The US Supreme Court building is seen on April 23, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
On Thursday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in a case involving Starbucks and its union, seeing all justices side with the company against workers. The decision will make it easier for employers to get away with firing workers for unionizing
It just got easier for employers to get away with firing workers for organizing a union.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court sided with Starbucks in a decision against Starbucks Workers United (SBWU), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) affiliate that continues to organize Starbucks locations across the country. The union has organized more than 440 stores representing some ten thousand workers since the campaign began in December 2021.
The case, Starbucks Corporation v. McKinney, concerns the “Memphis Seven,” whom Starbucks fired during their store’s organizing drive in 2022. The workers claim that they were fired in retaliation for their organizing activities, alleging that the policy the company cited as the cause of their termination — the workers reopened the store after closing time, inviting nonemployees, including a television crew, inside — are not usually enforced.
SBWU filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over their termination, arguing that it constituted a violation of the workers’ legally protected right to engage in concerted activity. In response, the board issued a complaint against Starbucks, writing that the reason it fired the Memphis Seven was because they had “joined or assisted the union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.” The NLRB then asked a federal judge in Tennessee for an injunction reinstating the seven; in August 2022, six months after they were fired, the judge issued that order.
Even as Starbucks finally agreed to get serious at the bargaining table with SBWU, stating that it hopes to reach a first contract by the end of the year, the coffee giant did not drop its objections to the injunction, which it appealed to the Supreme Court. But the NLRB’s actions were an attempt to remedy the chilling effect of the company’s actions: if other workers see that Starbucks can fire seven workers for engaging in protected activity and those workers have to wait years for justice to prevail in the legal realm, it will make them think twice about organizing.
“Starbucks has committed more than 400 violations of federal labor law, including firing 59 union leaders and supporters, according to decisions of administrative law judges,” wrote twelve former Starbucks workers who have been disciplined or fired in response to organizing in a friend-of-the-court brief. “More than 60 additional complaints against Starbucks are awaiting decisions.”
An employer’s ability to stall worker organizing by forcing workers to wait as legal matters wend their way through the courts is particularly damaging for SBWU, for whom momentum has been a key tool to spreading the organizing victories. That dynamic is why NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo called the federal judge’s granting of an injunction “a crucial step in ensuring that these workers, and all Starbucks workers, can freely exercise their right to join together to improve their working conditions and form a union.”
The Supreme Court judges disagree. Starbucks’s argument was that federal judges have different standards for granting injunctions to reinstate workers: some courts only require the NLRB to show that there is “reasonable cause” to believe an employer has violated labor law, while others make the board prove that not reinstating workers would cause “irreparable harm,” and that the board will likely prevail in its legal case. The NLRB called the difference semantic, arguing that there is no discrepancy in need of intervention by the Supreme Court.
Eight of the court’s nine judges agreed with Starbucks’s argument, ruling in favor of the stricter standard. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority opinion, “But, the reasonable-cause standard goes far beyond simply fine tuning the traditional criteria . . . it substantively lowers the bar for securing a preliminary injunction.” Justice Thomas noted that the stricter standard is usually applied in cases where other laws allow a judge to issue a preliminary injunction.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a separate opinion that concurred with the overall judgment but stated that it’s easy to show irreparable harm to workers who have been terminated and will have to wait years for reinstatement as a case makes its way through the legal process. Thomas’s opinion, wrote Justice Jackson, ignores Congress’s “clear and comprehensive” directives in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) as to how courts should exercise discretion when it comes to the Board’s authority over labor disputes.
“Unfortunately, today’s decision appears to be another installment in a series of labor cases in which this Court has failed ‘to heed Congress’s intent,’” she wrote. “I am loath to bless this aggrandizement of judicial power where Congress has so plainly limited the discretion of the courts, and where it so clearly intends for the expert agency it has created to make the primary determinations.”
“Working people have so few tools to protect and defend themselves when their employers break the law,” Workers United president Lynne Fox said in a statement. “That makes today’s ruling by the Supreme Court particularly egregious.”
The case is but the first of many in the works from employers seeking to diminish the NLRB’s capacity. Amazon, SpaceX, and Trader Joe’s have all made arguments challenging the constitutionality of the board. These companies are taking advantage of the court’s rightward swing: the court is currently poised to remove power from federal agencies broadly by overturning a legal doctrine known as the Chevron deference, which establishes that judges must defer to federal agencies when interpreting ambiguous laws. Overturning that principle will be a major blow to the government’s regulatory power and as such is a priority for the Right.
Employers seeking to undermine the NLRB are but one prong of that broad attack. They’re chipping away at an agency that has been a thorn in their side in recent years, consistently objecting to union-busting campaigns across the country. With last week’s Supreme Court ruling, they’ve scored a victory in that project.
Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.
The Supreme Court recently heard argument in Starbucks Corp. v. McKinney, a case where employers are trying to make it more difficult for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to obtain preliminary injunctions that undo an employer’s illegal acts while a case is pending. Without a preliminary injunction, an employer can interfere with organizing rights or refuse to bargain, knowing that it will take years before it is required to comply with a final judgment. Everyone agrees that to obtain a preliminary injunction, the NLRB must show that in the absence of an injunction there will likely be irreparable harm. The fight is over what constitutes irreparable harm. This is an instance where we should watch what employers do, and not what they say. Employers often make exceedingly weak arguments to the NLRB, and exhaust their appeals because they understand that the delay imposes harms on workers, and under current law workers are not compensated for those harms.
The Supreme Court has long held that irreparable harm is simply harm for which there is no adequate monetary remedy. Thus, an intangible harm, such as loss of First Amendment freedoms, is considered irreparable. During the oral argument, Starbucks’ lawyer, Lisa Blatt, argued for an extremely narrow definition of irreparable harm. Blatt contended that in the labor law context, irreparable harm only exists where there’s a specific pending event, for instance if workers are going to be prevented from voting in an upcoming election. The lawyer who argued for the government argued for a somewhat broader test, suggesting that the Court should consider whether the firing of a union activist “extinguishes the momentum of the union drive or impairs it in such a serious way that an order from the Board a year or two down the road won’t be able to restart the drive.” While workers are rarely able to restart a union organizing drive that’s been sidelined for two years, even if they were, they would still suffer irreparable harm. If an organizing drive that should have taken six months ends up taking three years, workers will not receive any compensation for the years in which they were effectively deprived of the right to organize, and thus, by definition, the harm is irreparable. The Board is currently considering the argument by NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo that it should overrule its 1970 decision in Ex-Cell-O Corporation, and compensate workers for the lost opportunity when employers illegally refuse to bargain, but so far even Abruzzo has not sought a compensatory remedy for illegal acts that slow down an organizing drive.
During the oral argument, Blatt insisted that the threat of a preliminary injunction is so “coercive” that it forces employers to settle unfair labor practice charges. There’s a different reason why cases often settle when the NLRB seeks a preliminary injunction, and it ties back directly to the irreparable harm argument. An NLRB Regional Director will generally only issue a complaint against an employer when they have a very strong case. So, once a complaint issues, management lawyers should be advising their clients that they are unlikely to prevail. But, in most cases, employers have little to lose and a lot to gain by delaying their inevitable defeat. If workers are fired illegally, there are no punitive or emotional distress damages. And any backpay owed is reduced by any interim earnings the worker earned at another job. For other violations, like a refusal to bargain, the only remedy is a prospective cease and desist order, so employers have a strong incentive to exhaust every appeal in an effort to delay as long as possible.
This incentive to delay explains why employers often raise frivolous arguments. Consider a pending case where Trader Joe’s is asking the NLRB to overturn a decisive union election victory. Trader Joe’s leading argument for overturning the election is that on the first day of the election, as the union’s lawyer walked through the store, he allegedly turned to one of the workers and raised his fist and shouted, “solidarity.” Trader Joe’s further alleges that the worker said, “I’m not part of the union group,” and then the lawyer responded, “Oh, you’re one of those.” While these facts are disputed, even if the allegations are credited, it’s absurd to suggest that the union lawyer’s conduct was intimidating, let alone that it changed the outcome of the election.
It’s been two years since workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York voted to unionize. Amazon predictably responded with a long list of objections, trying to set aside the election. The NLRB’s Regional Director rejected Amazon’s objections, but Amazon still refuses to bargain with the Amazon Labor Union. If a preliminary injunction forced Amazon to bargain while the litigation plays out, Amazon might well decide that its longshot objections aren’t worth the trouble. But, as I have previously explained, without a preliminary injunction, Amazon has nothing to lose by plowing forward with its flimsy claims – even if, as expected, it ultimately loses after exhausting all appeals, it will still have succeeded in postponing bargaining and demoralizing its workers.
Big business is playing a “heads I win, tails you lose” game enabled by right-wing courts. On the one hand, you have Starbucks telling the Court that there is no need to grant preliminary injunctions because workers will recover damages once litigation finally concludes. But, at the same time, SpaceX is arguing that the NLRB can’t award compensatory damages unless it figures out a way to empanel juries. And, the business lobby has opposed the NLRB’s pleas to increase its budget so that it could hire more staff and speed up case processing.
