ religious freedom.

 One involved Suley Ayala, a very active IWW Starbucks Workers Union barista and Indigenous Ecuadorian co-worker from the Bronx. Suley was a practising Wiccan and she would wear a pentacle necklace during her shift. The company went on this huge warpath by writing Suley up, threatening her with termination and harassing her all about this pentacle. The SWU’s direction action and grievance community picked this up together as baristas and started pushing the company on that by doing actions. I think we filed an EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) discrimination case and did internet stuff. It was all coming together but the straw that kind of broke the camel’s back was that the union baristas at Suley’s store had a plan and if the company was going to kick Suley off the shifts for wearing the necklace, the idea was that the next time it happened, another union barista would put on the necklace and so on. Like clockwork, they kicked Suley out of the shift and the very first barista took the necklace and started working with the necklace on. It’s such a classic Wobbly story. Suley was kicked out but, if memory serves, that was it and the company’s will was broken. I’m sure the legal stuff played a part, the media played a part and the internet played a part but the final checkmate to get Suley fully reinstated, with the right to express her religious faith in that way, was that little direct action. I remember that was definitely a beautiful action.

This very much echoes actions of the historical IWW, which we talk about in our episode 6, particularly its free-speech fights. When IWW organisers were arrested for public speaking, the union would start a campaign for free speech, and would call in Wobblies from around the country to flood the town, and begin speaking as soon the previous speaker was arrested, flooding the jails and courthouses until eventually the authorities would have to cave in and grant the union the right to speak and organise publicly.

Another incident Daniel told me about, I already knew about, because I remembered reading about it in the IWW newspaper. It took place at the Logan Sq, Starbucks in Chicago, in 2006.

The baristas, at this particular store, had to reach up for supplies in a high cabinet and position themselves on a counter. They were constantly risking their health and they were very fed up with not having a simple step ladder to reach these supplies in a high-up cabinet. Of course, for years before they went union, they had asked for a step ladder but the company wouldn’t do it because that would mean spending money and caring about whether a barista gets hurt or not. As union members, they choreographed the plan to try to accomplish this task of getting a step ladder. They actually purchased a step ladder, brought it to work and started using it. The beautiful thing was that they had an IWW sticker on it which they had made and said ‘For a safer, healthier workplace’.

They put the management in a pickle. ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to allow this useful tool from the IWW, which workers wanted, to avoid unsafe climbing on tables? Are you going to let that be there or do you just take it away? Even more so, you have shown your reckless disregard for workers’ health and safety.’ They were in a bit of a pickle and they were scrambling around right away.

What did the company do? They went out and bought the ladder within hours and brought it in. The workers won their ladder. Of course, the initial plan was to say, ‘Let’s go and return the ladder that we had bought,’ but it became a historical relic and so the Chicago IWW baristas held on to it. We ran that playbook, at least, at one other store and I think it was for a fan. There may have been others but I remember that there was, at least, one more play on that exact playbook to get a fan. It’s just a wonderful genre of direct action by doing the thing you need to do directly and putting pressure on the opponent that way. That was a really nice, memorable, creative action that we were able to prevail on.

This story also stuck with me when I read it, almost 20 years ago, because it’s an example of an action which is both so simple, so effective, and it shows up just how ridiculously petty management can be. And that sort of thing is a great tool for growing the union further – and showing your fellow workers just how little management cares for their supposed “partners”.

We’ll be right back after these messages. If you want to listen to our podcast without ads, join us on Patreon, where you can listen to an additional bonus episode. Support from our listeners on Patreon is the only way we’re able to devote the time and money it takes to make this podcast. Learn more and join us at patreon.com/Working Class History. Link in the show notes.

Facing rapid growth of the union in New York, Starbucks management tried to head it off to an extent by attempting to address some of the root causes of worker unrest – principally, low pay. First, they increased hourly pay by a dollar across-the-board, then they increased it again. By 2006, New York baristas were making $9.63 per hour after six months of employment – an increase of nearly 25% in 2 ½ years. And eventually they increased pay for workers in other states as well.

The company claimed this was not related to the union activity, but as the Nation magazine argued, that claim was simply not “credible”. Wages in the US over that time period generally only increased around 10%, so such an unusually large increase was clearly a response to the union organising.

