How unionized Starbucks workers did the impossible
The inside story
Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.
How about those New York Rangers?! Artemi Panarin scored the game-winning goal on a gorgeous little between-the-legs backhand deflection just two minutes into overtime tonight, giving the Blueshirts a 3-0 lead in the Eastern Conference semi-finals.
Though the Russian superstar is not a finalist for the Hart Trophy, he’s my personal MVP tonight for providing just enough dopamine to lower the boil on the volcanic rage I’m feeling at Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the most dangerously impotent politician of the 21st century.
Intrigued? You can read more in the second story of tonght’s newsletter.
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How plucky Starbucks workers tamed the beast
If anybody tries to tell you that they knew all along that Starbucks Workers United would wind up outmaneuvering and outlasting the world’s largest retail coffee corporation, they’re either lying or dangerously optimistic, because even the union’s original and most dedicated organizers admit that they were worried and reeling as the calendar turned to 2024.
“I think every other day I woke up feeling like, how much longer can I possibly go on?” Michelle Eisen, one of the union’s co-founders and most prominent organizers, told me in late April. “How much longer can these — at this point almost 10,000 workers — how do we get up every day and keep fighting when it doesn't look like there's an end in sight?”
Similar sentiments were expressed this spring by a fair number of other unionized Starbucks workers who have helped to unionize 428 Starbucks stores and counting since the summer of 2021, when the first stores started organizing in Buffalo, NY.
After they survived an intense and often cringeworthy union-busting campaign by the company’s top executives — including CEO Howard Schultz, who gave a speech with a confusing Holocaust allegory — and won NLRB elections in two out of three cafes that December, they were off to the races. The campaign began spreading like wildfire while Starbucks became more and more brazen about its union-busting, to the point that it seemed as if Schultz were ready to burn it all down.
It was guerilla warfare of sorts for the young union organizers, most of whom were millennials or members of Gen Z who were often either already on the political left or just increasingly resentful of the profits that the company raked in while offering worsening health insurance, minimal raises, and plunging hours. They’d quietly organize stores, put together smart media plans (often including leaking embarrassing and/ or incriminating video to me), and go public to great fanfare.
There were more than 70 Starbucks stores where workers filed to unionize in March 2022 and over 50 more that April. The union was putting up unreal, unprecedented numbers, at least until the company decided that it was willing to piss off customers and break the law in order to crush the union.
Hundreds of workers were illegally fired, nearly two dozen stores closed, and the NLRB started edging toward upwards of a thousand unfair labor practice charges.
It was national news, and it didn’t reflect well on the company — Schultz, who returned as CEO to lead the assault, went from being largely seen as a clueless but mostly harmless centrist failed presidential candidate to an avatar of corporate greed — but it was effective. Organizing slowed considerably, and eventually, a kind of Cold War broke out, creating a tit-for-tat that seemed as if it would go nowhere fast.
As you can see in the video, which I reported and produced and just released on Thursday at More Perfect Union, things finally began changing in February when Starbucks gave in and asked to sit down and negotiate a master contract agreement. There was a lot that led up to that, obviously, but that’s what the video is about; it’s both a history of the past few years and an instructional video for other unions facing the same challenge.
The first bargaining sessions took place in late April, with more than 100 worker representatives at a few tables with a handful of executives. Both sides described it publicly as productive, while union sources said that the counterproposals were reasonable. They haven’t discussed pay yet, and that will likely be a big sticking point, but the hope is to have an agreement that can be used as the basis for regional contracts.
Meanwhile, the organizing has picked up again; the union announced a record 21 new stores in one day in early February, just before Starbucks reached out to make peace, and now that there seems to be less of a threat, leaders say more leads are coming in. But they’ll have to remain vigilant — the company just announced the closure of a union store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which the company and union will have to negotiate, too.
Letting them get away with it
On Wednesday, Sen. Dick Durbin admitted that he continues to be stonewalled by ultra-right judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo, who refuses to comply with a subpoena issued to him as part of the Senate Judiciary Committee‘s investigation into the Supreme Court’s ugly web of corruption.
Durbin, who chairs the committee, lamented that Leo has “stifled us at every turn,” yet just as it took him six months to actually issue the subpoena, he’s holding out on taking any actual action to compel Leo to testify.
Asked whether he had plans to refer Leo to the Capitol Police for contempt of Congress, he didn’t even bother to bluff. “Not at this moment,” Durbin said, signaling to the Federalist Society co-chair that he was free to continue to disperse his $1.6 billion slush fund to as many federal judges, high court justices, and partisan scam artists as he pleased.
With Americans preoccupied by brain worms, porn stars, and what the college kids are doing, the comments slipped under the radar of every major news outlet, which seem to have largely given up on what is one of the most most consequential stories in years.
It’s going to take a concerted effort to pressure Durbin to do anything at all, but the stakes are too high to give up.
More on this in tomorrow’s weekly news wrap newsletter for premium subscribers.
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Thank you, Jordan. You have real heart, and that includes the pun. Good health and long life.