‘It’s important to remember that a different world is possible.’
A conversation with Jaz Brisack, author of ‘Get on the Job and Organize’
Is there a new labor movement in America?
Jaz Brisack poses that question at the end of their new book, Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World.1 Brisack is a union organizer who played a leading role in some of the most high-profile unionization campaigns of recent years, including Starbucks and Tesla. They’re also a cofounder of the Inside Organizer School, a collective that trains workers to organize—and, to my mind, sounds a bit like a modern-day version of the Highlander Folk School (which readers may recall from last month’s conversation with Elaine Weiss).2
Whether or not there already is a new labor movement in America—and record-low union density suggests we have some distance yet to go—after reading Get on the Job and Organize and speaking with Brisack, I have no doubt that if a new labor movement does take shape, they will have helped make it happen.3
The conversation below has been condensed and edited significantly for clarity and accuracy. To listen to our full 50-minute conversation, head here, or search for “Reframe Your Inbox” wherever you get your podcasts.
ADAM: There’s a sentence you write toward the start of the book that I’ve never seen before: “At the age of seven, I became obsessed with John Kerry.” Tell me more.
JAZ: Well, I grew up in kind of a weird environment in the South. My mom was a fairly conservative southern Democrat, and my dad had immigrated from India. I grew up in Houston, Texas, surrounded by a conservative environment. In some ways, in Texas, being a Democrat, even a very liberal Democrat in the pejorative Phil Oaks “Love me, I’m a liberal” way, was an act of rebellion against the George Bush regime.4
I thought at seven years old that John Kerry was going to save the planet from George Bush. I was seven. I didn’t have a great understanding of the limitations of the Democratic Party yet.
I think I still have my John Kerry t-shirt. A lot of us were on board.
I learned a lot from that environment. In some ways, I miss the kind of “big tent” organizing in the South. There’s not a lot of folks who are organizing around progressive values, so you end up being in coalition with a very wide range of people. And, of course, in a place like Texas or Mississippi, the right wing thinks that communism means everything from Hillary Clinton to Karl Marx, so you end up being red-baited regardless of where on that spectrum you are.
So you might as well choose Marx.
Exactly. You ain’t done nothing if you ain’t been called a red.5
It sounded like the labor movement became what religion was for you growing up. Is that a fair way to put it?
I think so. Maybe a little bit more at 18 [years old] than now. I’ve seen the labor movement at its best and sometimes close to its worst, like with Tesla. But I think the idea of “faith in something bigger than yourself” easily transferred for me from religion into the idea of solidarity and organizing people around the struggle for greater freedom.
You have to trust and believe, or you choose to believe, that this can be successful over the long run, even if you don’t live to see it come to life.
There’s that Angela Davis quote: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world, and you have to do it all the time.” I’m not sure I always believe it all of the time, but that’s what I’m trying to work toward.
Can you give an overview of Starbucks Workers United and how you got involved?
I got involved with union organizing in Mississippi. I learned that unions still existed, and it was something that you could do, working on the Nissan campaign.6 I met my organizing mentor, Richard Bensinger, who was simultaneously helping workers organize what was then the only coffee shop union in the U.S., in Ithaca, at a company called Gimme! Coffee.
Out of the Gimme! Coffee campaign, Workers United in upstate New York committed to organizing the rest of the coffee shop industry based on the idea that you couldn’t build enough power to change these jobs and win healthcare and living wages for baristas without actually building union density in the industry, because it’s so predicated on low wages and high turnover.
I ended up going to upstate New York to work on the Spot Coffee campaign, which was a coffee shop chain in Buffalo and Rochester. We won that union campaign. And then Starbucks workers started reaching out about, “Hey, if Spot could do it, we could do it.” I was working with a Starbucks worker named Benny at the university location in Buffalo. They started trying to build an organizing committee [and] having organizing conversations. Management got wind of what was going on and fired Benny, allegedly for cursing. Of course, that was a flimsy pretext, but we had no way of proving that the company knew what Benny was doing.