As we discussed earlier about the initial work, the campaign ended up spreading like wildfire and folks stepped up to do IWW Starbucks Workers Unionism in different parts of the country and into Canada. We would have the issues we would fight locally, regionally in our districts and nationally to push for those overall national demands. Definitely, the wage increase piece was key and we won wage increases across the board, starting in New York but then, ultimately, nationally. The IWW Starbucks Workers Union achieved, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of wage victories in our pockets as baristas when we would crunch the numbers and do the math.

A major benefit with pay increases is that they are long-term, because future pay increases are based on historic rates. So even the pay Starbucks workers get today is still significantly higher than it would have otherwise been without this organising in the 2000s.

In stores where the union was active, workers were also able to get better local arrangements, staffing levels and working hours.

For that decade and a half, in many cases, we were able to have much more secure hours than we had had and better staffing than we’d had.

For Daniel, one of the most poignant victories of the union was their campaign to put Martin Luther King Jr.’s federal holiday on a par with other federal holidays.

 Starbucks made a big show of so-called ‘embracing diversity’. We talked previously about how that was a lie but Dr King’s second-class holiday status was really a stark illustration belying Starbucks’ commitment. For the other federal holidays, Starbucks would pay a time-and-a-half holiday premium and officially recognise it. Dr King’s Day, no. We set out to do this fight to win time and a half and to get the recognition for one of labour’s great martyrs.

While Dr King is best known as a civil rights martyr, he was assassinated while he was supporting a strike by sanitation workers, which we discuss more in our episodes 99-100.

We fought it out in stores when the company would do different marketing-oriented events in cities. We would bust those up when senior executives would come into town. We used independent media, corporate media, the internet and coalition building and ground it out year after year. For three years we fought it out and, ultimately, we prevailed.

Obviously, it’s significant with over 100,000 workers. For time and a half, that’s real resources going from the company’s coffers, that we earned, into our pockets. Beyond the important material benefits, which are obvious, being able to say that we were able to contribute this to one of labour’s great martyrs. That was a victory to be really proud of. We struggled a lot and this piece had a major legal component.

In addition to direct action and public campaigning, the IWW also took legal action against Starbucks and their frequent violations of labour law.

There were many large trials against Starbucks with hundreds of thousands of corporate documents that we got hold of. Through that, we were able to win respect nationally for the right to wear IWW union pins, use bulletin boards for union communications and discuss wages and working conditions. We beat them and overturned some of the firings that they had accomplished.

For example, in 2006, after a complaint from the union to the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB), Starbucks had to rehire two workers in New York who’d been fired for union activity. And two years later, Starbucks was forced to rehire Erik Forman, another IWW barista working at Starbucks in the Mall of America in Minnesota.

In addition, the union took on the company for their unhealthy products, and on safety violations which put customers as well as staff at risk.

 We walloped them on the poor nutrition of their products, sickening local communities and baristas with all the sugar and the saturated fat that they weren’t disclosing at the time. We fought them on that and they were hit very hard. We were heavy hitters and landed very, very strong blows to achieve that. That was a national piece.

While Starbucks did end up taking action following union campaigns, they would never admit that they were a response to union action.

 Starbucks never acknowledged any union victory whatsoever. We could slam them on the rats and insects, like we did in New York, because we were sick of working with rats and insects. We did a big campaign because they wouldn’t do anything about it. We took photos and videos of them. We did a press conference with an inflatable rat which went viral in the New York local media. Within hours, the management was literally on their hands and knees scrubbing. They called contractors in to do the work and make the structural repairs that were needed. They bought in exterminators. They still denied that it was our victory.

The cool thing is that, as baristas, you see through that. It was the same with Dr King’s Day. We fight them relentlessly for three years and they have to constantly deny this in the press and justify why they’re not paying for Dr King’s day. Finally, they cave in and said, ‘We just felt like doing it this year.’ It’s a very, very good point about solidarity unionism. It’s really key to be aware that the company is not going to acknowledge your victories.

