Starbucks probably didn’t know what it was for when the coffee chain hired Jaz Brisack in late 2020. The 24-year-old former Rhodes Fellow of Oxford University joined the company as a bartender, but with a much bigger plan than making foam. milk for a living: unionizing one of America’s best-known brands.
A year later, Brisack would be instrumental in helping lead a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, to become the first of the company’s nearly 10,000. US stores to vote in favor of joining a union. Since then, nine Starbucks workers in more than four states have been unionized, while more than 100 stores have been formally requested to hold elections.
“We’re very excited to be one of the only partners in the country who really have the right to trade on an equal footing with companies,” MoneyWatch told CBS.
Brisack embodies a new generation of labor activists, one less discouraged by years of union membership than one encouraged by recent successes, including a number of organized media companies as well as an Amazon store in New York that becomes the first installation of the e-commerce giant to approve a union.
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“It changed my life”
From an early age, Brisack became interested in the plight of those struggling with low pay and harsh working conditions. As a teenager, she was encouraged by a speech delivered in 1918 by American socialist and trade unionist Eugene Debs, who told CBS MoneyWatch “it changed my life and inspired me to learn all I could about unions.” .
That life-changing resource led Debs to oppose “a social order in which it is possible for a man who does absolutely nothing useful to accumulate a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work every day of their lives are safe enough for a miserable existence. “
In his own words, at age 16, Brisack worked to wash dishes in a Panera Bread store, working alongside low-paid workers who lived without health insurance and subject to arbitrary practices.
Originally from Texas, Brisack also lived in Tennessee before winning a full scholarship to the University of Mississippi, where he participated in a failed United Auto Workers campaign to unionize a Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, and met him at the time. UAW organizer Richard Bensinger.
“I didn’t really know that union organization was something people did,” Brisack said.
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Knowing that car workers have died due to poor safety protocols, Brisack said the experience “taught me that this is literally a struggle for our lives. And with Omicron and COVID, it’s still a fight for our lives. ”
Brisack, the first Rhodes student in the history of the University of Mississippi, was asked by Bensinger the summer before leaving for Oxford to join him in Buffalo, where he was working to organize a small coffee chain. He left for England knowing that he would return to New York City and passed at full speed through Rhodes in a year instead of the usual two.
Brisack returned and applied for a bartender job at Starbucks in late 2020, then spent eight months working and waiting for the right time.
“I wanted to work in the industry I was organizing, and at least in Buffalo, which was largely the coffee retail industry,” he said. “I didn’t think about Starbucks in particular,” added Brisack, who only knew he wanted to organize from the ground up, working alongside those he wanted to unionize.
Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment.
New generation
Bensinger, 71, began calling Brisack and her co-organizers “Generation Union,” a recognition that a 20-year-old army is the driving force behind the recent rise in labor stocks.
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Still, “You don’t have to be under 30 to have those opinions,” he said. “Richard and Bernie [Sanders] and some of my favorite grandparents are helping us. “
“I’m a worker in my shop and I work mostly on weekends,” said Brisack, who went out with colleagues in early January to demand better protections against COVID as the Omicron variant went through its shop.
The march came weeks after Brisack and his co-workers voted 19 to 8 to unionize, becoming the first store to join Starbucks’ corporate-owned stores in the United States. Now part of Workers United, a unit of the International Service Employees Union, the Brisack store has already held several negotiation sessions with the law firm that handles negotiations on behalf of Starbucks.
“This movement is only growing and getting stronger,” Brisack said. “Starbucks is a very brand-focused company, and an anti-union campaign is incompatible with that.”
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