At the Supreme Court, the government’s lawyer was reduced to arguing that there is no need to rein in the NLRB when it comes to seeking preliminary injunctions because this is a tool that the Board hardly ever uses. The right-wing Justices weren’t buying that argument, but if they had it would provide little comfort to workers. The Board’s power to seek preliminary injunctions isn’t worth much if it can only be reserved for a handful of the most egregious cases each year. In 1969, a very different Supreme Court observed that because workers are economically dependent on their employer, they are more likely “to pick up intended implications of the latter that might be more readily dismissed by a more disinterested ear.” So, an employer’s illegal acts may not seem flagrant to a district court judge, but nevertheless they may be more than sufficient to intimidate workers.
Workers have long understood that justice delayed is often justice denied. The ability to seek a preliminary injunction is the only tool the NLRB has to prevent employers from using delay as an anti-union tactic. When Congress gave the NLRB the power to obtain preliminary injunctions, it did so to prevent employers from taking advantage of the Board’s slow-moving administrative processes to accomplish illegal objectives. The Supreme Court should honor that Congressional intent and not allow employers to violate the the law with impunity, secure in the knowledge that time is on their side.
Andrew Strom has been a union lawyer for more than 25 years. He is an Associate General Counsel of Service Employees International Union, Local 32BJ in New York, NY. He is the author of Caught in a Vicious Cycle: A Weak Labor Movement Emboldens the Ruling Class, 16 U.St. Thomas L.J. 19 (2019); Boeing and the NLRB: A Sixty-Four Year-old Time Bomb Explodes, 68 National Lawyers Guild Review 109 (2011); and Rethinking the NLRB’s Approach to Union Recognition Agreements, 15 Berkeley J. Emp. &; Lab. L. 50 (1994), and has written for Dissent and Dollars and Sense. He also taught advanced legal writing at Fordham Law School. He received his J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. The views he expresses on this blog are his personal views, and should not be attributed to SEIU Local 32BJ.
Members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) pickett outside of the Michigan Parts Assembly Plant in Wayne, Michigan amid rumors that US President Joe Biden may stop by during his visit to Michigan to stand on the pickett lines with UAW workers in Detroit, Michigan on September 26, 2023 | Photo by Matthew Hatcher / AFP via Getty Images
Progressive economic ideas have been on the whole an anathema to the U.S. political establishment and violence against labor militancy has always been the norm for almost all of the country’s political history. Nonetheless, the U.S. labor movement has not yet been defeated.
May 1st is International Workers’ Day and was established as such in celebration of the struggle for the introduction of the eight-hour workday and in memory of Chicago’s Haymarket Affair, which took place in 1886. May 1st is celebrated in over 160 countries with large-scale marches and protests as workers across the globe continue to fight for better working conditions, fair wages, and other labor rights. International Workers’ Day, however, is not celebrated in the U.S. and has in fact been practically erased from historical memory. But this shouldn’t be surprising since U.S. capitalism operates on the basis of a brutal economy where maximization of profit takes priority over everything else, including the environment and even human lives.
Indeed, the U.S. has a notorious record when it comes to worker rights. The country has the most violent and bloody history of labor relations in the advanced industrialized world, according to labor historians. Subsequently, unionization has always faced an uphill battle as corporations are allowed to engage in widespread union-busting practices through manipulation or violation of federal labor law. The recent activities of Amazon and Starbucks speak volumes of the anti-union mentality that pervades most U.S. corporations. Accordingly, unionization in the U.S. has been on decline for decades even though the majority of Americans see this development as a bad thing.
The backlash against unionization and worker rights in general in the U.S. also takes place against the backdrop of an insidious ideological framework in which it has been regarded as a self-evident truth that individuals are responsible for their own fate and that government should not interfere with the free market out of concern for social and economic inequalities.
While May Day may have been formally obliterated by the powers that be from U.S. public awareness, the labor movement is still alive and kicking.
Social Darwinism first appeared in U.S. political and social thought in the mid-1860s, as historian Richard Hofstadter showed in his brilliant work Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915, but it would be a gross mistake to think that it ever went away. The conservative counterrevolution launched by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s and refined by Bill Clinton in the early 1990s aimed at bringing back the loathsome idea that the government should not interfere in the “survival of the fittest” by helping the weak and the poor. Progressive economic ideas have been on the whole an anathema to the U.S. political establishment and violence against labor militancy has always been the norm for almost all of the country’s political history.
Long before the movement for an eight-hour workday in the U.S., which can be largely attributed to the influx of European immigrants mainly from Italy and Germany, radicalism had set foot across a number of post-colonial states. Rhode Island, often referred to as the Rogue Island, had one of the most radical economic policies on revolutionary debt, which was wildly popular with farmers and common folks in general, and experimented with the idea of radical democracy. At approximately the same time, Shays’ rebellion in Massachusetts was also about money, debts, poverty, and democracy. Naturally, the elite in both states pulled out all stops to put an end to radicalism, and the pattern of suppressing popular demands has somehow survived in U.S. politics across time.
The pattern of suppressing social and political movements from below continued well into modern times. The Red Scare, climaxed in the late 1910s on account of the Russian revolution and the rise of labor strikes and then renewed with the anti-communist campaign of the 1940s, played a crucial role in the establishment’s fervent dedication to crushing radicalism in the U.S. and putting an end to challenges against capitalism.
In light of this, it is nothing short of a shame that May Day has been all but forgotten in U.S. political culture even though the day traces its origins to the fight of American laborers for a shorter workday.
Last year, after marching on May Day with thousands of other people in the streets of Dublin, one of the questions that was posed to me was how could it be that International Workers’ Day is not celebrated in the U.S. I am still struggling to come up with a convincing explanation, as may be evident from this essay, but Gore Vidal was not off the mark when he said, “we are the United States of Amnesia.”
Nonetheless, the U.S. labor movement has not yet been defeated and is surely not dead. In spite of the bloody suppression and the constant intimidation over many decades, the U.S. labor movement has made its presence felt on numerous historic occasions, from the Battle of Cripple Creek in 1894 and the 1892 Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania to being behind the historic 1963 march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and continues doing so down to this day. Scores of victories for the working class were achieved last year—and all against prevailing odds. Moreover, in 2023, labor strikes in the U.S. jumped to a 23-year high and some of the largest labor disputes in the history of the U.S. were also recorded last year.
So, while May Day may have been formally obliterated by the powers that be from U.S. public awareness, the labor movement is still alive and kicking. Even a small victory is still a victory, though time will tell of the historic significance of each step forward. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that the unionists, socialists, and anarchists that made Chicago in 1886 the center of the national movement for the eight-hour workday had foreseen what the impact of their actions would be in the struggle of the international labor movement for democracy, better wages, safer working conditions, and freedom of speech. All these social rights have been amplified over time, though much remains to be accomplished and the struggle continues.
But this is all the more reason why we must not forget—and indeed celebrate every year with marches and protests—May 1st.
C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).
Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, is seen in Washington, D.C. on September 20, 2022(Photo: Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“These esoteric arguments came about why?” said National Labor Relations Board Chief Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. “Because we dared to issue a complaint against SpaceX after it unlawfully fired eight workers.”
Amid an ongoing nationwide surge in union organizing across numerous industries in the U.S., powerful corporations in recent months have argued the federal watchdog tasked with ensuring fair labor practices is, itself, unconstitutional—but the nation’s top labor lawyer said Tuesday she doesn’t buy the claims of Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and other companies.
The “deep-pocketed, low-road employers want to divert [the National Labor Relations Board’s] sparse resources to defending ourselves in court,” NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo said at a virtual event, “to slow down or prevent us from engaging in concerted action. They’re just trying to stop our enforcement actions.”
Abruzzo spoke at a webinar titled “Preserving the Administrative State: Threats to Administrative Law Enforcement in the Courts,” hosted by the left-leaning think tank Roosevelt Institute.
Watch the event below:
The event was held just over three months after SpaceX, billionaire enterpreneur Elon Musk’s space exploration company, filed a complaint against the NLRB after the board accused it of unlawfully firing eight employees. SpaceX claimed that a “constitutionally required degree of control is lacking” at the agency because its judges and five board members cannot immediately be dismissed by a president.
In moves Abruzzo on Tuesday called “jumping on the bandwagon,” an attorney for Trader Joe’s argued at a hearing weeks later that the “structure and organization” of the NLRB is unconstitutional, and Amazon made a similar claim in February. Starbucks said in its own legal filing that the limitation on removing NLRB judges and members “frustrates the presidential control Article II [of the U.S. Constitution] demands.”
“These esoteric arguments came about why?” said Abruzzo. “Because we dared to issue a complaint against SpaceX after it unlawfully fired eight workers for speaking about their workplace concerns. And then Amazon jumps on the bandwagon, Starbucks jumps on the bandwagon, Trader Joe’s, others get in on the action just because we’re trying to hold them accountable for repeatedly violating workers rights to organize and collectively bargain through representatives of their free choosing.”