It is therefore incumbent on workers and the union itself, to relentlessly try to publicise your achievements to your colleagues. I know this is something that I put a lot of effort into with my personal organising, making sure that our union kept a full list of all of the gains we won, and consistently promoted this to our co-workers. Otherwise management will happily take credit and chalk up any improvements to their own benevolence.

 That’s all we’ve got time for this week. Learn more in part 3, and you can listen to that now by joining us on Patreon, which is how our work is funded. There, you can also access loads of other great exclusive content, including an exclusive bonus episode with more information from Daniel about his work and activism. It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

Otherwise, part 3 will be out for everyone else in the next couple of weeks.

If joining us on Patreon isn’t an option for you at the moment, please don’t worry about it but please do tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

We’ve got books by Daniel and others available in our online store, including an account of organising at Starbucks, and a really useful book called Labour Law for the Rank-And-Filer, along with other organising guides. Check them out on the link in the show notes, and as a listener of this podcast can get 10% off them or anything else your first order using the discount code WCHPODCAST. Daniel also has a new book out now with Haymarket, called Unions of Our Own, and he is currently organising with the Solidarity Union Network. Links in the show notes.

Learn more about the IWW in our podcast series, including episodes 6, 9, 16, 19, 52, 73-74, and episode 1 of the Working Class Literature podcast.

As always, we’ve got more information, sources and eventually a transcript on the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes.

Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Thanks for listening, and catch you next time.

Part 3

Welcome back to part 3 of our podcast miniseries about the Industrial Workers of the World Starbucks Workers Union, formed in the early 2000s. If you haven’t listened to parts 1 or 2 yet, I would go back and listen to them first.

Before we get started, we just wanted to remind you that our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes every month, two exclusive podcast series – Fireside Chats and Radical Reads, as well as free and discounted merchandise and other content. So our supporters can listen to an exclusive bonus episode with more information and context. So if you can, please join us, and help us preserve and promote our history of collective struggle. Sign up and listen today at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

In addition to organising in coffee shops in the US, the IWW Starbucks Workers Union also teamed up with coffee growers to confront Starbucks’ exploitation of workers in the global South.

It would be really remiss also, if I may, not to mention the international linkages that we had because it was a very international vision that we had. They were all amazing but one that was truly remarkable, in some ways, was our partnership with Ethiopian coffee farmers.

This is Daniel Gross, who had worked at Starbucks since 2003.

The coffee farmers in Ethiopia were growing beans and Starbucks was roasting and selling them, of course, at a huge markup. Something remarkable happened in that the coffee farmer collectives wanted to benefit from the use of their ancestral coffee-growing region names. They had an initiative to capture their own value from their own ancient ancestral lands. Starbucks decided they were going to go and block that effort and said, ‘You can’t do that.’ They were literally denying these coffee farmers value from their own lands. The farmers were leading a campaign and we were able to link up with them on the barista side and that was not really a common thing.

There had been consumer anti-sweatshop work but this was folks in Starbucks’ so-called ‘value chain’, either directly or indirectly, who were working for Starbucks across the globe and across the supply chain, making common cause. We were able to find out and discover exactly what Starbucks was paying for the beans. They had obfuscated that and we were showing that the coffee farmers were only getting 2.2% of what the beans would retail for.

Ultimately, it culminated in a barista delegation to the Ethiopian coffee-growing lands with the organised coffee farmers there. We generated media around that which really exposed a lot of Starbucks’ lies. The big one was when they said, ‘We built this bridge for the Ethiopian coffee farmers.’ Starbucks probably spent millions marketing and advertising some bridge. We found it and brought the press. It was a 10-foot slab of concrete. The coffee farmers said, ‘We didn’t even need this thing. We don’t even use it.’ It was a complete fraud and, in fact, the farmers were crystal clear about it. We made a video and, actually, I think there’s a piece of this that got into the final video. They said, ‘We don’t want your programmes. We don’t want you saying, “We built this thing for coffee farmers.” We want a fair price for the fruit of our labour.’ It was a beautiful coalition and, ultimately, the coffee farmers prevailed through their leadership. OXFAM played a good, supportive role for the coffee farmers as well. Starbucks had to back down and remove its blockage of this effort of the Ethiopian coffee farmers and sign a licensing deal with them to use their ancestral homelands in branding and marketing. That was incredible.

