After years and years of declining union density in America, the beginning of the 2020s felt like a sea change. Upstart labor campaigns notched huge wins at Amazon, public support for unions reached new heights, and new organizing election petitions with the National Labor Relations Board soared.

Halfway through the decade though, the surge in labor organizing has not managed to slow the decline in Americans represented by a union. Why?

Pulling from experiences at the heart of union campaigns at Nissan, Tesla, and Starbucks, labor organizer Jaz Brisack details how the deck of American labor law is stacked in the favor of employers. But that isn’t the only thing holding the labor movement back — Brisack’s experiences also show how major labor unions can derail campaigns with onerous bureaucracy that restricts worker leadership. 

The bulk of Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World, available here, focuses on Brisack’s time as co-founder of Starbucks Workers United and the campaign to organize cafes born in Buffalo, New York.

Brisack started at Starbucks as a “salt” — someone who gets a job in a workplace with the intent of unionizing it — and continues to train people eager to pursue that path at the Inside Organizer School. But the effort to unionize Starbucks was a salt and pepper campaign, as organic leaders soon emerged among Brisack’s colleagues. 

Inequality.org sat down with Brisack earlier this month to discuss their book and the lessons the labor movement can draw from worker-led campaigns.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Chris Mills Rodrigo: One theme across the campaigns you discuss in this book is the importance of winning the “right to organize” before anything else. Could you explain why that’s a prerequisite to workplace issues? How can bosses take advantage of more narrow issue campaigns?

Jaz Brisack: The right to organize almost sounds like a platitude sometimes, but it’s also the very core of what we’re fighting for. I think it sounds like a platitude because we often have unions and politicians giving lip service to the right to organize without actually committing to the fight of what it means to win the right to organize. Throughout labor history a huge piece of every fight for greater labor rights was the right to have democracy in the workplace, to have an independent organization where workers can advocate for themselves. That’s still what’s at the heart of the right to organize on every campaign, whether it’s Nissan, Starbucks or Tesla. 

Companies have unilateral control if workers don’t have a union and companies want to maintain that control, so unions basically have to make it more difficult, more painful, more costly for a company to continue to insist on crushing the union rather than deal with sharing power. This also gets into a psychological question of how the management is thinking about this. Some of them are thinking about it as a business equation, but some of them — like Howard Schultz at Starbucks — are thinking about it as a referendum on their own leadership in a very personal way. 

Jaz Brisack

Companies will do just about anything rather than give up unilateral control. We’ve gotten the question of “what would you like to improve with a union?” on every campaign and our answer was always we want a voice on the job and we’ll get into this more at the bargaining table. Sometimes you have to talk with co-workers about things you want to change or tell the press about some of the conditions in the workplace. But I think companies will try to find out what workers would like to have changed, whether that’s a bad manager, whether that’s pay issues, whatever it is, and, often, will make any kinds of improvements that they can, short of actually giving workers an independent democratic body — that is, a union.

CMR: What do you think is behind that fear of giving up unilateral control?

JB: It’s really about the desire to control workers. Without a union, management has the final say on everything, and workers have basically no rights to their jobs or to how they want to work. Bosses can fire people for just about any reason, except for a protected reason. But even then, that’s a very hard thing to prove, and management can easily claim it’s for something else. This desire to have full power over workers and over the company is extremely motivating to corporations.

I think there’s secondary fears about whether the union will allow for flexibility, will the company be as profitable, etc. But often companies will spend more to crush the union than they would spend to actually recognize and negotiate a first contract. And so I think this question of control is the piece that’s really at the heart of the matter.

CMR: Does the current state of the NLRB — which was already rife with delays and heavily tilted to employers before the second Trump term — change the calculus around the right to organize or how you would approach a new union campaign?

JB: I think barely, if at all. Maybe it’s made me a little bit more open to card check, but I think that’s almost a semantics question. We’ve asked all of these companies, from Nissan to Starbucks to Ben and Jerry’s, etc., to sign the Fair Election Principles. The reason for doing so is that having an election is kind of psychologically considered even more of a gold standard, including by workers. The NLRB has historically been much better at administering elections than it has been at enforcing any other part of labor law. So having an election with neutrality, or with equal time for a union campaign, is much preferable to having a card check scenario where the company is fighting. 

But I think the Starbucks campaign shows the limitations of even a “favorable” NLRB. Starbucks broke the law hundreds of times in each city, thousands of times across the country. I was fired in 2022; workers across the country are still awaiting reinstatement, awaiting back pay. Starbucks basically had no incentive not to break the law, and in fact, had every incentive to break the law and deal with the consequences later. Even at the best of times, the NLRB isn’t really sufficient to protect the right to organize. The laws are very weak. There’s no penalties, there’s only remedies. 

I think winning the right to organize is not something that we’re going to get through the law. It’s something that we have to get through the court of public opinion, through consumer pressure. Exactly what the “hammer” is depends on the company and on their business model, etc. At Starbucks, we were pretty convinced it was a boycott and I think that’s just more true than ever, as the NLRB is either undermined or actively hostile.

CMR: That’s a perfect segue, because I wanted to talk about hammers next and the importance of having them to compel companies to the bargaining table. What about American labor unions makes them so reticent to even threaten the use of hammers?

JB: Million dollar question, if we could fix this one we would have a very different state of union density in the US. I think partly it’s that it’s very hard to actually commit to [hammers]. It’s easy to call for a boycott on social media, and sometimes you get lucky with those like the solidarity with Palestine boycott of Starbucks, which I think exceeded our wildest expectations. But to really do a consumer boycott of a company you actually need to have people outside of stores, picket captains, resources. I think the Teamsters at Chipotle could have easily brought Chipotle down with a real consumer campaign. The UAW at Nissan — when Richard [Bensinger] and his crew were testing the impact of student and church group pickets outside of Nissan dealerships the results were very encouraging, people were not buying cars once they knew what was going on. That [strategy] could have potentially won us the right to organize at Nissan. 

It’s partly a resource question and then partly a strategy question with Starbucks. Starbucks has 10,000 stores, you would have needed a presence at a huge number of those stores to ensure and force a financial impact.

Workers United is affiliated with SEIU, and there were different schools of thought within Workers United and SEIU about how you should even go about organizing: through NLRB elections and contracts versus a much more kind of legislative reform, wage based Fight for 15 style model. SEIU has tried to jump through hoops to reconcile the Starbucks campaign with their approach at Waffle House or McDonalds where they refuse to file for elections and are instead doing days of action and pressure campaigns. I think there’s also a fear of the very grassroots nature of these union campaigns where there’s been struggles over how much control workers would actually have of the campaigns versus decision makers within the union.

CMR: Unionized Starbucks workers went on strike starting November 13th, Red Cup Day, and more have joined since. How did we get to this point? 

JB: This is really an extension of one of the Starbucks campaign strategy camp’s tactics of having national strikes on a consistent basis. The union and the company probably haven’t been that far off on a deal. We knew a while back that they really only had an impasse on economic issues. Everything else was mostly done. I think the real question is: could there be a deal on a contract that would actually win the right to organize at all of the stores versus kind of limiting the union to a minority? And I think that remains to be seen. 

The campaign is still remarkably resilient. A lot of the workers who are on strike now are folks who came into the movement later and who are amazing leaders. It’s really impressive how much people have been able to withstand.

With this strike there’s been sort of a tentative call for a boycott with figures like Zohran [Mamdani] saying don’t go to Starbucks. We should have had that energy in 2022 when Starbucks fired the Memphis Seven. Now there’s been sort of on-again, off-again momentum. Starbucks is not in the public eye the way we were in 2022 and the union’s hesitation around endorsing the Palestine boycott was definitely a cause of some lost momentum. But I think, better late than never, hopefully there is a contract, and then things can always improve from there.

CMR: What was the internal discussion like over calling for a boycott back then?

JB: In retrospect we should have just done it. The core organizing committee, which was still largely a Buffalo group but was expanding to other parts of the country, were the ones writing all the press releases, doing social media, and kind of controlling the public narrative. I think the decision making at that point was a bit muddy, SEIU wasn’t really in the picture yet, it was Workers United leadership and they were very hesitant that it’d be hard to enforce a boycott, that it might not work.

There was also a school of thought that striking was our only form of worker power and that boycotting was sort of a cop-out or not as militant of a strategy as striking over these issues. And then I think there was also a fear that it would hurt the organizing effort at other stores, which I would argue it did anyway, but we didn’t actually have the leverage that a boycott would have given us.

CMR: I was very fascinated with the internal conflict you seem to have had over organizing at Starbucks. As a campaign framing it makes sense to say you want the company to be better, even though in the back of your mind you would prefer there not to be a corporate behemoth dominating local cafes. How do you work through this tension?

JB: I had to wrestle with this a lot. Basically the way I approach it is: we’re unlikely to put Starbucks out of business. A couple of times it actually did seem more likely that Starbucks might go out of business rather than respect the right to organize. But I don’t think there’s any world in which Starbucks actually goes under. Like Walmart’s market share is now being threatened by Amazon, but it’s not like Walmart is going away. Starbucks may lose some of its ubiquity, but it is still too big of a player to fully get rid of.

My personal way of reconciling the positive rhetoric was just focusing on things I really did like about the job. I was an opener, the camaraderie with my coworkers was really great, the kind of people who are attracted to working at Starbucks are really great. I think it’s kind of true with baristas anywhere, but certainly among Starbucks workers there was just an immediate understanding and an immediate jargon that was universally shared and made for very easy, immediate bonding.

And then a lot of customers aren’t great, but there were fun parts of the job. I actually really enjoy coffee. Starbucks, unfortunately, doesn’t really allow you to do that much of the craft part. But we would find ways to learn about coffee and make good coffee by bringing in beans ourselves. So I was able to find ways not to lie when I was talking about loving my job. 

We can’t fight all of the battles all at once. We have to find stepping stones to getting where we want. And the first step has to be really changing union density. One worker asked me very early on, I can’t remember if this is in the book, would Starbucks take us seriously if we said we loved the company instead of, you know, we want to overthrow capitalism. I was like, don’t worry, they will see the word union and they will understand what that means, because that’s what actually is threatening to them.

CMR: In the same vein, as a kind of wrap up question, what would you hope that other unions can learn from the Starbucks campaign, which remains one of the most exciting in recent memory?

JB: I would say it underscores the importance of calling the question on the right to organize very early. We were talking about doing this before we even voted in the first elections, and we decided to wait long enough to have a concrete election victory that we could then point to and say the workers have spoken and they want to union. I wouldn’t wait much longer than that. You don’t gain a lot of momentum over a longer period of time, and we have to get better as a labor movement about really acting as one big union. We had unions that were offering to adopt stores and take on picketing at various locations, and there was never really a willingness to even ask them to put that into practice. 

The other main piece is that unions need to be less worried about control and more worried about throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. We are dying as a labor movement. We have existential threats from the government, from corporations, from all of the typical factors, but it all seems even more ramped up these days. So we need to be less worried about whether Tesla workers are organizing jurisdictionally with the right union, or whether Starbucks workers might somehow say the wrong thing at the bargaining table if they’re allowed to bargain at hundreds of stores simultaneously, or whether Chipotle workers should be allowed to do a national pressure campaign.

Let workers take autonomy in their own campaigns and see what works.