The pandemic happened in the middle of that and slammed the brakes on our plans to boycott Starbucks. I decided to get a job at the company with the goal of helping build relationships, understand the workplace, and hopefully find enough people that we could actually build an organizing committee—before Starbucks found out what we were doing—and prevent more workers from getting fired like Benny had been.
A term that you define in the book is “salting.” I think there is a sense that if you get a job somewhere with the goal of organizing that workplace, there’s something shady or nefarious about that. But there’s someone who you quote in the book who describes it as really “heroic” work. Can you explain what salting is?
Salting, I think, is one of the best tactics that we have to overcome what the boss will try to do when workers organize. Every day, workers are fired in retaliation for organizing, often before they’ve had a chance to really build an organizing committee [and] get a union campaign off the ground.
Labor law in the U.S. incentivizes companies to bust the union early. If there’s a majority of workers [already] involved, then there’s potentially the risk that a company would get the union ordered in. But if they fire somebody immediately, then they don’t have that risk, and often they can claim that they had no idea what workers were doing to organize.
Salting is not that different from what any worker who wants to organize should be doing. But a salt often has a bit more training [and] contact with the union than an average worker, so it’s the best way to ensure that a campaign can get off the ground quickly, and that you can build a strong enough organizing committee, before the company finds out what’s going on and starts firing people.
I was working with the union before becoming a salt [at Starbucks], but that’s a really rare situation. Most salts are volunteers who are doing this because they believe in the labor movement—and they also need jobs. Why not take a job at a company where you can make a difference and help coworkers start organizing, versus taking another job where maybe you’ll be able to organize, but there’s no plan or strategy going in.
To the idea that it’s a shady thing to do, the reason that we’re secretive about [salting] isn’t because we don’t want coworkers to know. I told coworkers that I had worked with the union and was still working with the union and that I wanted to organize. The reason that we have to be secretive about it is the same reason that any worker can’t talk too openly about wanting to organize: because companies will go after or fire people who are trying to form a union.
When it comes to organizing a workplace, what does that actually mean?
On the most fundamental level, organizing is about building relationships with people and understanding what’s motivating people, what issues they want to take action on, and what having a union would mean in their life. At its core, a union is just an organization of workers in a workplace who, by forming a union, gain the right to bargain with the company on an equal footing.
[Former organizing director of the Amalgamated Transit Union] Chris Townsend calls the workplace a “dictatorship.” I don’t think that’s a hyperbolic statement. Without a union, the boss has total say over whether people have jobs, what those jobs are like, what the conditions are. If there’s a dispute or somebody’s written up, then the management gets to act as the judge and jury in their own case. With a union, that starts to change. Workers can change the balance of power so that suddenly there’s checks and balances on what the boss can do and how they are treating workers and disciplining workers.
The most fundamental part of this is winning the right to organize. Regardless of whether you win the [union] election, companies need to understand that it’s in their own interest to actually work with workers and stop fighting the union effort—versus spending years, like Starbucks has done, trying to prevent workers from organizing more stores or winning a good contract.
There’s no one more invested in making Starbucks a better place to work, store by store, than the people who work there. It’s remarkable how differently the corporate management interprets that.
A lot of companies are like this, but Starbucks is almost an extreme case of companies—and CEOs as individuals—taking unionization extremely personally.
[Former Starbucks CEO Howard] Schultz had written in one of his books about taking over Starbucks in the 80s, when they were a little coffee shop chain in Seattle. They had a union at that time, and Schultz made it his personal mission to decertify the union because he saw it as a referendum on his own leadership abilities. If people trusted him, they wouldn’t want to unionize.
Our messaging from the very beginning [of the Starbucks campaign] came from people like Lexi Rizzo, a shift supervisor, [who] said, “We fight for what we love.” We wanted to show how positive our campaign was and how we were actually aligned with what Starbucks claimed to be. One of their core mission and value statements was, “We challenge the status quo.”