All the companies have been accused by the board’s prosecutors of violating labor law—a fact that Abruzzo said the corporations are eager for the public to forget.
A key goal of the legal filings is to “to divert attention away from the fact that they are actually lawbreakers who need to be held accountable in a timely manner,” Abruzzo said at the Roosevelt Institute webinar. “And frankly, that strategy is working. There’s a lot of public reporting about the challenges as opposed to the law-breaking.”
In addition to SpaceX’s alleged illegal firing of workers, the companies have been accused of retaliating against employees, limiting workers’ access to a warehouse, and closing store locations to discourage union activity, among other violations.
NLRB judges have already ruled against Starbucks, Amazon, and Trader Joe’s in several workers’ rights cases.
Two of the companies—SpaceX and Amazon—were founded by the two richest men in the United States, Musk and Jeff Bezos.
“Once billionaires are scared of the power of the NLRB, they bring in the big guns,” Diana Reddy, a labor law professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said at the Roosevelt Institute event.
Abruzzo said courts are likely to reject the companies’ claims, noting the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the organizational structure of the NLRB in 1937.
Workers at 400 Starbucks stores across the country have won union elections. On Feb. 27, after more than two years of union-busting campaigns and stalling on negotiations, the company announced it would begin to bargain in good faith with the Starbucks Workers United union. It also promised to grant raises and benefits to the unionized shops, which it has been illegally denying.
Workers from the Starbucks on Fourth Avenue and 11th St. in Park Slope table outside their store (Amba Guerguerian)
On March 19, Starbucks said it would begin bargaining in late April with workers from the unionized stores nationally, instead of store by store. That day, workers at nine more Starbucks stores in eight states filed to have their union recognized.
The workers’ main demands include a minimum wage of $20 per hour, more consistent scheduling and increased staffing levels.
“This is amazing,” says worker-organizer Melina Carrasquillo, 26. “I had initially thought coming into this that we were going to be stuck for at least a year or two in limbo, like how it has been for the movement prior to us.” She works at a Starbucks in Park Slope that was one of 21 shops that launched their campaigns together in mid-February.
Labor historian Eric Blanc says the Starbucks campaign might be the most significant win for labor since the 1930s, because “nobody [since then] has shown it’s been possible not just to win elections, but to get to a first contract against the biggest corporations in the world in our modern economy.”
Factors that might have changed Starbucks’ calculations include that it has spent at least $240 million on union-busting lawyers that failed to stop organizing. It has faced repeated defeats at the federal National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), damage to its “progressive” brand identity, and a shareholder revolt that sought to place three union-friendly directors on the company’s board.
Brendan Lopez, a worker-organizer who was fired from a Starbucks in Farmingville, Long Island, told The Indypendent that he thinks an international boycott movement against Starbucks after the company tried to punish the union for its pro-Palestine position played a crucial role in forcing the company’s hand.
Whatever the company’s intentions were, “we have all been celebrating,” says Lopez.
They were sending lawyers to go in and then leave immediately. Lawyers would not even show up in a meeting sometimes to bargain, and if they would show up, they would just be on their phones, or not even pay attention to the meeting, and then they would just leave.
The baristas The Indypendent spoke with, however, remain wary of the company’s intentions. It recently entered, along with Amazon and Trader Joe’s, in a legal battle started by Elon Musk’s SpaceX that seeks to declare the NLRB’s power to enforce New Deal-era labor laws that protect workers’ right to form unions unconstitutional.
Regardless, this is a sign that the insurgent labor movement is maintaining momentum, says veteran unionist Eric Dirnbach.
“What is management looking for?” he asks.
They’re looking for signs that the union momentum is dissipated. If the union momentum were dissipating, they would hold out, they would not reach out for a deal. They’re seeing the opposite. They’re seeing this not going away, so they’re making a business decision.
Organizing in the City
Nitehawk workers celebrate outside the cinema with their new UAW union representative just after the victory announcement (Amba Guerguerian)
Since winning its first union election in Buffalo in December 2021, Starbucks Workers United has helped inspire a wave of organizing by younger workers in retail and service industry jobs that were long thought to be impossible to unionize.
Here in New York City, workers at Starbucks, Barboncino pizzeria, Death and Co. bar, Hex & Company boardgame cafe, She Wolf Bakery, Housing Works, Greenlight Bookstore, Barnes & Noble, REI, Trader Joe’s, Film Forum, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Lower Manhattan and Nitehawk Cinema have won union elections or begun the process of organizing a union.
Workers in service and retail jobs make up at least 46.3 million of the roughly 160 million people employed in the United States in 2023, according to data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. These industries, whose share of the workforce grew after deindustrialization hit the U.S. in the 1970s, have some of the country’s lowest unionization rates–between 1.3% and 4.6%.
Downward mobility among millennial and Zoomer workers in the United States has also spurred unionization, as more college-educated workers are finding themselves working in service and retail jobs for years.
“People my age are seeing these jobs that we’ve been raised to think of as lesser and have low value, that we are now working because the economy is not very good, and then we can sort of get stuck in them,” says Esther, 29, a barista at Barnes and Noble.
With high turnover rates and “easily replaceable” jobs, service and retail workers have been considered nearly impossible to organize, but being hailed as “essential workers” who had to endure great risk during the pandemic helped spark a new desire to fight for their rights in the workplace. These occupations, often rife with safety and health hazards and bosses that care more about customer happiness than workers’ wellbeing, are proving to be fertile grounds for unionization.
“We are now seeing that that labor is actually incredibly valuable, that it’s really hard work, that it’s a lot of effort, and that it’s not right–not just societally–but that these companies treat us like we’re just disposable,” says Esther, who graduated from a masters program in 2020 with a degree in media archiving and preservation. Unable to find a job in her field, and having worked previously at Starbucks barista, she got a position in the cafe at the Barnes and Noble bookstore on 82nd Street in Manhattan in mid-2023.
Esther was eager to join the union push. “Pay is a big issue for everyone, not being able to afford to live in the neighborhood where we work is something we all came together and said, ‘This is not right. Our labor is worth more than what we’re being paid,’” she told The Indy.
On March 14, 85% of them voted to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. In June, 88% of workers at the Park Slope Barnes and Nobles and 97% at the company’s flagship store in Union Square voted to join the same union. They are some of seven stores in the country that have unionized since May 2023.
Alex Dinndorf, 26, who was one of the workers who formed a union at the Barboncino pizzeria in Brooklyn last year and now is an organizer with Workers United, says another reason service workers are particularly motivated to unionize is that “the service economy is becoming more consolidated under corporate restaurant groups,” and that that is happening because “all of these restaurants are becoming so expensive to operate.”
While workers at local businesses or small chains have faced union-busting tactics, they generally pale in comparison to the anti-union campaigns at Trader Joe’s, Starbucks and REI which can afford to pay hundreds of dollars per hour to lawyers from top-tier law firms that specialize in “union avoidance.”
At Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the local owner aggressively opposed the Nitehawk Workers Union after it went public.
Workers there started organizing last August. “The workers reached out to the Barboncino Union Twitter,” said Dinndorf. He supported organizing at Nitehawk as a volunteer with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), which formed in 2020 as an organizing tool for workers to fight for better working conditions and form unions at their shops.
Nitehawk, where theatergoers are served food and drinks while they watch movies, “is an absolute factory,” Dinndorf says. “The food runners there wear earpieces to communicate,” and servers carry “trays of drinks weaving up and down stairs, crouching–the conditions are notoriously bad.”
“I had heard stories about Nitehawk and Alamo well before I started organizing anything, and it always had the reputation of a place that was really tough to work at and have no work-life balance” during major film releases, he adds. The Barbie/Oppenheimer double release proved to be “the big catalyzing incident at Nitehawk” that led to the workers’ decision to organize.
On March 17, workers voted 51-41 to join United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2179, with 90% of the staff voting.
“I’m looking forward to hearing from those 41 people that did vote no, so we’ll be able to take those grievances and work them out,” worker-organizer Lydia told The Indypendent. She said the close vote was “pretty understandable, given mistakes that were made by the organizing committee, as well as the union-busting tactics that were used against our shop.” She says that the campaign was the first union experience for “pretty much all” the worker-organizers at Nitehawk.
Nitehawk owner Matthew Viragh, Lydia says, spread misinformation about unions and what might happen at the cinema if a union were to win, as well as rumors about some of the pro-union workers. The UAW filed unfair labor practice charges against Nitehawk for threatening to fire union supporters, cut their benefits, and deny them special privileges, all illegal under the National Labor Relations Act.
Standing outside Nitehawk after the election results were announced, Dinndorf, Lydia, another worker and their new union representative from UAW Local 2179 excitedly hugged and shook hands.
