Starbucks unionization efforts brewing success thanks to a Rhodes scholar

Most weekend mornings, Jaz Brisack gets up around 5 a.m., wills her semiconscious body into a Toyota Prius and winds her way through Buffalo, New York, to the Starbucks on Elmwood Avenue. After a supervisor unlocks the door, she clocks in, checks herself for COVID symptoms and helps get the store ready for customers.

“I’m almost always on bar if I open,” said Brisack, who has a thrift-store aesthetic and long reddish-brown hair that she parts down the middle. “I like steaming milk, pouring lattes.”

The Starbucks door is not the only one that has been opened for her. As a University of Mississippi senior in 2018, Brisack was one of 32 Americans who won Rhodes scholarships, which fund study in Oxford, England.

Many students seek the scholarship because it can pave the way to a career in the top ranks of law, academia, government or business. They’re motivated by a mix of ambition and idealism.

Brisack became a barista for similar reasons: She believed it was the most urgent claim of her time and her talents.

When Brisack joined Starbucks in late 2020, not a single one of the company’s 9,000 U.S. locations had a union; she hoped to change that by helping to unionize its Buffalo stores.

She and her co-workers have far exceeded their goal.

Since December, when her store became the only corporate-owned Starbucks in the U.S. with a certified union, more than 150 other stores have voted to unionize, and more than 275 have filed paperwork to hold elections. Their actions come amid an increase in public support for unions, which last year reached its highest point since the mid-1960s, and a growing consensus among center-left experts that rising union membership could move millions of workers into the middle class.

Brisack’s weekend shift represents all these trends, as well as one more: a change in the views of the most privileged Americans. According to Gallup, approval of unions among college graduates grew from 55% in the late 1990s to 70% last year.

In talking with Brisack and her fellow Rhodes scholars, it became clear the change had reached even that rarefied group. The American Rhodes scholars I encountered from a generation earlier typically said that, while at Oxford, they had been middle-of-the-road types who believed in a modest role for government. They did not spend much time thinking about unions as students, and what they did think was likely to be skeptical.

“I was a child of the 1980s and 1990s, steeped in the centrist politics of the era,” wrote Jake Sullivan, a 1998 Rhodes scholar who is President Joe Biden’s national security adviser and was a top aide to Hillary Clinton.

By contrast, many of Brisack’s classmates express reservations about the market-oriented policies of the ’80s and ’90s and strong support for unions. Several told me that they were enthusiastic about Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who made reviving the labor movement a priority of their 2020 presidential campaigns.

The fight in Buffalo

Brisack moved to Buffalo after Oxford for another job, as an organizer with the union Workers United, where a college mentor worked. Once there, she decided to take a second job at Starbucks.

“Her philosophy was get on the job and organize. She wanted to learn the industry,” said Gary Bonadonna Jr., the top Workers United official in upstate New York. “I said, ‘OK.’”

In its pushback against the campaign, Starbucks has often blamed “outside union forces” intent on harming the company, as its CEO, Howard Schultz, suggested in April. The company has identified Brisack as one of these interlopers, noting that she draws a salary from Workers United. Bonadonna said she was the only Starbucks employee on the union’s payroll.

But the impression that Brisack and her fellow employee-organizers give off is one of fondness for the company. Even as they point out flaws — understaffing, insufficient training, low seniority pay, all of which they want to improve — they embrace Starbucks and its distinctive culture.

They talk up their sense of camaraderie and community — many count regular customers among their friends — and delight in their coffee expertise. On mornings when Brisack’s store isn’t busy, employees often hold tastings.

A Starbucks spokesperson said that Schultz believes employees don’t need a union if they have faith in him and his motives, and the company has said that seniority-based pay increases will take effect this summer.

One Friday in February, Brisack and another barista, Casey Moore, met at the two-bedroom rental that Brisack shares with three cats to talk union strategy over breakfast.

That afternoon, Brisack held a Zoom call from her living room with a group of Starbucks employees who were interested in unionizing. It is an exercise that she and other organizers in Buffalo have repeated hundreds of times since last fall, as workers around the country sought to follow their lead. But in almost every case, the Starbucks workers outside Buffalo have reached out to the organizers, rather than vice versa.

This particular group of workers, in Brisack’s college town of Oxford, Mississippi, seemed to require even less of a hard sell than most. When Brisack said she, too, had attended the University of Mississippi, one of the workers waved her off, as if her celebrity preceded her.

“Oh, yeah, we know Jaz,” the worker gushed.