We were like, “Not only are we doing this, we also are underscoring all of these other value statements that Starbucks claims to have.” They say they’re a different kind of company. They call workers “partners.” And what better way to have a true partnership than through unionizing?
You talk a lot about “corporate psychology” in the book. You mentioned Howard Schultz taking personally the idea of Starbucks workers forming a union. There’s a sense [among corporate executives] of, “We deserve your gratitude and appreciation for how benevolent we are, and if we run our company well, you won’t have to punish us by unionizing.”
It’s clear that Starbucks did not fight your organizing efforts because they were going to lose money. They spent way more money trying to union bust than they would have lost by immediately recognizing your right to organize and reaching an agreement on higher wages or something—steps they later made to try to stave off the union. So it’s not about money.
Can you talk about your diagnosis, I guess, of the corporate psychology and thinking behind why they are so adamantly opposed to even the idea of workers organizing?
There’s layers and somewhat different motivations, company to company. I think Jeff Bezos is probably less personally affronted by Amazon workers wanting to organize and more determined to crush the union effort because he thinks it’s an economic and a flexibility question, versus someone like Howard Schultz being personally invested in union busting on a deep, individual level.
But companies are really interested in maintaining control. I think most companies also have either a patronizing attitude or a disrespect toward workers. Howard flew to Buffalo to tell us how great and how generous he was toward workers and how wonderful the benefits he was giving workers were, and then descended into strange Holocaust analogies about blanket sharing.7
I think it’s fundamentally about maintaining power and maintaining control. Also, Howard really wanted to say, “We gave you these things out of the goodness of our hearts.” The narrative of, “We’re so benevolent and you should be grateful to us,” was incredibly powerful for Howard and Starbucks as a motivation. They wanted the fame that came with, “We’re doing this different kind of capitalism.”8
The idea of workers actually having power to negotiate for these things meant suddenly they’re not these benevolent people.
One of the struggles of organizing that comes through in the book is making the case to your colleagues that you deserve what a union can provide for you—that you shouldn’t just be grateful to have a job.
I think the main part of the case that’s the hardest to make is [that] it’s worth rocking the boat and risking corporate retaliation to form a union. Unions are at a record high of popularity. I think most people are sympathetic, or vaguely sympathetic, to the idea of having a union. At the core of workplace democracy, people typically are like, “Yeah, that sounds good.”
The resistance to that was [that] people understood what Starbucks had done before. People like Cassie, one of my closest friends at Starbucks, told me people often don’t stick around at Starbucks once they start talking about unionizing because the company would find a way to get rid of people.
It wouldn’t have actually cost Starbucks that much to recognize our union and sign a contract with us because what we were demanding was really basic. We were demanding things like credit card tipping, seniority pay. Talking to people about what we could do with a union was common sense.
Unlike other companies that had been hurt by the pandemic, Starbucks was able to capitalize. They were actually making more profit. People saw that. We could see that the company was doing well, but workers weren’t doing better. So I think it was a question of overcoming the fear [of retaliation].
On credit card tipping, am I correct in remembering from the book that Starbucks initially rolled that out only to stores that had not unionized?
Yes. They gave credit card tipping and seniority pay and most of the benefits that we had been bargaining for only to the stores that didn’t unionize and then told union stores, “We can’t give this to you because we have to bargain about it with the union. If you unionize, you won’t have access to these [benefits]. But if you decertify your union, then you could be eligible.”
That’s illegal. But labor law in this country is so weak that there’s no real incentive for Starbucks not to break the law and then deal with it later.
Never underestimate the pettiness of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people and organizations in the world.
Exactly. I mean, they’ve written a new playbook for union busting. Every company, from REI to Trader Joe’s to Amazon, has been doing a lot of these same things to try to convince workers that organizing is futile or detrimental.9
Can you give an overview of what that union-busting industry looks like? Companies aren’t doing this on their own.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the union-busting industry looked like private security forces and detectives and Pinkerton agents who would act as spies and report back to management on what the union was doing. Once the National Labor Relations Act became law in the 30s, union busting began shifting away from a billy club situation and toward a psychological battle over convincing workers that they shouldn’t form a union.