The Local 2179 representative, a veteran labor organizer, said he was happy to welcome more movie theaters into the local. “This will be our third theater in a year,” he said in a strong New York accent as he smoked a cigarette. “There’s Nitehawk, Alamo Theatre and Drafthouse and another one.” He said with a sly smile meaning, ‘It’s a new campaign; we can’t tell you yet.’
“It’s incredible to be a part of this enormous mobilization of organized labor that’s been happening since the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020 with the Amazon Labor Union, as well as Starbucks and Trader Joe’s, and even smaller shops, not just in New York City, but across the entire United States,” said Lydia.
Sticking it to Corporate
Workers from the Starbucks on Fourth Avenue and 11th St. in Park Slope table outside their store (Amba Guerguerian)
At a sidewalk tabling event to collect signatures from customers and community members that support the union campaign at the Starbucks on Fourth Avenue and 11th Street in Park Slope, sometimes a queue formed as people waited to sign on one of the two devices available.
“Sure, I love you guys,” said one elderly regular, when workers asked him to sign.
“It’s so weird that it has to be location by location,” added another regular, about the fact that a union can’t be won for every franchise at once.
“I did plumbing work for a while and obviously there was a union for a good reason, and fuck these corporates,” said a young man who had stopped to sign the petition.
“We’re getting a lot more signatures than I expected today,” said Starbucks worker-organizer Victoria Blair, 24.
“I’ve been running in left-wing, trade-unionist, pro-labor circles since I was 13,” said Blair. She grew up poor in Texas, moving around from home to home, with a brother with special needs, so she had to learn to advocate for them, and through that, got involved in politics at a young age. “I didn’t know at the time that I was queer, but I knew something was different about me–so it was a burning desire to understand why marginalized people are marginalized.” That led her to critical analysis of gender and ability,
which leads into critical analysis of the socio-economic status quo, into Marxist critical analysis.
“I always have been a bit of a firebrand,” added Blair.
She moved to Brooklyn in July in part because of the “ongoing persecution of transgender people in Texas,” she said. She had tried to unionize the Starbucks she was working at in Arlington, Texas, to little avail and thought she would take another shot at it when she transferred to the Park Slope store.
Melina Carrasquillo, who had been working at the Starbucks for around a year and a half, was itching for someone to start a union campaign there but was nervous to be the one to spearhead it, partially because she was hoping to be promoted to a managerial position.
One day last fall, Blair mentioned her plan to Carrasquillo, who begged her to follow through with it, promising she would help. “I realized the union was more important to me than getting a promotion,” said Carrasquillo, who grew up around organized labor because her father is a shop steward at the National Association of Letter Carriers union for postal workers.
“We thought that you show up to any company, and you have to take the rules that are in place, you have to take the injustices and discrimination,” Carasquillo told The Indy. “But we’re coming to a place in our country and generation where we’re realizing that we don’t have to accept this as the status quo.” The union election at her store will take place on March 28.
Brendan Lopez, 23, who was fired from the Farmingville Starbucks last July, was one of the first workers to participate in organizing there.
“I had just started, and someone had written ‘Start union now’ on the whiteboard in the break room,” he recalls. Lopez walked in while an anti-union supervisor was examining the note and yelled at Lopez, saying he would fire whoever was responsible. “My response was, ‘If you’re gonna yell in my face, I’m gonna go be a part of the union then.’” He started organizing with the worker who had written the note.
Despite gridlocked negotiations, Farmingville Starbucks workers continue to hold regular union meetings. Lopez and other workers also traveled around to different Starbucks franchises on Long Island to inform other baristas about the union efforts. After he was terminated, Lopez and his coworkers went to Starbucks’ corporate offices in Manhattan and marched on the boss for firing a key worker-organizer.
Corporate union-busting has standard tactics: firing organizing workers, threatening to demote or fire them for union activity, promoting misinformation campaigns that claim unions will result in lower pay and benefits and lost jobs, mandatory “captive audience” meetings with anti-union propaganda and veiled threats, and taking down or prohibiting pro-union literature in the break room. If a union wins an election, employers often stall or refuse to bargain a first contract and deny the unionized workers the same raises and benefits it gives other workers, as both Starbucks and REI have done. All those tactics are illegal under federal labor law, but still frequent.
At REI Soho, workers have been denied company-wide raises since they voted to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in March 2022. All the unionized workers in the United States recently found out that they would be denied end-of-year “merit” bonuses.
Carlos Angel-Barajas, 34, an actor with a master’s degree in the field, is on the REI Soho bargaining committee. After one year of bargaining, REI changed law firms and hired the notoriously anti-union Morgan Lewis. Now, two years after winning their union election, neither REI Soho workers nor those at eight other recently-unionized stores are anywhere near reaching a deal with the company.
“When we bargained with [the previous firm], there were representatives from REI on the Zoom call,” Angel-Barajas recalls. “It was a very slow, at times frustrating, process but there were things that were handled at the bargaining table because REI was present.” Now, he says, “it’s just the legal team; there are no REI representatives,” and not one additional tentative agreement has been made.
Workers at REI stores nationwide have filed more than 80 complaints with the NLRB, seeking to force the company to bargain first contracts.
At the Trader Joe’s on Essex and Delancey in Lower Manhattan, bosses approached union-busting in a more creative way. “Trader Joe’s doesn’t have to hire professional union busters to come in–they are just using the employees to do that work,” says labor lawyer Seth Goldstein.
After losing a union election in a 76-76 tie last spring, workers haven’t stopped organizing, and the boss continues to hire anti-union workers who have formed an unofficial union-busting clan, says independent union Trader Joe’s United.
Things came to a head in February when Fredd Moore, a queer pro-union worker, was fired on what the union says are trumped-up claims after being called homophobic slurs by one of the anti-union workers.
“They truly believe that if we get a union, we will lose our jobs,” said worker-organizer Jordan Pollack of the anti-union group.
The union’s legal team, Julian, Mehrer, Singla and Goldstein, has filed an unfair-labor-practice charge against Moore’s firing. It has also appealed the election results and is hoping to have them overturned under the precedent set in the NLRB’s Cemex ruling last August, which stipulates that if management illegally interfered with an election, the employer will be ordered to recognize the union, rather than having to redo the election.
Workers at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, the only unionized Amazon warehouse in the United States, faced a grueling anti-union campaign, with workers forced to sit through several captive-audience meetings before the April 2022 union election, which the Amazon Labor Union won. Amazon also fired several union leaders before and after the election. It has not yet begun to negotiate a contract.
The independent Amazon Labor Union also has internal problems. There has been a split between union president Chris Smalls and his supporters, and some of the union’s organizers who came from outside and took jobs as “salts” at the JFK8 warehouse to build support for the union. JFK8 workers recently voted to have direct elections for their leadership which will be held in the coming months. Meanwhile, the 1.3-million member Teamsters union vowed to organize Amazon after winning a strong contract from UPS last summer.
Labor organizers and union lawyers have been sounding the alarm as the world’s richest men fight against the labor movement by attempting to destroy the NLRB’s power to enforce the National Labor Relations Act. The law, enacted in 1935, protects the rights of private-sector workers to unionize and engage in other “concerted activity.” In June, Starbucks followed Trader Joe’s and Amazon making legal filings that support SpaceX’s argument in a lawsuit claiming that the NLRB’s administrative process for hearing cases violates its constitutional due-process rights.
“This is just a blatant attack on the labor movement for their success in organizing,” says labor lawyer Seth Goldstein.
Maintaining Momentum
Workers at Hex & Company react last November after winning their union election (Moses Jeanfrancois)
“I was a socialist in the ’90s. It was very hard; there were like five of us in the meetings,” labor organizer Eric Dirnbach told The Indy. Now, he attends packed meetings full of excited young labor organizers and socialists.
New unions and militant union-support networks like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee are paving the way for effective worker-to-worker organizing, and well-established unions like the Teamsters and the UAW have been revitalized by grassroots pro-democracy campaigns.
EWOC, a joint, volunteer-run project between the United Electrical Workers union and the Democratic Socialists of America, says it has around 500 currently active organizing volunteers; that over 5,200 workers have reached out to it since its founding; and that of these, over 2,100 campaigns have been launched with some organizing activity, representing workers at over 1,500 employers.
Younger people are gaining class consciousness, after more than 40 years of declining economic conditions for workers. We are paying more than ever for higher education, housing, groceries, health care and more, while the share of wealth controlled by the richest 1% continues to grow.
“I think for our generation, a promise was made about working hard, getting an education, buying a house. We saw examples of it by our parents and grandparents,” says Angel-Barajas,
and it turned out to be empty.
Gay and transgender people, particularly those of color, face high rates of workplace discrimination and harassment. At Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, REI and Nitehawk, queer workers are leading the way.
Angel-Barajas is queer and was undocumented for much of his life. “I, along with a bunch of my coworkers, are uniquely tuned into systems of oppression, and we’re tuned into methods, tactics, for those in power to control,” they said. “And I’ve seen how powerfully folks in the store will fight for one another. It’s difficult work, but it’s also very important and transformative.