A few hours later, Brisack, Moore and Michelle Eisen, a longtime Starbucks employee also involved in the organizing, gathered with two union lawyers at the union office. The National Labor Relations Board was counting ballots for an election at a Starbucks in Mesa, Arizona — the first real test of whether the campaign was taking root nationally, and not just in a union stronghold like New York. The room was tense as the first results trickled in.

“Can you feel my heart beating?” Moore asked her colleagues.

Within a few minutes, however, it became clear that the union would win — the final count was 25-3. Everyone turned slightly punchy, as if they had all suddenly entered a dream world where unions were far more popular than they had ever imagined.

One of the lawyers let out an expletive before musing, “Whoever organized down there …”

Brisack seemed to capture the mood when she read a text from a co-worker to the group, “I’m so happy I’m crying and eating a week-old ice cream cake.”

A black antifa t-shirt at the formal

Brisack once appeared to be on a different path. As a child, she idolized Lyndon Johnson and imagined running for office. At the University of Mississippi, she was elected president of the College Democrats.

She had developed an interest in labor history as a teenager when money was sometimes tight, but it was largely an academic interest.

“She had read Eugene Debs,” said Tim Dolan, the university’s national scholarship adviser at the time. “It was like: ‘Oh, gosh. Wow.’”

When Richard Bensinger, a former organizing director with the AFL-CIO and the United Automobile Workers, came to speak on campus, she realized that union organizing was more than a historical curiosity. She talked her way into an internship on a union campaign he was involved with at a nearby Nissan plant. It did not go well. The union accused the company of running a racially divisive campaign, and Brisack was disillusioned by the loss.

“Nissan never paid a consequence for what it did,” she said.

In response to charges of “scare tactics,” the company said at the time that it had sought to provide information to workers and clear up misperceptions.

Dolan noticed she was becoming jaded about mainstream politics.

“There were times between her sophomore and junior year when I’d steer her toward something, and she’d say, ‘Oh, they’re way too conservative.’ I’d send her a New York Times article, and she’d say, ‘Neoliberalism is dead.’”

In England, where she arrived during the fall of 2019 at age 22, Brisack was a regular at a “solidarity” film club that screened movies about labor struggles worldwide and wore a sweatshirt that featured a head shot of Karl Marx. She liberally reinterpreted the term “black tie” at an annual Rhodes dinner, wearing a black dress-coat over a black antifa T-shirt.

“I went and got gowns and everything; I wanted to fit in,” said Leah Crowder, a friend and fellow Rhodes scholar. “I always loved how she never tried to fit into Oxford.”

Reaching Howard Schultz

The first time I met Brisack was in October, at a Starbucks near the Buffalo airport.

I was there to cover the union election. She was there, unsolicited, to brief me.

“I don’t think we can lose,” Brisack said of the vote at her store.

At the time, not a single corporate-owned Starbucks in the country was unionized. The union would go on to win there by more than a 2-1 ratio.

It’s hard to overstate the challenge of unionizing a major corporation that doesn’t want to. Employers are allowed to inundate workers with anti-union messaging, whereas unions have no protected access to workers on the job. While it is officially illegal to threaten, discipline or fire workers who seek to unionize, the consequences for doing so are typically minor and delayed.

Yet the union continues to win elections — over 80% of the more than 175 votes in which the board has declared a winner. Starbucks denies that it has broken the law, and a federal judge recently rejected a request to reinstate pro-union workers whom the labor board said Starbucks had forced out illegally.

Though Brisack was one of dozens of early leaders in the union campaign, the imprint of her personality is visible. In store after store around the country, workers who support the union give no ground in meetings with company officials.

The challenge for Brisack and her colleagues is that while younger people, even younger elites, are increasingly pro-union, the shift has not yet reached many of the country’s most powerful leaders. Or, more to the point, the shift has not yet reached Schultz, the 68-year-old now in his third tour as Starbucks’ CEO.

Schultz has long opposed unions at Starbucks, but Brisack, for one, believes that even business executives are persuadable. She recently spoke at an Aspen Institute panel on workers’ rights. She has even mused about using her Rhodes connections to make a personal appeal to Schultz, something that Bensinger has pooh-poohed but that other organizers believe she just may pull off.

“Richard has been making fun of me for thinking of asking one of the Rhodes people to broker a meeting with Howard Schultz,” Brisack said in February.

“I’m sure if you met Howard Schultz, he’d be like, ‘She’s so nice,’” responded Moore, her co-worker. “He’d be like: ‘I get it. I would want to be in a union with you, too.’”