Portside

How many graduates of Buena Vista Elementary and Lowell High School have become labor book authors?

Probably not many–other than Eric Blanc, whose mother taught in the San Francisco school system (and served as union president) and whose father was long active in the central labor council.

Blanc became a teacher himself and drew on that experience when writing his first book, Red State Revolt: The Teachers Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics. It chronicled the 2017-18 uprising in public education in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, and other states.

Now an assistant professor at Rutgers University, Blanc has just published a more wide-ranging study. It grapples with a perennial question facing the labor left—namely, what kind of break with business as usual, within established unions, would help more private sector workers win union recognition, first contracts, and strikes?

Blanc argues that the current imbalance of power between labor and management in the U.S. can only be changed, for the better, with large-scale, coordinated organizing efforts rooted in the rank-and-file. His most detailed case study focuses on the four-year union recognition drive at Starbucks, one of the biggest restaurant companies in the world, with 380,000 employees and market value of $108 billion.

In the U.S., that workforce is relatively high-turnover, widely dispersed and fragmented into small, retail store size groups.  The author’s interviews with founders of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU)  take us behind the scenes of an amazingly durable campaign that began when “ten young radicals started salting Buffalo Starbucks stores in early 2021.” (One was Jaz Brisack, now a “practitioner in residence” at the UC Berkeley Labor Center).

“Worker to Worker DNA”

During its early months, SBWU filed almost two representation petitions per day at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This implanted what Blanc calls “worker-to-worker DNA into the entire subsequent trajectory of the campaign.”  Because of its do-it-yourself spirit, the campaign’s initial Labor Board election win rate was a remarkably high 80 percent. According to Blanc, SBWU could not have gained such traction if the organizing had been done in more conventional fashion, with heavy reliance on full-time union staff.

Backed by Workers United/SEIU, SBWU has since helped about 11,000 baristas win bargaining rights at 525 Starbucks stores in 45 states.  SBWU had to develop union majorities, unit by unit and maintain them before, during, and after hotly contested NLRB voting. For two years, SBWU endured what Blanc calls a “scorched earth union busting campaign of unparalleled intensity and breadth,” with an estimated price tag of $250 million.

That effort was orchestrated by Littler Mendelson, a corporate law firm notorious (and often victorious) in the field of “union avoidance. To achieve that management goal at Starbucks, countless workers were harassed, several hundred were fired or suspended for their union activity, and baristas who voted for collective bargaining were illegally denied wage and benefit improvements granted in non-union stores, as an incentive to keep them that way.

Collective action—especially work stoppages—were “key to sustaining momentum and forging solidarity” and keeping the pressure on management, Blanc reports. “In addition to periodic nationwide mobilizations, many Starbucks strikes were begun locally as responses to grievances at their stores.” According to the author, SBWU also “did a great job fighting for and highlighting partial concessions from management secured along the road to a first contract.”

First Contract Fight

That goal suddenly became more achievable in February, 2024, when “Starbucks raised a white flag” and agreed to “begin bargaining in good faith and stop illegally denying equal benefits to unionized workers.” The ensuing talks on a “foundational framework for union contracts” have not produced a settlement yet. If the company’s new CEO, Brian Niccol (who makes $57,000 per hour) changes course–in light of Trump’s impending hobbling of the NLRB—labor relations at Starbucks may become brutal again (if they have not already).

In December, SBWU reported that 98% of the participants in a strike authorization vote had demonstrated their willingness to walk out, if necessary, “to win fair raises, benefits, and staffing, protest unfair labor practices, and resolve outstanding litigation.” As of last month, the union disclosed, Starbucks had “yet to bring a comprehensive economic package to the bargaining table,” hundreds of still pending unfair labor practice charges had not been settled, and “$100 million in legal liabilities remain outstanding.”

While this critical first contract fight continues, Blanc urges other unions to follow SBWU’s example: Develop and train more rank and file leaders in non-union workplaces, who “can self-organize and train others.” Use digital communication tools like Zoom “to quickly and widely scale up drives across huge spatial divides…so workers can directly coordinate and support each other without relying as much on paid staff and union resources.”

The author also recommends better funding of “widespread salting at strategic targets,” like Workers United did in upstate N. Y. with a “crew of radical salts” whose efforts led to the formation of SBWU.  And he encourages organized labor to seize high-profile opportunities to “spread unionization as widely as possible”—as SBWU did when it was deluged with appeals for organizing help from baristas around the country. In short, Blanc argues, “the labor movement needs to finally start acting like a movement again.”