Workers are becoming aware that they cannot fix working conditions by just changing jobs. “I come from a line of horrible work experience. I have yet to find a job that has a good management, a good foundation for its workers,” says Lopez.
I know what it feels like to be an ant underneath a shoe, and it’s not a good feeling that you can be replaced by any other worker ant, and you’ll just be another squashed bug on the side of the road.
Lopez says another reason he hasn’t given up is because he has a whole new community of friends and support through the union.
I’m constantly asking everybody new I meet, ‘If you ever need a union, let me know.’
Millennials and Zoomers grew up in a time when union membership was at its lowest ebb in generations in the United States, and knowledge about unions and labor issues was slim or nonexistent. None of the workers I spoke with for this article remember being taught much of anything about organized labor and its history. We heard snippets about it during Occupy Wall Street, the Fight for $15, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns and the Chicago teachers strikes. In March 2020, when Amazon workers bucked at Jeff Bezos, then the richest man in the world, we were ready to follow suit.
SEATTLE—Starbucks workers, in the midst of their organizing drive at the giant coffee chain, are taking the fight to a new level: The corporate board and its anti-union anti-worker policies.
The workers, in a formal filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, put up three pro-worker advocates for board seats, while also urging Starbucks shareholders to oppose three directors who have been forces, they say, in its union-busting.
The issue will percolate up to Starbucks’s annual meeting on March 13.
That’s when the workers also want the firm’s shareholders to seat former National Labor Relations Board chair Wilma Liebman, former Obama Labor Department official Maria Echaveste and Josh Gotbaum, a former top official in several federal agencies, including the Labor Department, the Office of Management and Budget and the Pentagon.
The workers’ key argument: union-busting hurts Starbucks’s image, revenues, profits, share price, credibility in the market place and, of course, the workers themselves.
That’s shown by a wide-ranging nationwide National Labor Relations Board complaint filed against the coffee giant on January 9.
And while the letter doesn’t say so, former CEO Howard Schultz dominates Starbucks and he’s still the largest shareholder. Schultz is so hostile to workers and unions that in a separate case, the NLRB charged him, personally, with labor law-breaking, formally unfair labor practices. He told a barista in California who spoke up against union-busting that, in so many words, go find another job, a firing threat.
It’s also shown by the fact that the workers, starting just over two years ago in Buffalo, N.Y., have voted union at almost 400 Starbucks stores, covering more than 9,000 workers.
Starbucks refuses to bargain with them as a group. It pushes a divide-and-conquer strategy, saying it will bargain store by store and only in secret, not, as the workers want, with everyone observing via zoom.
In their letter to other shareholders, including institutional investors, the workers, aided by the union-created Strategic Organizing Center, lay out their case for Starbucks to give up the union-busting: It would help not just the workers’ pay and conditions but the firm’s bottom line.
They told the SEC, which regulates corporate boards and annual meetings—among other oversight–that Starbucks has spent an estimated $240 million in the last year on union-busting. As a result, it’s busted its image as a progressive place to work. That’s cut its stock price and its revenues, too.
In a separate action earlier this year, Starbucks Workers United, which is aiding the organizing drive, asked the Labor Department to force Starbucks and its union-buster to disclose their spending or face federal fines.
Starbucks hired wink-wink nod-nod operatives from Littler Mendelson, a Los Angeles-based law firm which advertises itself—to the criminal corporate class—as the U.S.’s largest “union avoidance” firm.
“We believe the current board tolerated an unacceptable level of reputational risk, a counter-productive approach to labor issues and a flawed allocation of resources,” the workers/Strategic Organizing Center letter to other shareholders continues.
Liebman, Gotbaum and Echaveste “are ideally suited to repair the relationship with the company’s workers and regulators while safeguarding the best interests of all stakeholders.
“Voting for the SOC nominees will help ensure the status quo does not continue and shareholder value does not suffer as the company’s reputation has.”
The letter cites 130 NLRB citations with 420 charges against Starbucks, more than 1100 complaints of labor law-breaking, and declines in sales and share prices. “Ongoing litigation, labor issues and staff walkouts” are some of the reasons for the sales and share price drops, it adds.
“The bottom line is this: Until the Starbucks board deals with the crisis that formed under the current directors’ watch, the company will not be able to fulfill its vast potential.”
The letter tells shareholders that Starbucks undertook recent moves to burnish its image, including replacing three directors. The workers’ response is to tell Starbucks shareholders to in essence pay attention “to what they”—directors and managers—”do, not what they say.”
“The NLRB’s ‘largest and most-focused action yet’ was brought against the company on January 9, encompassing nearly 400 stores and charging ‘Starbucks is failing and refusing to bargain collectively with the union.’ While Starbucks may want stakeholders to believe it has seen the light, what we see is an ongoing pattern of disenfranchising employees.”
The Strategic Organizing Center also said in a statement to Reuters that Starbucks “needs to immediately provide full disclosure of the total costs and liabilities” of its anti-unionism “in order for informed voting decisions before the 2024 annual meeting.”
The costs and liabilities include labor law-breaking fines, plus net back pay to workers Starbucks illegally fired. NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo told agency offices last year that “net back pay” should cover all costs workers incur when the boss illegally fires them.
That includes interest on credit card debt used to stay alive, missed or late mortgage and car payments and medical bills and more, not just the old remedy of net back pay.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
Press Associates Inc. (PAI), is a union news service in Washington D.C. Mark Gruenberg is the editor.
WASHINGTON—Under federal labor law, companies and their union-busters are supposed to disclose, with some exceptions, how much they spend to stop organizing drives. Starbucks and its union-buster, Littler Mendelson, haven’t, so the Service Employees is demanding the Labor Department force them to do so.
The information is relevant to Starbucks Workers United, the SEIU affiliate which is aiding the Starbucks workers from coast to coast in their from-the-ground-up organizing drive at the giant coffee chain’s stores.
SWU has won union recognition votes at 370 stores and counting, Casey Cabalquinto, the union’s senior research coordinator, told DOL. But with union-buster coaching, Starbucks not only tries to stop the workers from organizing, but refuses to bargain with them when they do so.
Such advice isn’t cheap. It’s also relevant. So Starbucks workers should know how much their bosses are paying for the expensive campaign to stop their organizing drive. Hence the union’s letter to the Labor Department.
Top “persuader” in the country
Littler has advertised itself as the top “persuader” against unions in the country. In the Starbucks campaign, it’s loaded workers at three New York stores and one in La Quinta, Calif., with 21-count subpoenas, allegedly for information but really for intimidation, Cabalquinto wrote.
Cabalquinto sent his letter on January 23 to DOL’s Office of Labor-Management Standards, which enforces that disclosure section of one labor law, the 1959 GOP-enacted Landrum-Griffin Act (LMRDA) against the union-busters, officially called “persuaders.”
“The nature of the information and documents requested demonstrate a clear objective of supplying Starbucks with detailed information about employees and the union,” he wrote.
“The Buffalo ALJ (administrative law judge) decision held the subpoenas were largely not relevant” to the NLRB’s demand for an enforceable injunction, called a 10(j), at one store in LaQuinta, Calif., where Starbucks tried to intimidate two workers. The LaQuinta case wound up in Buffalo because that’s where the workers’ campaign—and company resistance—began.
Starbucks’s wide-ranging subpoenas of the workers also broke labor law. “An employer may not surveil its employees to obtain such information and may not give its employees the impression that it has surveilled—or will surveil—them to obtain such information,” the letter to DOL added.
“The subpoenas Starbucks and Littler filed in other cases appear to similarly violate workers’ rights. These other cases indicate Starbucks and Littler may be utilizing overly broad and abusive subpoenas for anti-union purposes in multiple cases beyond LaQuinta and Buffalo.” Those include cases in Great Neck, Long Island, and New York City.
Starbucks and Littler Mendelson’s law-breaking is so widespread against the Starbucks workers and SWU that the Labor Department has already gone to court once “to enforce a subpoena against Starbucks seeking information about company spending to fly corporate officers to Buffalo” to stop the unionization drive there. The coffee giant and Littler also spent money to create an anti-union website, the letter added.
If labor law’s disclosure provisions are “to have any force, employers cannot be permitted to issue broad and invasive subpoenas and then hide behind the ‘discovery’ exception to avoid disclosures,” Cabalquinto declared.
“Because Starbucks retained Littler to engage in activities falling squarely under” the disclosure sections of Landrum Griffin which cover such “persuaders,” both “must disclose any agreements under which Littler issued discovery requests on behalf of Starbucks, and any expenditures and payments in connection with those requests.”
When organized labor introduced the Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act in 2021, it included the mandated “persuader” financial disclosures SEIU’s Cabalquinto discussed.
Corporate interests opposed disclosing the “persuader” spending, but so did the American Bar Association. It said the PRO Act provision would violate client-lawyer confidentiality. A business-backed Republican filibuster threat, plus opposition from swing Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., killed the PRO Act, including the “persuader” disclosure.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.
