Is “Salting” the Future of Organized Labor?
Founding member of Starbucks Workers United, Jaz Brisack, shares the hard-won lessons they learned taking on a multinational corporation.
Maximillian Alvarez
After getting a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, Jaz Brisack became a founding member of Starbucks Workers United and helped organize the first unionized Starbucks in the U.S. in December of 2021. In their new book, Get on the Job and Organize, Brisack details the hard-won lessons they and their coworkers have learned from building one of the most significant and paradigm-shifting worker organizing campaigns in modern history. In this extended episode of Working People, The Real News Network Editor-in-Chief Maximillian speaks with Brisack about their book, the facts and fictions characterizing today’s “new labor movement,” and why union organizing is essential for saving democracy and the world.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Maximillian Alvarez: Thank you so much for sitting down with me here in the Real News studio in Baltimore.
We’ve been talking about this resurgence of American organized labor, right? We’ve been talking about this new young labor movement, from Starbucks to Chipotle to grad workers to all over the place. I’ve been dying to ask you for the past few years to just tell that story through your eyes, from Buffalo to now. What do you see when you look at the landscape of worker organizing in America today, and where does the Starbucks Workers United campaign fit into that?
Jaz Brisack: We weren’t just trying to unionize Starbucks; we were trying to unionize the entire coffee industry.
A lot of folks in the labor movement are really into lobbying and legislative advocacy and think that sectoral bargaining means creating legislative reforms, or fast food councils, where you can shortcut organizing store-by-store or workplace-by-workplace.
I think there’s no substitute for workplace democracy, where workers are actually organizing their workplaces and sitting across the table from the boss on an equal footing. I think that process transforms the workplace, but I think it also transforms people’s lives.
I do think especially among young workers today, the red-baiting that has characterized the American dominant narratives around unions doesn’t really work anymore, and people have, not just an intersectional view of organizing and the struggle for social justice, but also a deeply felt personal connection to the ways that we’re not going to have queer liberation and trans liberation until we actually have full union rights, full economic justice. Trans workers aren’t marginalized to certain jobs or facing economic discrimination. We’re not going to have racial justice because a bunch of companies endorse Black Lives Matter with half-hearted words.
MA: Where would you place the current union upsurge, the labor movement over the past few years. Is it what people online are saying it is?
JB: Well, I think we’re at a crisis point. I think there’s a huge surge in people wanting to organize and wanting to form unions, and seeing unions as a fundamental force for democracy in their workplace, for building a better life, for transforming society. And so I think that momentum is there and is spreading.
But at the same time, I think the labor movement isn’t fully meeting this moment. Workers need advice.
The Starbucks campaign wouldn’t have worked if it was fully spontaneous. We needed to use salts, which means folks who get jobs with the goal of organizing. We needed folks who’d been through union campaigns before, like I was, drawing on my own experiences. We had Richard Bensinger, who’s an amazing organizer and mentor, and who’d been organizing for 50 years. If we just tried to do it totally spontaneously, it probably wouldn’t have worked.
And so our core demand on all these campaigns, from Nissan to Starbucks to Tesla to Ben & Jerry’s, was, sign the fair election principles, which are a code of corporate conduct that set a higher standard. Labor law in this country is terrible, super weak, no penalties, the process moves so slowly that you know, workers are still waiting on reinstatement years and years later.
MA: Could you talk a bit more about the need that the Inside Organizer School grew out of, and the path that it’s been charting for workers and organizers over the past seven years, and how that’s different from the more traditional kind of models of organizing?
JB: The Inside Organizer School is really based on the idea that organizers are going to be most effective when they’re in the workplace. Labor law is pretty weak on giving union organizers access. If a company wants to campaign against the union, they can require people to go to anti-union meetings, plaster the workplace with “vote no” signs and other propaganda, have people in one-on-one meetings with their managers, who they have relationships with, and often like or trust.
That’s a really unequal playing field, in addition to the fact that the union exists to give workers more democracy, but it doesn’t have control over people’s livelihoods, and so companies know that they hold the cards of who gets fired, who gets promoted, and they will use all of those things to try to crush organizing.