Union Reform Aids Organizing

Blanc’s book also highlights recent union reform victories–within the United Auto Workers (UAW) and NewsGuild/CWA—which led to organizing program improvements. One common denominator of these successful internal election campaigns was “small pockets of newly organized, radicalized young workers [who] played an outsized role.” Their efforts have led to greater rank-and-file engagement in contract campaigns, more frequent strike action, and expanded membership recruitment in both the auto industry and the media.

Given the UAW’s much bigger size, the positive impact of the election of Shawn Fain and other members of Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) to leadership positions, two years ago, is more widely known.  Blanc lauds UAW’s new leadership for internal and external organizing initiatives which “raise expectations, tap into anger at corporate overlords, and show that workers can win big through mass militancy.”

It was no easy task rallying dues-payers understandably “cynical and checked out,” after years of Solidarity House corruption and dysfunction. Yet, during its 2023 contract talks with the Big Three, the UAW’s use of membership education and mobilization, unprecedented bargaining table transparency, and a selective strike strategy produced major gains, after years of divisive and demoralizing concessions. Just a few months later, newly energized and inspired UAW supporters at a non-union Volkswagen plant in Tennessee achieved a major southern organizing breakthrough, with more to come.

 A NewsGuild Shake-Up

The catalyst for a similar organizational shake-up in the 30,000-member NewsGuild was Jon Schleuss winning the union presidency five years ago. As Blanc recounts, his main qualification for national union office was helping to organize the Los Angeles Times, a non-union paper for 135 years. Unlike Fain in the UAW, the 31-year old Schleuss had never been elected or appointed to any union position before, other than a local bargaining committee.

On this own dime, Schleuss went to the NewsGuild’s national convention in 2019 anyway. With backing from three locals, he got himself nominated as a candidate for president in a race everyone assumed was a shoe-in for an incumbent thirty years older and far more experienced than Schleuss.  All Guild officers, headquarters staff, and field reps, along with many local union officials, opposed his candidacy.

Nevertheless, the young journalist proved to be an effective organizer of restive media workers nationwide. During a rare union presidential campaign debate, Schleuss called for “tapping the creativity of our members” in better organized campaigns against newspaper take-overs by hedge-fund owners and others “intent on destroying journalism.” If elected, he pledged to seek more resources from the Guild’s parent organization, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and expand rank-and-file participation in the Guild’s own “Member Organizing Program.”

This MOP draws on four decades of CWA-backed member-based organizing in the public and private sector–using the model favored by Blanc for all unions (ie training and deploying active members, on a “lost-time” or volunteer basis, to recruit non-union workers in the same industry or occupation as their own.)

Strike Activity

During the last five years, the Guild has become what Blanc calls “a powerhouse of new organizing.” Its reform leadership has invested heavily in on-line and in person training of activists who want to get involved in external and internal organizing, contract bargaining, job actions, and strikes. As part of the broader organizing surge that made this possible, nearly 11,000 media workers won bargaining rights in more than 200 new units between 2018 and 2023, according to Blanc. In the last four years, the union has helped workers secure100 first contracts.

By last fall, when Guild members walked out at a legal publication called Law360, it was the union’s 24^th strike of the year. Other targets included Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, The NY Times, Chicago Tribune, and other media outlets, large and small.  In 2023, 36 newsrooms were struck for varying lengths of time. While many of these were quickie strikes, not open ended ones, 100 workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been out for two years, in the longest running strike in the nation.

In We Are The Union, Schleuss recalls when he and other Guild supporters signed up enough co-workers to get an NLRB election at the LA Times seven years ago. Even then, they knew their job was not over. After winning that vote, “we would still have to do everything we could to fix the union—to make it more focused on organizing and more focused on building rank-and-file power.” To keep their spirits up during their difficult contest with management, Times organizing committee members reassured each other that “we have more power than we know.”

In Schleuss’s view, that collective realization is a source of empowerment whether you’re “struggling against an employer who is fighting you every step of the way or you’re a rank-and-filer pushing against deadweight union leadership.” The strength of We Are The Union is Eric Blanc’s inspiring examples of workers overcoming both adversaries.

 (Steve Early is a former International Union representative for the Communications Workers of America and author of five books about labor or politics. He is a NewsGuild/CWA member and can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com)

Steve Early

Steve Early is a longtime labor journalist and author of Save Our Unions: Dispatches from a Movement in Distress (Monthly Review Press, 2013), The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor (Haymarket Books, 2011) and Embedded With Organized Labor (MRP, 2009)

More Posts