Outside the US, the example of the IWW Starbucks Workers Union inspired organising in several other countries.

The Chilean baristas started organising a couple of years after us. We were the first baristas to stand up with them. We did a global day of action with our global folks and the IWW, like-minded unions in Europe and Latin America rose up with the Chilean workers. They would ultimately prevail in their demands and through a strike that they did and continue to win gains as Starbucks’ baristas. They are some of the international pieces as well and that was an important part of the Starbucks Workers Union’s vision.

In 2005, Starbucks workers at a store in Auckland, Aotearoa (New Zealand) walked out in protest against low pay. After the company planned to bring managers in to scab on the strike, workers at 10 other locations walked out in solidarity as well.

And in 2011, around 200 Starbucks workers in Chile, out of the total workforce of 670, walked out on strike demanding a pay increase in line with inflation. Management managed to keep their approximately 30 stores in the country open, running them with scabs and managers. But a couple of weeks later, the strike ended, and the company agreed to implement a 10% pay increase, which they claimed was nothing to do with the union or the strike. But before this point they hadn’t given any pay rises in eight years, so (as with the increased pay for US workers) this seems a little too much of a coincidence to be believable.

Back in the US, because of the unorthodox approach of the IWW to organising at Starbucks, they never got exact numbers of how many members or activists they had.

 Obviously, there are different moments, as your question is hitting at, of peaks and valleys at that time. We also had different membership approaches. You could be a red-card-holding IWW member of Starbucks Workers Union. There were long stretches where you could also become a member of the campaign without becoming a dues-paying member. Of course, there were many people who would participate in meetings and actions who probably never signed any kind of document. They were just in the solidarity culture and in the organisation through their participation. I think some people have tried to tally the numbers but no one is ever going to be able to fully tally the numbers because of the different ways to get involved.

At any given time, there was approximately between 300-400 baristas who formed the active core of the union and those baristas would be moving somewhere in the low 1,000 to 2,000 range of others who were participating in meetings and actions. Of course, there was a large group that would have signed petitions and that type of thing which I won’t include in these numbers. We never were approaching a 100,000 plus worker total constituency but we had a very solid, influential core that was operating over a long stretch of time.

The membership of the union to an extent reflected the diversity of the Starbucks workforce, but pre-existing IWW members like Daniel were disproportionately white, and so to an extent this ended up reflected in the union.

I think back to the co-workers who were super-active and it was just an incredible diversity of folks, like Latino folks. One of our great New York leaders was an Indigenous Ecuadorean. There were Black folks and Afro-Caribbean folks. I think it’s definitely fair to say that probably white folks were over-represented in the group, I guess, but I would never want anyone to erase the incredible leadership of baristas of colour and queer women baristas. Obviously, they’re not mutually exclusive categories in the union.

As is occurring today as well, one key feature of the organising campaign at Starbucks was the vicious unionbusting by the company.

Starbucks built a giant, anti-union operation which was quite staggering in size. It all started within a day or two and Howard Schultz, the Chairman of the company, fired the opening shot. In those days, Howard would be a senior executive who would leave a voicemail which would be transcribed and posted in all the stores. Within a day or two, every store in the country had a ‘voicemail’ posted on a bulletin board from Howard Schultz opposing the union. He said he was disappointed and disturbed at these ‘disgruntled New York baristas’. I definitely remember the word ‘disgruntled’ and ‘New York’ in there. They tried to limit those New Yorkers. You know how they are [laughter].

Of course, this was all work-shopped by their PR company. Remember, always disgruntled. That was the opening shot as far as we experienced it and soon after, my store was flooded with senior managers and Schultz himself came. That was the start and from there, it just amped up.

The Starbucks anti-union campaign had three major players. One was the Starbucks executives from the top town. The second was their union-busting law firm which is called Akin Gump. As a footnote, the leading Akin Gump union-busters, who we went up against for this whole period, have recently been hired on to the law firm currently doing Starbucks’ union busting. There’s an unvirtuous circle there for you. The third player was the Edelman PR firm and it’s important we get their name in there because they’re really a nefarious player. It’s important to understand these PR firms. I think we talk more about the union-busting lawyers but the PR firms do a lot of the strategic, tactical stuff. It’s not just media. They do a lot of the influence campaigning of trying to marginal baristas, demoralise baristas and baristas.