Up against all of those odds, salting gives workers who want to organize the training on how to have an organizing conversation, how to connect with a union ahead of time, so that you’re not then scrambling to find a union who will take you on, which is often an uphill battle, so that you’re not just going in and being like, hey guys, have y’all thought about unionizing?
MA: Hello, fellow kids!
JB: Yeah, exactly. Nine times out of 10, the company finds out about organizing campaigns because someone is really excited about unionizing and goes back into the workplace and is like, guys, look what we’re gonna do. And then often folks get fired before there’s any way to prove that the company knew what they were doing.
So salting means quietly building relationships, quietly getting things in order to be able to launch the campaign with enough worker support, a big enough committee, so that when you go public and the company finds out about it, they can’t crush the momentum.
MA: Another point to just make is that as a salt, you have to earn your keep. Yes, you’re in closer proximity to people, and you can talk to them and build relationships. But part of that is also like doing the work, being taken seriously as a fellow worker, who knows what the hell you’re talking about.
JB: Exactly. You have to be a good coworker.
I worked at Starbucks for eight months before ever saying the word union. And my role wasn’t to be the vanguard of the revolution. It was to find people, like Michelle Eisen, whose family were coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, who had a deep sense of social justice and a deep commitment to unions, and who quickly saw that her legacy at Starbucks could be helping build a union for everybody who would come after her.
MA: You have one chapter with a very eye-catching title called “Corporate Terrorism.” I was wondering if maybe we could start there and you can expand a bit on what you mean by that, because I think it’s a very powerful way to put it.
JB: Terrorism is instilling fear for political reasons. And trying to terrorize people out of taking a stand, or with some kind of agenda, and that’s exactly what corporations are doing. Terrorism is usually a slur directed at people who are resisting oppression by the powers that are in place that are practicing the oppression. I highly recommend Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ When They Call You a Terrorist.
The terrorists aren’t people like Leila Khaled; they’re people who are responsible for the oppression that people are facing. And so I use corporate terrorism very intentionally, because I think it is potentially controversial, and I want people to think about how they define terror and terrorism in their own heads.
MA: What are some other key points that folks will find in this book to help them continue down that path?
JB: It’s not rocket science. We were literally a sleep-deprived band of 20-year-olds crashing on each other’s couches and going to drag bars to sign up our coworkers and then going to open our stores at five in the morning the next morning. If we could take on this multinational corporation, it can be done.
Another takeaway I really want people to get from this is if you have a job, you should have a union. I think there’s often a conception that people are unionizing jobs that they hate, or unionizing jobs in response to really terrible conditions. And I think pushing back on both of those things is really important.
And then I think the other takeaway is you can’t separate out all these threats. The Starbucks campaign was led by folks who were active in all kinds of other struggles, whether they had been protesters for racial justice, whether they were queer workers and trans workers who were seeing the stripping away of their rights every day, especially folks in places like Oklahoma City or Tennessee or Florida who were organizing a union to be able to have collective self defense against these structures.
Our stance with Palestine, we were slammed for doing it. People were like, you’re using your platform of being on this union campaign to express your own politics that don’t relate to union organizing.
MA: Those politics being, you shouldn’t slaughter people.
You end on that note in the book, like, this is not just about workers having more power to negotiate over their wages and working conditions. It is that too. But there’s a vision here and a path through organizing to a better world, a better life, a fuller humanity. I wanted to ask you if you could just expand on that by way of rounding us out.
JB: I get so annoyed with people who are like socialism sounds good, or communism sounds good, but our freedom! We have to be able to protect people’s freedom! Freedom to do what? During the Civil War, it’s states rights to do what? It’s to have slavery.
The same systems that are trying to oppress people in Palestine, or sweep homeless encampments in California, or ICE, obviously, and rounding up people who are not considered worthy of being here or having a social safety net, all of these things are designed to condition us to accept that some people aren’t fully human. The only way that we can actually achieve liberation is if everybody actually is treated as fully human and has the same opportunities.
Maximillian Alvarez is editor-in-chief at the Real News Network and host of the podcast Working People, available at InTheseTimes.com. He is also the author of The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke.