Consultants like Charles Hughes ran surveys for workers to give the illusion of worker voice without any actual power. Consultants like [the] Labor Relations Institute and other groups send “union experts” to have captive audience meetings and tell workers that they shouldn’t unionize and how union organizing could hurt them.
Law firms like Morgan Lewis, which represents Tesla and SpaceX and Amazon, and Littler Mendelson, which Starbucks and Nissan and a lot of other companies use, specialize in trying to prevent workers from organizing and then helping companies avoid bargaining. A variety of comms firms, including Edelman, help companies craft messaging and try not to tarnish their reputations.
They’re trying to appeal to workers. After making your life at work incredibly stressful, incredibly intense—dragging people into meetings to tell them about why they shouldn’t unionize, pulling people into one-on-one meetings, stationing tons of management in the store [to watch] people, changing everything about the workplace, enforcing rules that were never enforced before—suddenly they send out these letters right before the election: “We miss how it used to be. Let’s make our workplace a fun place to work again. Vote no to the union.”
Of course, it’s management that’s made the company such an unpleasant environment, but it’s extremely effective because people do want an end to the union busting and stress and anxiety.
The psychological warfare and gaslighting—two critical components of any union-busting campaign—are next level.
Starbucks took it extremely far. They would retaliate against workers who were organizing by doing things like scheduling them for closing shifts and then opening shifts, which disrupts people’s sleep schedules [and] means that people are having to clock out and then rush back to work in the morning. That messes with people’s mental health. And Starbucks was—intentionally, I think—retaliating against people who had known mental health issues, and often drove workers into [a] mental health crisis.
This was the company that made such a big reputational and PR splash about taking care of workers and providing health care and all of the things that would make a consumer feel good about shopping at Starbucks.
Starbucks provided virtual therapy sessions through a company that Howard Schultz owned a large stake in. These therapists would often be like, “This job is really bad for your mental health. You should quit.”
We had to tell people, “This job is currently bad for your mental health because of the union busting, but please don’t quit. That’s what they want you to do.”
A hundred days into the second Trump regime is a very interesting time for a book about worker power to find its way into the world. I’m curious what you’ve seen from the labor movement [and] the left over the first few months.
I can’t say I was surprised by the results of the election. I think Trumpism is the most extreme form of all of the issues within our society. I also think Trumpism is successful right now because there’s been no real articulation of a unifying message around class.
The Democratic Party seems incapable of actually embracing a Bernie Sanders-style message, instead of marginalizing the left wing of the party that’s interested in talking about why workers are disenfranchised and what society could be doing differently. I think the power structures that exist are more comfortable allowing Trump to take power than actually allowing someone like Bernie to take power.
The labor movement is more important than ever in terms of helping people understand what their own self-interest is, and that right-wing authoritarian nationalism is not actually going to help workers or deliver us from corporate power. It’s going to entrench corporate power and lead us into fascism.
It’s interesting. I started the book tour in Mississippi, and a lot of my Mississippi comrades’ response has been, “We’ve been living Project 2025. This is not really anything that new.” Organizing in Mississippi is illegal within the state sector. Unions have mostly been unwilling to put resources into organizing in the private sector. The UAW never made Nissan pay a consequence for the terror campaign they put Nissan workers through, and there haven’t been other high-profile campaigns like that in Mississippi since.
The message of the book is the same whether we were talking about Biden or Kamala Harris [or] Trump. Tesla got away with firing 40 workers the day after workers went public with the union campaign under the Biden administration—supposedly the most pro-labor president and general counsel of the NLRB ever. That may be true—they may have been—but that shows how screwed we are because it’s not enough. It’s not going to change things. Union density continued to drop under Biden.
Certainly, solidarity and organizing is going to continue to be difficult, but I think it’s also the most important thing we can do. And, anecdotally, I’ve been seeing a big surge in people wanting to get involved with organizing or with salting because of everything that’s happening. I think there’s a growing understanding that labor is the best way to try to reverse course.
There are a lot of hard and tragic aspects of trying to organize a workplace, and [of] the state of worker power in America. But there are also moving and inspiring aspects to this work as well. Can you talk a bit about the positive, energizing parts of organizing? Because I feel like that’s an important message—not to take away from how hard it is and how uncertain the outcomes are, but to say that there is something very beautiful, very empowering about solidarity.
It was incredible to experience this firsthand at Starbucks. Our stores and our coworkers had never been closer than we were during the union campaign. Incredible people step up and become part of a union effort—people like Michelle Eisen, who are fearless from the beginning and willing to take on the fight. Also, people transform over the course of a union campaign. People who are initially hesitant suddenly become leaders and help organize strikes or organize coworkers to take action.
For me, it was unbelievably gratifying to see the campaign spread, especially in the South and in parts of the country that are often considered less likely hotbeds of unionization. Starbucks workers in places like Florida and Tennessee and Oklahoma were organizing because of how bad the political climate was, how bad a lot of the harassment that they were facing from customers was.
Starbucks has long promoted itself as one of the safest places for queer and trans workers. And they did not have workers’ backs. We weren’t allowed to refuse service to customers, most of the time. You had to put up with harassment. People often didn’t feel safe at work. Starbucks had started to reverse course on some of their Pride initiatives. They started taking down Pride flags and stopped covering gender-affirming care for workers. They sometimes fired trans workers right before their planned gender-affirming care procedures.
Starbucks workers responded by organizing what we think—there’s not records on this—was the largest strike over queer rights in the workplace in U.S. labor history. It was amazing to see people organizing a union, but also understanding the ways that you can’t achieve liberation on other fronts without also achieving class liberation. Workers in Oklahoma came up with the slogan, “Trans rights are labor rights, and trans liberation is class liberation.”
That was incredibly impactful and inspiring to see the way that workers were able to use the union to connect all of these issues and also to start changing the stereotypes of who is a union member [and] what unions look like.
We talked a bit about choosing hope. I’m wondering if there are developments or issues that you are choosing to be hopeful about, given the precarious state of affairs right now.
It’s incredibly important that we remember that a different world is possible. Even when it seems like the forces that want to crush human rights and perpetuate genocide and take away every piece of freedom and autonomy that we have seem to be triumphing, things can change very quickly.
Sometimes people understand how bad the situation is and that’s what prompts them to take action. I think we have to keep working on union organizing, solidarity with Palestine, organizing on a variety of different fronts, and we can change the narrative and also start building a movement that’s powerful enough to actually overturn the current society.
I write about the ways that losing [union] campaigns—losing an election, not getting to a contract—are still helping to lay the groundwork for future efforts and helping people understand what’s possible.
It feels a little bit like we better figure out how to do a lot of this really quickly before it’s too late. But I think we have to keep the faith that it’s possible, and that we can build a different world out of the ashes of this one, as the Wobblies would say.10
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Get-on-the-Job-and-Organize/Jaz-Brisack/9781668080795
https://www.insideorganizerschool.com
https://genius.com/Phil-ochs-love-me-im-a-liberal-lyrics
https://genius.com/Faith-petric-aint-done-nothing-if-you-aint-been-called-a-red-live-1984-lyrics
https://www.epi.org/blog/what-the-nissan-union-fight-in-mississippi-is-really-about
https://www.vice.com/en/article/video-howard-schultz-compares-selflessness-of-starbucks-to-that-of-holocaust-prisoners
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/mar/21/starbucks-face-conscious-capitalism
https://www.cascadepbs.org/news/2025/05/rei-co-op-members-reject-company-board-picks-after-union-campaign
https://archive.iww.org/history/library/AJMiller/OldTimeWobblies