Those are the three forces. It was all out and it was everything from puffing up the supposedly good parts of working at Starbucks. It was saying that unions are obsolete. It was packing stores with managers to either woo or intimidate you, depending on what they thought would be more effective in the moment.

A common tool was an unlawful, but tried and tested one: just sacking organisers.

The firings were definitely the most blunt and brutal and, sadly, it was an effective tool for them. Baristas would emerge as highly-respected co-workers into the union and be motivating and helping other co-workers to participate and co-lead in the campaign. Many of those folks were just simply fired. There’s no ethical limit to it.

In one of the many trials we won against the company, I think we got 100,000 documents and one of the documents was from a senior manager or could have even been the CEO. I can’t quite recall. It was a very senior executive instructing an underling to spy on one of our conference calls about our Justice From Bean to Cup campaign which was the coffee farmer barista and we also had a student component to it. It was just right there in black and white.

Many of their documents openly showed how brutal and widespread the scope of the union busting was. They spent so much on it. One obvious thing is that these lawyers killed so many forests with their legal documents. You can only imagine how many hours they billed Starbucks for in these trials, legal documents and advice but also manager or executive time.

Starbucks developed a whole national, potentially international, training that was called ‘Creating the Environment’. That was the name of Starbucks’ national anti-union management training that they created to try to rebuff the IWW. Think about all the hours they had to pay all these people to develop, carry out and follow up on these trainings.

It was a very ruthless, A+ campaign. I give them credit. I’ve gone up now against many companies, my own workplaces, but also accompanying workers building in theirs in many industries. They’re up there. They’re at the top. There are others that are as good as them but there are many employers are far less effective at union busting. That was what we were going up against.

It’s a credit to the robustness of solidarity unionism, the courage of my co-workers and the community that we were able to build together that we were able to stay on the offensive, hit hard and push on our issues on wages, staffing, more secure hours, anti-discrimination and to make the gains we were able to make.

One of the individual victims of this unionbusting, was Daniel himself. We go into the full story of what happened to him in the bonus episode, available for our Patreon supporters, link in the show notes.

I was not able to go back and continue my job, unfortunately, but we did win many reinstatements

Now these reinstatements are one rare aspect of labour law which is actually stronger in the US than in the UK, from the perspective of protecting workers. As in the UK, it’s pretty much impossible to get your job back, even if courts establish you were fired unlawfully. But one thing it’s important to realise is that even when workers do manage to win these cases, and reinstatement, often the process takes so long, that any organising effort can have long since been extinguished.

 Years had passed because there was the trial, the first appeal and then back into the circuit court. I know Joe Agins Jnr was a really active New York barista and I think he won his job back ten years later. That’s just to give you a reference.

Ultimately, in this long war of attrition, while the union landed many blows, the company wound up the overall victor. And the IWW Starbucks Workers Union fizzled out. But many of the improvements they won, remain to this day, and some of their victories helped pave the way for a new wave of worker organising in the 2020s, with the background of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

We had union power at Starbucks for 15 years.

We were able to achieve so much and build this beautiful community and win these gains but we weren’t able to fully realise our vision, our strategy or aspiration. I mean, 15 years is a good run but we wanted to go further than that. Ultimately, we didn’t have a model that was really robust enough to overcome that long of a stretch with the firings of so many leaders. That was a key part. We were working at a time when there were Starbucks Workers Unions and some other shining lights in that moment of labour but they were very few and far between. The macro factors were not good in that era, so I think we probably took things as far as we could go in that macro era.

Despite the spark of some radical social movements in the early 2000s, in general it was still part of the long period of defeat for the working class in the US (and elsewhere) since the 1980s and the era of Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher. And the IWW wasn’t able to keep going in those conditions.

There was no collapse or anything like that. The sustainability that had worked for that decade and a half just didn’t hold longer than that, so we weren’t able to go all the way. Some of the really heartening things are what exist now that didn’t exist then. Solidarity unionism, although it has many antecedents, lineage and history, is a new path in many ways or it’s maybe new again.

The Starbucks Workers Union was the first really big successful attempt at this kind of unionism, literally, in decades. We didn’t have the frameworks, tools, community and infrastructure that solidarity unionists today do have.

For example, where I’m organising now at Solidarity Union Network, we have a tool where workers in their workplaces or industries literally design, discuss and analyse their complete union model and scrutinise the sustainability of each part. They test the things that seem to need a little bit of experimentation and do that diligently in a community of solidarity union builders. I know the IWW has also advanced in its infrastructure and training over time. Those are really good things and there has been some good macro developments as well.

We’ve seen a working-class in motion in the last, say, ten years than we have seen in many, many decades or at least 50 years and some would even go back to the ‘30s. There is some stuff to really be optimistic about in some of the things we validated in the Starbucks Workers Union but couldn’t get beyond that decade-and-a-half hurdle that are calling out to be used and developed in this particular moment. It’s not just because of this but especially, we could have helped block off NLRBs. Even if you’re not a born solidarity unionist like I was, you’re kind of forced now to look beyond NLRB representation elections.

We’ll be right back after these messages. If you want to listen to our podcast without ads, join us on Patreon, where you can also listen to an exclusive bonus episode with more information. Support from our listeners on Patreon is the only way we’re able to devote the time and money it takes to make this podcast. Learn more and join us at patreon.com/Working Class History. Link in the show notes.

Looking back, I asked Daniel if he had any thoughts about if there was anything the union could have done better.

 To put a theme to what we could have done differently… it’s strange because we were so committed to solidarity unionism but, inadvertently, we were not intentionally and kind of unknowingly, we had let seep in some traditional union tactics, thinking and strategy. I’ll start with a straightforward one because I know this is important stuff for union builders today and I want to be really concrete. I’ll start as concretely as I can.

It might hard for some people to realise but with traditional unionism, you often leave a lot of power on the table because you don’t want to actually show the opponent that you need to sign the deal and that you’re going to go all out with the power that you have. One way you can see that is with many fast-food or retail campaigns across many different unions. This is not to single any one out at all because they’re different unions in different industries. You’ll see that, for example, there is not usually an effort to bring in supply-chain workers into a cohesive union with the retail side.

At Starbucks Workers Union, we rejected that and we had really important initiatives to try to build in the roasting plants. I’m not giving anything away here. Everyone knows the roasting plants at Starbucks are choke points. Everyone knows that distribution hubs at Walmart are choke points. This is not giving anything away. At that time, especially, I think Starbucks had maybe two roasting plants for the whole country and I think all of Europe was supplied by a plant in the Netherlands. They were real choke points. I don’t want to under-appreciate the work we did because we did a lot. We connected with roasting plant workers who had issues with the company. We generally tried to engage that part but what I would want to do now is say that this is not just a priority or important. This is a must. We actually need to do this. This is essential. I would really want to do that. It wouldn’t be easy because there are many, many obstacles to accomplishing that. The company knows it’s a choke point, obviously. As much as we did, I’d want to do a lot more just to have a much more existential power. That was a key way. Another way, and this might be a little more subtle because I wanted to get to the roasting plant part first, is that we inadvertently took from traditional unionism this idea of getting organised… at least in the best of traditional unionism, you’re still supposed to get organised. You then go public and fight this fight to get to the victory. It’s kind of an all-out fight in a way. Maybe you’re leaving power on the table but you go public and… Boom! That’s it.

Obviously, in traditional unionism, it’s all about getting to a contract. For us, there wasn’t the contract but we still did that thing where you organise at your store, you’re part of the citywide campaign, you’re part of the national campaign through coalitions and you’re part of the global campaign but you also do this going public thing at your store where you then do an all-out, knock-out, drag-out fight with Starbucks at your store.

What happens there is you’re using a lot of energy in that knock-out, drag-out fight. Instead, what I would want to do now, looking back, is we had this beautiful community where we were, just by being in a community, enjoying a lot of value from that but then also, there were so many victories around discrimination and countless issues of how the stores were operating. We could win at the store level, we could win at the district level, we could win at the regional level and we won. On the other hand, there was this national or corporate-wide stuff that we were able to win as well.

What I would want to do is still have the store organisation be the cell or the base, definitely, but be more thoughtful and more experimental. How do we really make this a sustainable piece of value that we create together through our solidarity? There was so much there but we didn’t lean into it enough because we spent so much time on these knock-out, drag-out fights and all the firings that came with it and all the energy that that takes. I would have definitely wanted to break more from traditional unionism. It’s not about getting to this exact point in time where the company accepts X, Y or Z. It’s more about creating value together through the struggle of our community.

For a pretty ragtag bunch of young radicals and anarchists, and disgruntled baristas of all ages, the Starbucks Workers Union managed to have an effect well beyond its numbers.

One of the remarkable things about the IWW Starbucks Workers Union was how it went on to have a lasting impact in the labour movement. There are probably a few big ones that it might be worth sharing here briefly. Firstly, in that era, many millions of workers in large swathes of economy were considered unorganisable, especially in fast-food and retail which was a major case in point. We rejected that any workers were unorganisable and held that we actually could organise. We broke new ground in that not only we were the first union at the contemporary Starbucks Corporation, once it became a corporation, but also the first union in fast-food, in the United States, in recent memory. This is not to take away from those that have come before but just to say, in that moment, what we were coming into. That has had a good effect over time in that now there are few people who would say, ‘Retail fast-food is unorganisable,’ because there has been so much work in that.

In terms of fast food organising which came before, you can learn about the McDonald’s Workers Resistance group which was founded in Scotland in the late 1990s, in episode 5 of our Working Class Literature podcast.

As well as in fast food, other groups of workers were considered impossible to organise as well.

Digital journalists were called unorganisable. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Fight for $15 is one obvious example. SEIU was one of the unions that were following closely what the IWW baristas were doing and eight years after we launched, they launched their fast-food campaign. It was a very different campaign but that campaign, with its very large media footprint, shifted the discourse even further than we had shifted it around the importance of this work and society; the importance of union organising in that space. Not as well-known as the SEIU Fight for $15 but Jimmy John’s campaign from the IWW came directly out of the Starbucks’ campaign. It was a very impressive campaign in many ways and broke new ground. They didn’t get as far as they wanted but showed that this could expand beyond Starbucks. The next IWW campaign, in this and other lineages because many seeds go into any union fight, is the IWW Burgerville Workers Union. For folks who are interested in union certification and contract unionism, that was the first fast-food chain in the US… through very durable, tight organising and a powerful strike the Burgerville folks did with deep integration into the community. They’ve built a very beautiful, longstanding union.

Burgerville workers first unionised with the IWW back in 2016. Now, they still represent the 100 Burgerville workers across five locations in the Pacific North-West.

Since 2023, workers at least four branches of Peet’s coffee have also unionised with the IWW.

The last one I’ll talk about is the giant upsurge of immigration food factory workers in New York City at the factory level which was a direct offshoot of the Starbucks organising. We did a lot of work together. A lead organiser in that food-factory campaign was quoted in the press at the time saying, ‘Wow! The ghost stirs. The red cards are stirring again.’

They were speaking to the inspiration that my courageous co-workers were able to accomplish.

You fast-forward to today, all the time, you’re hearing that a group of workers that was supposedly unorganisable has announced they’ve organised. That’s been a beautiful thing over the last ten years. I think the second impact is that the IWW Starbucks Workers Union demonstrated the possibility and the potency of union building that was initiated, led and operated by workers with a big independent vision and not conceived of by any union institution. Baristas made this union. We did the organising not in a vacuum. I want to be clear. We had many collaborators and many wonderful solidarity partners but we directed the work and we did the predominant amount of it.

The powers that be understood what a game-changer it was and what we were bringing in. A recording was leaked of a conference call between some influential bosses and their union-busters. It was during the time of trying to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

The Employee Free-Choice Act was a proposed law which would allow for workers to get union recognition much more straightforwardly – simply by getting a majority of workers to sign union membership cards. And it would actually fine employers who broke the law. While a version of the law was approved by both houses of Congress in 2007, in the Senate it got 51 votes in favour, and 48 against, and so it didn’t reach the 60 votes in favour to overcome the Republican filibuster.

It made waves because one of the billionaires on the call, the Home Depot billionaire, said, ‘If we expand union rights, it will be the end of civilization.’ The call was famous for that but on the call also was the top gun of union-busting who was Richard Berman. He is no longer with us anymore and I can’t say I shed a tear but Berman won over the oligarchs on the call and said, ‘There’s something going on. There’s this thing where workers are not waiting around to be organised. They’re organising themselves.’ He coined a term and called this looming spectre, the Starbucks Problem, referring to our campaign. \So, sometimes, the anti-union lawyers have some good insight into what’s going on. There was another one looking at the Jimmy John’s side, solidarity unionism and Starbucks and he said, ‘This kind of unionism addresses issues from a broader, more global perspective. They see solidarity as drawing the boundary of the struggle of the working class as widely as possible.’ That’s pretty on point. I’ve got to hand it to that particular union-busting lawyer.

This will be the last point. It would be remiss of me not to mention that the beautiful impacts or seeds that the Starbucks Workers Union anticipates is trans and gender-queer union organising. We’re now over 20 years later and, today, this is a very major pronounced phenomenon in US unionism. You can’t miss the leadership of trans-workers, trans-workers of colour, gender-queer workers and other marginalised folks.

You see this in the Starbucks Workers Union campaign with leaders in this community and not just leaders from this community but making that connection between their gendered experience and unionism.

One leader from this community in the union was Liberté Lock. Liberté mentored many and she wrote too and the writing endures. One of her pieces, which I’d recommend to anyone and is resonant today as it always was, is called My Body, My Rules: A Case for Rape and Domestic Violence Survivors Becoming Workplace Organisers. It’s things that you hear now much more commonly from workers making this connection of safety for trans people through unionism, like gender-queer folks, women folks, survivors of domestic violence and rape, in the case of this particular article. It’s incredibly powerful to look back and think about those seeds that were able to help bring out in the campaign.

Indeed, this was a really powerful article – I still remember when I first read it, as a piece which went viral on social media nearly 15 years ago. The union also produced a useful introduction to trans rights as workers’ rights for organisers. We will pop a link to them in the show notes.

Today, Daniel and others are trying to apply the lessons learnt from the experiences of Starbucks workers in the 2000s in their organising now, with the Solidarity Union Network.

The really positive thing about some of the learning is that, today, solidarity unionism is so much more advanced. I know the IWW has advanced greatly. The network I’m with, Solidarity Union Network (SUN), is an example of workers organising in their shops and their industries through SUN.

They design their own union models, discuss it, analyse it, piece together all the building blocks and then learn and experiment very intentionally about what works or what doesn’t through this very intentional struggle and process. It’s not just the framework and the tools. There’s a community of solidarity union builders who learn together, build together and really concretely look at the sustainability piece of each part of the union. Are the gains we win sustainable? Are we renewing leadership and membership sustainably? Are our finances sustainable? It’s about being really diligent about that and how much power it takes.

In addition to all the other big-picture developments that have been good, and in the last ten years, of course, we’ve seen tremendous motion in the US working class and some other working classes, but we also have a better toolset, community and framework that is more advanced than we had. With a lot of those advancements, you can look to the Starbucks Workers Union, amongst many others, as valuable experiences that went into developing some of these tools and community frameworks.

That brings us to the end of the main part of this miniseries. We also have a bonus episode with more information from Daniel about his work and activism, which is available for our supporters on Patreon. It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

If you can’t spare the money at the moment, absolutely no worries but please do tell your friends about this podcast, share links to it on social media, and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

We’ve got books by Daniel and others available in our online store, including an account of organising at Starbucks, and a really useful book called Labour Law for the Rank-And-Filer, along with other organising guides. Check them out on the link in the show notes, and as a listener of this podcast can get 10% off them or anything else your first order using the discount code WCHPODCAST. Daniel also has a new book out now with Haymarket, called Unions of Our Own, so look out for that, and he is currently organising with the Solidarity Union Network, learn more about them on the link in the show notes.

Learn more about the IWW in our podcast series, including episodes 6, 9, 16, 19, 52, 73-74, and episode 1 of the Working Class Literature podcast.

As always, we’ve got more information, sources and eventually a transcript on the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes.

Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Thanks for listening, and catch you next time.

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