More than half a million workers in the US went on strike this year, winning gains not only for themselves but for nonunion workers too. While there’s much more work to be done, 2023 was a year when the working class punched back at the capitalist class.
In 2023, the US working class fought back. After decades of stagnating wages and concessionary contracts, this year workers in a vast range of industries went on the offensive.
More than 500,000 workers walked off the job this year, more than double the 224,000 that struck last year, which itself was double 2021’s numbers, according to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker. Baristas, journalists, actors, manufacturing workers, professors, autoworkers, health care workers: they all shared in the terrifying, exhilarating experience of walking off the job. More importantly, they won.
Autoworkers at the Big Three — Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis — wrestled back many of the concessions they’d made in recent decades, particularly in the aftermath of the Great Recession. They didn’t succeed on all fronts — some members still don’t have pensions, and not every worker is satisfied with their raise — but between the conversion of scores of temporary workers to full-time positions, hefty raises over the length of the contract, the reopening of an idled Stellantis plant in Belvidere, Illinois, and the creation of pathway for electric vehicle (EV) workers to be folded into the union’s master contracts — it was a decisive victory.
As is so often the case with unions, these gains didn’t only help their members. Nonunion autoworkers are seeing raises, too — Honda, Toyota, Hyunai, and Subaru have all announced plans to increase worker pay — as their employers try to deflate pro-union sentiment among the workforce, many of whom are dead set on joining the UAW, having seen what a union can win. The employers’ efforts may be too little, too late as the UAW moves forward with its plan of organizing roughly 150,000 nonunion autoworkers nationwide, the same number as are currently covered under the Big Three contracts.
Also this year, workers at the West Coast health care giant Kaiser Permanente won 21 percent raises after a three-day strike, and nurses in New York secured safe staffing provisions. Locomotive manufacturing workers in Erie, Pennsylvania struck for green technology and the right to strike over grievances — a critical tool when an employer persistently violates workers’ contracts — and while they didn’t emerge victorious on everything, they did win some of it. The entertainment industry’s writers and actors — nearly 175,000 people in total — grabbed raises and a host of workplace protections, including reining in generative artificial intelligence (AI).
In the first quarter of 2023 alone, unionized workers’ wages jumped an average of 7 percent in the first year of their contracts, the biggest single-quarter uptick since 2007, according to Bloomberg Law. Overall, some 900,000 union workers secured double-digit raises this year through new contracts.
“That’s Just Class Consciousness”
It’s not just about the ballooning numbers in union workers’ paychecks. This year saw a qualitative shift too, a sense of things adding up to more than the sum of their parts. There were always bright spots in the US labor movement in the last decade or two — militant democratic unionism from the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU), the work of the longstanding reform caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) — but now, discrete fights are starting to flow into one another.
“Take the Hollywood strikes,” said labor historian Gabriel Winant, reflecting on this year. “They did it together — the Teamsters didn’t cross the picket lines — and the public was with them and seems to be with every strike now. The UAW strike, too, is a product of autoworkers’ militancy, but it also has to do with Labor Notes, DSA, and with graduate student unions. And people seem to be able to see the connection also to Amazon and Starbucks and so on.”
“That’s just class consciousness,” he added. “It feels like there is class consciousness coming out of these strikes as opposed to just trade-union consciousness.”
And strikes aren’t the only positive trend. Reform efforts within existing unions gained steam in 2023. Taking the decades of work by TDU as a model, unionized workers have gotten serious about democratizing their unions, drawing on rather than shutting down the rank-and-file initiative by which union battles are won or lost.
Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), the recently formed reform caucus in the UAW, notched a huge win in electing seven members to the union’s international executive board in the union’s first-ever direct election, and then immediately getting to work preparing the rank and file to pull off a historic strike.
UAW president Shawn Fain is one of UAWD’s members, and as he said at this year’s TDU convention, UAWD wouldn’t exist without TDU.
“When he said, ‘Without TDU, there would be no Shawn Fain. Without TDU, there would be no UAWD. Without TDU, there would be no stand-up strike,’ I was completely blown away,” Teamsters Local 804’s Antonio Rosario told me.
Rosario joined TDU in 2016, and as an organizer for the Teamsters’ United Parcel Service (UPS) local in New York City, he’s part of another key labor story this year: the Teamsters’ preparations to strike UPS, where some 340,000 members labor under the largest private-sector contract in the country. There, just the threat of a walkout was enough to force the company to agree to the strongest contracts the workers have won in decades.
“After economic and social disruption, [there’s] a working out of a new arrangement of power,” labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein told me. “Today, the wind is at the back of the working class. Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters had the intelligence to recognize that the wind was at their backs, and then that in such a case, you can be bold.”
Reform caucuses are now popping up in quick succession inside existing unions. As Labor Notes’s Jenny Brown wrote in her own 2023 reflection:
There’s already a sizable reform pole in the 1.2 million-member United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) centered in the union’s biggest local. Rail Machinist reformers look set to finally win a challenged election in the 7,500-member District Lodge 19, which represents rail mechanics all over the country. A new caucus, CREW, has emerged in the Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE).
Then there are the efforts to form new unions. Starbucks Workers United has now unionized 360 of the coffee giant’s stores, inspiring workers across retail and food-service to get organized too. Amazon workers are also trying to assemble under the union banner — either independently as part of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) or Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment (CAUSE), as a minority union such as Amazonians United, or with established unions like the Teamsters or the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU). Importantly, at both Starbucks and Amazon, major obstacles to winning first contracts remain, as the megacorporations refuse to negotiate with or even recognize the unions formed by their workers.
Accumulating Momentum
Despite the exuberant talk of a Hot Labor Summer or a Striketober, none of this year’s labor activity was unprecedented. Strike levels are nowhere near the heights reached in the aftermath of World War II, or even in the public-sector rebellions of the early 1970s. The unionization rate remains stubbornly low, sitting at a measly 10.1 percent last year. Even with the most pro-labor National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in generations — which has demanded the reinstatement of workers illegally fired for organizing and issued important rulings such as the recent Cemex decision, which says that if an employer commits an unfair labor practice that would necessitate another union election, the employer automatically must recognize the union instead — the playing field is far from level. Should we lose the labor-friendly Board after the 2024 presidential election, even these favorable rulings will become vulnerable.
And not every strike ended in victory this year. The two-year-long, hundreds-strong United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) strike at Warrior Met in Brookwood, Alabama, concluded with workers returning to the mine without a contract. Local anti-union elected officials played a central role in that fight, with the governor using state troopers to escort scabs and judges issuing injunctions that hobbled the picket line. The UAW’s efforts to organize Southern auto plants will surely require surmounting similarly intransigent local officials who have no interest in a UAW local establishing itself in their jurisdiction. It will take disciplined, militant rank-and-file ingenuity, backed up by a united labor movement, to overcome such opposition.
Yet despite the immense amount of work still to be done, the feeling of accumulating working-class momentum this year is unmissable when speaking with workers day in and day out. It’s what Lichtenstein described to me as the working out of “new constellations of power and income” following a period of economic and social disruption.
Myself, when I’m asked to explain it — the growing militancy of the US working class, the strike numbers, the union reform efforts, the new organizing drives — I often quote one worker with whom I spoke earlier this year.
Tony Falco was the founding organizing director of Trader Joe’s United (TJU), an independent union. Trader Joe’s workers have voted to join the union at stores in California, Kentucky, Massachusetss, and Minnesota, though the company is now trying to decertify the first location that formed TJU, in Hadley, Massachusetts.
I wrote an article exploring the opportunities and challenges that come with forming an independent union in the United States at a corporation with the resources to fight it, speaking to many of the founding members of TJU.
The forty-three-year-old Falco has worked at Trader Joe’s for seventeen years; he works at the Hadley location. Amid a long conversation, here’s what particularly stuck with me:
There’s been a break in the mass brainwashing in which we’re all meant to just suffer and work and be exploited. There’s a moment where you think, ‘Maybe not. Maybe it’s time to seize our power.’ What we’re doing is not without risk, but I don’t feel scared. I’m feeling, and I hope other workers are feeling, the empowerment that we’ve yet to see the results of. I feel a sense of it already. And I can find something else if need be — that’s part of where the lack of fear comes from. Being underpaid? I can get that elsewhere if I have to.
I’ve heard this sentiment — “Being underpaid? I can get that elsewhere if I have to” — if not in those exact words, from workers across industries and at workplaces big and small. If the feeling of millions of people can be summarized in such a short refrain, it is that one.
The pandemic had a way of cutting through the bullshit. The illusion that workers and their bosses are one big family crumbled as one part of that family risked their health and safety or worked mind-boggling mandatoryovertime to bring in the money. Executives retreated to remote work and second homes while workers like Falco kept bagging groceries, exposed to a deadly virus for meager wages.
The tight labor market, born of the heights of the pandemic, has not entirely receded: unemployment currently sits at 3.7 percent. That won’t last forever, and it’s why, across the labor movement, there is an at-times feverish scramble to, as Falco put it, “seize our power” before the capitalist class reorganizes a new offensive. The clock is ticking.
Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin who covers labor organizing.
On Wednesday, December 14, the National Labor Relations Board accused Starbucks of illegally closing 23 stores, including a unionized store on Middle Street in Portland, to suppress union organizing. The federal labor panel is seeking to force the company to reopen the 23 stores, including the Middle Street location. The NLRB is also asking the judge to order Starbucks to compensate former employees for their loss of earnings, benefits and for other costs they incurred as a result of the closures. According to the New York Times, the case is scheduled to go before a judge next summer unless Starbucks settles with the workers earlier.
“Workers have a fundamental freedom in this country to organize unions and collectively bargain for a better life. Working people are increasingly standing together in solidarity to exercise that right to win a collective voice on the job and better pay and benefits,” said Maine AFL-CIO Executive Director Matt Schlobohm.“Corporations like Starbucks are not above the law even though they act like they are. Starbucks has routinely, systematically and arrogantly broken our labor laws and sought to deny workers’ rights to collectively bargain. We applaud this decision to hold Starbucks accountable and order it to reopen and respect our first amendment freedom of association.”
Andy O’Brienis lifelong Mainer, writer, former Maine state legislator, and former editor of The Free Press, a newspaper covering midcoast Maine. He covered Maine state politics for nine years with a focus on Lincoln, Knox, and Waldo counties. He is also the communications director of the Maine AFL-CIO.
An unusual candidate has joined the growing calls for a Starbucks boycott—the coffee conglomerate itself. Baited by right-wing forces incensed by worker expressions of solidarity with Palestine, the company has committed one of its most desperate attacks on the growing Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) movement to date.
Starbucks is actually promoting an internal boycott of unionized stores under the improbable auspices of condemning terrorism.
It marks a new high-water mark of the company’s union-busting bonanza. Coupled with a frivolous intellectual property suit against the union and internal messaging to workers, Starbucks’ efforts to frame SBWU expresses its increasingly unpopular strategy of retaliation.
But how did it happen?
Starbucks escalated its union-busting by suing Starbucks Workers United for for trademark infringement and then called for a boycott of its own unionized stores. | via SBWU
Prelude
On Oct. 8, Workers United International Union endorsed a statement on the war from the Jewish Labor Committee, led by RWDSU President Stuart Applebaum. Starbucks and its allies ignored this statement in their messaging and instead used the ongoing crisis to manufacture outrage and division.
Seizing on a single tweet posted by an individual within the Starbucks movement—quickly deleted—expressing “Solidarity with Palestine,” right-wing news media, the union-busting Center for Union Facts, and eventually Republican Party stalwart Rick Scott and the House Workforce Committee fabricated campaign of hate, incitement, and, ironically, a boycott of the very company in question.
“These stores are run by the union and their employees who support Hamas,” alleged the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce. The organization, which has its offices in the Trump Building on Wall Street, released a list of several hundred unionized Starbucks locations across the United States which it said should be boycotted.
The partner in this call to ditch the brew? Starbucks itself.
Within days, Chamber CEO Duvi Honig met with coffee boss Howard Schultz. On behalf of the Chamber, Honig suggested that Schultz “should close down the stores in question.” The former chairman expressed his desire to do so and to also “terminate the employment of those who support Hamas,” if he had the power to do so.
As it turned out, it was not the Orthodox Chamber that launched the initial boycott, but rather the political right. Sen. Rick Scott demanded a mass boycott until Starbucks leadership “strongly denounces and takes action against this horrific support of terrorism.” He was parroted by the GOP-controlled House Committee on Education and the Workforce, who took aim at individual baristas and organizers who had expressed sympathies on their personal social media for the Palestinian struggle.
Predictably, these condemnations by a sitting U.S. senator unleashed the floodgates for a torrent of hate directed indiscriminately against the company, its workers, and their union. Without a hint of restraint, Florida State Rep. Randy Fine threw gas on the flames: “If you go to Starbucks, you are supporting killing Jews.”
This dangerous escalation was taken further on Oct. 15 by the Orthodox Chamber, when it issued a call declaring: “Drinking a cup of Starbucks is drinking a cup of Jewish blood!” Like the words of Scott, the Chamber’s statement was a deliberate strategy of incitement.
Starbucks strikes
Starbucks immediately took up Scott’s call for a retaliatory strike against the union, in the form of a cease-and-desist order demanding the union renounce its own name and logo. Hoping to score a sympathetic Trump appointee to preside over the case, Starbucks also filed a trademark infringement suit in the conservative Iowa federal circuit. SBWU filed a countersuit in Pennsylvania.
As similar suits against unions at companies like Medieval Times have shown, it’s a losing argument to suggest that the “consumer confusion” of a union’s name is tantamount to intellectual property theft. But that’s of little concern to the bosses at Starbucks HQ, who saw an opening to escalate their effort to break the union.
Internally, the company released targeted messaging condemning SBWU and its membership, claiming the union was associated with “acts of terrorism, hate, and violence.” Customers and workers were encouraged to express their concerns directly to SBWU and SEIU officials.
The whole sequence was an attempt by the right to twist Starbucks’ arm into joining the ongoing neo-McCarthyite attack on friends of the Palestinian people in the labor movement. Once Starbucks had carried out its strike against the union, Scott ended his boycott, as did the Orthodox Chamber.
Not so savvy after all
Before a global audience, Starbucks’ obscene maneuvering hardly seems a righteous or business-savvy as it may appear at home in the U.S. Reader comments on coverage of the lawsuit from Morocco World News, for instance, demanded consumers stop patronizing Starbucks over its union-busting support for Israel; they scored hundreds of likes.
“[G]uys you can give up your matcha latte…and boycot [sic] starbucks!! this how you can help palestine!!!” opined one Moroccan youth. “Don’t worry #Starbucks… we are already boycotting since [you] support criminal government,” another veteran boycotter reminded the company.
The Doha News reports, meanwhile, that franchises “across Qatar and the broader region” are “noticeably empty” this week.
Expressions of outrage against Starbucks’ anti-worker stunt found an audience outside the Arab world, too. “Bojkot Starbucksa!” demanded one Balkan reader, and the clash did not go unreported in mainland China.
As public opinion grows against Israel’s ongoing attack on Gaza, a growing share of the youth market in particular is at stake. A large number of young American Jews have fundamentally shifted their view of Israel, for instance. In trying to navigate the emerging genocidal war, Schultz and his union-busting allies are facing a split in their consumer base: right-wing backers of Netanyahu vs. enlightened detractors from the left.
Starbucks withdrew from the Israeli market in 2003, it has been speculated, “to appease the anti-Israel…Arab world.” Regardless of the company’s motive for its retreat from the very country it now purports to vindicate, the company’s website on its Middle Eastern and North African operations is clearly sensitive to potential anger for its alleged support for Israel, repeatedly disavowing any alleged financial support from the company or Schultz in particular.
Schultz’s vehement anti-union stance has been described by the corporate press as a “matter of self-image”—an expression of his insecurity in the face of “outside agitator” forces spoiling his brand—and as “tinkering from outside the formal chain of command” to the chagrin of other leading executives.
Now, however, Schultz has gone beyond “tinkering” by embroiling the company in a lurid misadventure putting union workers and the brand alike at risk. As his own conduct continues to be found illegal in court, patience with these indiscretions may continue to thin among his allies in the C-suite.
Turnover at the top
In September, Schultz resigned from the Starbucks Board, to be replaced by Wei Zhang, an AliBaba executive. Zhang, formerly Senior VP of Corporate Social Responsibility for Alibaba in Beijing, may be more sensitive to the international community’s position on Palestine than the more domestically marketed Land O’ Lakes or Nike executives who also populate Starbucks’ top leadership.
The diplomatic orbit of AliBaba, which previously shuttered its development center in Israel, might imaginably pull the Board’s center of gravity away from such frivolous and risky diversions—diversions which surely would be frowned upon in most global markets.
Despite massive investment in the growing Chinese market, projected to be the brand’s largest by 2025, the company is still subject to political standards—as when the People’s Daily forcibly reminded the company that “one scandal is enough” to destroy even a “gold standard” brand built painstakingly over years.
More sober minds on the Board may realize that support for Israel is a growing liability worldwide, and that no global company can advocate for Zionism without incurring the disdain of the world’s peace-loving people.
As a U.N. complaint brought by the union against the United States—alleging the government failed in its mandate to protect Starbucks workers universal right of association through the paucity of its labor law, moves through the International Labor Organization—the labor movements and governments of various countries will have more and more opportunity to eschew patience or patronage for the conglomerate, and may reorient towards local competitors or firms who abide by international labor standards.
Fundamentally, Schultz and his enablers on the Board of Directors are in denial about the magnitude of the corporation’slegalwoes, and the inevitability of conceding to the union’s demand to bargain a first contract in good faith. The only way to sustain this denial is to align increasingly with the dangerous, unhinged pole of American politics—which will inevitably stain its destiny as a global brand.
Although he has stepped down from the Board, Schultz remains “lifelong Chairman Emeritus,” a position which seemingly entitles him to wage a personal “war on terror” against union agitators and make-believe Hamas proxies within.
Workers won’t back down
Workers United President Lynne Fox, herself the immediate descendent of Holocaust survivors and victims, did not mince words about the company’s provocation in a statement published at In These Times:
“I’m the president of a union of young workers who are now terrified that they’ve been placed on a hit list by their employer. At a time when we should be focused on the human tragedy taking place in Gaza and Israel, Starbucks is instead taking every chance it gets to bash its employees as supporters of hate and violence without any concern for truth—or consequences.”
Starbucks’ encouragement of the mob to target Fox expresses the kind of anti-Semitism that often emerges from far-right Zionism, which defames, bullies, and renounces the millions of peace-loving Jews, even Israelis, who dare to criticize any aspect of the apartheid regime.
These manipulations are the subject of an unfair labor practice charge filed by the union alleging that the company acted with the intention “of inciting fear and workplace violence against employees,” of “using the…global tragedy against its own employees,” and illegally threatening to fire union workers and close union shops.
“Am I at risk for being fired if I’m found out to…have attended pro-Palestine rallies?” asked one union barista when she read the news of Starbucks’ lawsuit. (After Schultz’s threat, one may wonder.) “That’s a lot to be doing over a tweet.”
While the dueling lawsuits and the union’s NLRB charge slowly progress, workers and their union grow increasingly fearful of the erratic violence of an incensed reactionary tendency in U.S. political life that has shown itself capable of stabbings, shootings, and threats against children and families in recent days.
More than simply tweeting individually about the war on Gaza, union workers in SBWU took the issue upon themselves and drafted a statement in support of Palestinian self-determination and endorsing the comprehensive statement issued by Jewish Voice for Peace.
A tweet from the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce. | Via Twitter (now X)
After discussion, 96% of workers voted to affirm the solidarity resolution—a stunning proportion in a country where public support for Palestine (not to mention merely being Arab) remains politically and physically dangerous to this day. Underlining the workforce’s diverse composition—Jewish, Muslim, and Palestinian together—union baristas affirmed the only tenable position: solidarity.
The union itself has yet to call any boycott action, but the spontaneous call to ditch the brand has spread organically with public outrage, a dynamic now magnified globally as the corporation’s vicious reprisals backfire again. If such a boycott is called, it will gain the support not just of labor, but of all peace-loving people who see in the union’s conduct a principled show of solidarity.
Starbucks subservient
Opposite the growing, militant, multinational movement of baristas stands an emerging sliver of Republican officials, reactionary billionaires, and the Littler Mendelson legal hawks inside of Starbucks’ war room. The once-chic café outlet obliges them and takes the low road: recidivist union-busting, fast food wages, and tacit support for the killing of Palestinians.
This budding coziness between Starbucks and the right was on display in the Senate hearing earlier this year where Schultz was grilled by progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders and Markey and lavished with enabling praise by right-wing Sens. Rand Paul, Mitt Romney, and Markwayne Mullin in turn. Now, this alliance is blooming into a more strident and overt political alliance.
Big money, too, has jumped in, with the Koch Brothers-affiliated National Right to Work Foundation colluding with the coffee giant to foster astroturfed decertification campaigns in union shops. And the corporation’s ongoing evasion regarding cuts to gender-affirming healthcare gives the cultural right another point of entry to their anti-worker pact.
As Starbucks aligns itself step-by-step with ultra-right Zionists and Republican minority rule, the company will only aggravate the contradictions between its purported progressivism and practical subservience to anti-democratic forces. Much like Israel, Starbucks has cornered itself into a position of belligerence and reprisal, while the world, and workers, turn more and more towards the horizon of peace, democracy, and social justice.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
People’s World is a voice for progressive change and socialism in the United States. It provides news and analysis of, by, and for the labor and democratic movements to our readers across the country and around the world. People’s World traces its lineage to the Daily Worker newspaper, founded by communists, socialists, union members, and other activists in Chicago in 1924.
The uprisings of Starbucks workers across the country, including here in Tallahassee, are frustrating the National Right to Work Committee, which can’t seem to score a single win against the union. | Wikipedia (CC)
Originally published in the People’s World on August 3, 2023
NEW YORK —The venal and vicious false front for the criminal corporate class, the so-called National Right To Work Committee and its legal defense fund, must be getting afraid of the accelerating grass-roots workers’ campaign to unionize Starbucks nationwide.
How else to explain their high-profile attempt to toss the Starbucks Workers United Union out of the big Starbucks Roastery in the Big Apple?
They must have figured that success in eliminating the union there, after SWU’s initial win a year before, would chill the national organizing drive. The RTW lobby’s try at eliminating the union, several months before, at the very first Starbucks to organize, in Buffalo, N.Y., failed.
The only problem with RTW’s attempt to stop the union in Manhattan was the anti-worker lobby’s lawyers didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, the National Labor Relations Board’s Manhattan Regional Director, John Doyle Jr., ruled.
Doyle threw the committee’s case out. And because Starbucks refuses to bargain with its workers at the Roastery—or anywhere else—Doyle ruled labor law gives Starbucks Workers United an extra year of certification as their union rep.
Let’s back up for a lesson in the nation’s current, pro-corporate labor law, to show how mixed up this mess is.
Under labor law, as watered down by the Republicans and the corporate class in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, once the NLRB certifies a union to represent a group of workers, the union has a year “free” to bargain a contract without the threat of bosses using willing stooges and shills, trying to throw it out.
But once that year is over dissatisfied workers can circulate a “decert (decertification) petition” to eject the union. If the NLRB OK’s their petition, there’s a decertification election. If decert wins, the union is out, and employees become at-will workers, again subject to the bosses’ whims.
There are three caveats to a decert petition. One is only workers, not bosses, can circulate and sign it. A second is the petition needs signatures from at least 30% of the workers before the NLRB will even look at it. The third is that other than not reaching a contract, the bosses better have followed labor law and not committed any unfair labor practices.
Those are the rules. In practice, an outside outfit, such as the RTW Committee, hunts up a willing stooge or shill to start the decert going. Or the boss finds someone. Sometimes the boss doesn’t even seek a shill but starts the petition, and that’s illegal. And a boss who backs decert petitions almost always has broken labor law in some way, shape, or form, but has to convince the NLRB to overlook its misdeeds as trivial.
Now let’s go to the New York Roastery at 60 Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. Start with the vote there. The Roastery workers and Starbucks Workers United, which helps their nationwide organizing drive—including with legal aid—won in April 2022, 46-36. That began the one-year clock.
When the year was up, worker Kevin Caesar began a decert petition at the Roastery. The RTW crowd gleefully stepped in to virtually take over. Signature-gathering can be done by anyone, even though decert petition signers must be workers in the targeted shop. And the RTW Committee provided Caesar with the lawyer who argued the case before Doyle. For free.
Caesar and his lawyer never told Doyle, at least publicly in the regional director’s ruling, how many workers signed the decert petition. But it had to be more than the minimum or Doyle wouldn’t have to consider the other standards for accepting or rejecting the petition. And that’s where the decert foundered, he ruled.
Starbucks refuses to bargain with its workers and SWU as a coalition of all 340-plus unionized stores. Starbucks bosses, led by their union-buster, walked out of talks after five minutes each of the first two nationwide sessions, giving the excuse for the second that they didn’t want to bargain in front of a nationwide crowd of workers who literally Zoomed in.
Instead, Starbucks and the creator of its anti-union hate, founder Howard Schultz, want to “divide and conquer” the workers through one-by-one, store-by-store talks.
Its walkouts are “refusals to bargain” under labor law and break a nationwide NLRB bargaining order to Starbucks. SWU said so and filed that complaint with Doyle. If Doyle found Starbucks refused to bargain, the company broke the law—and then the law says the workers at the Roastery get an extra year of “free” union representation.
Which is what Doyle ruled. The union and the NLRB’s General Counsel’s office filed the labor law-breaking charge. It included refusing to bargain, “not even acknowledging demands to bargain, not providing a single bargaining date” to start the talks, and refusing to give SWU legally required financial information to bargain with.
Doyle ruled those unfair labor practices got in the way of the decert petition. He rejected it, but pointed out there will be a hearing on the unfair labor practices themselves. It will start on September 19. If there’s no proven labor law-breaking at the Roastery, then the decert petition could be revived. Still, Doyle came down hard on the decert try.
“Allowing the certification year to elapse while an employer delayed and undermined the bargaining process ‘would be to allow it to take advantage of its own failure to carry out its statutory obligation, contrary to the very reasons for the establishment of the rule that a certification requires bargaining for at least one year,’” Doyle wrote. The same principle applies when the boss engages in “surface bargaining,” Doyle added. “The same is true here.”
“Moreover, the board construes the initial period of the certification as beginning on the date the respondent [company] begins to bargain in good faith with the union.” Which is what Starbucks has refused to do.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.
COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE 