The Power of the Starbucks Model

The Power of the Starbucks Model

How does labor organize at scale?

We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big
by Eric Blanc
University of California Press, 2025, 336 pp.

Get on the Job and Organize: Standing up for a Better Workplace and a Better World
by Jaz Brisack
Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2025, 320 pp.

The steady numerical decline of union membership has become a perennial of American political economy. While this decline is matched by pretty much every wealthy country on earth, peak union density in the United States, about 34 percent of non-farm workers in the mid-1950s, never reached the heights attained in Europe or even Canada. The proportional drop puts the U.S. labor movement at a lower baseline today than these other countries.

The urgent conundrum plaguing U.S. labor scholars, writers, and activists for many years has been: How does labor make up this massive, historically rooted shortfall? How does labor organize “at scale”? Any given workplace might be ripe for organizing, and there are skills that can be taught to union staff organizers to accomplish that task, but only great waves of labor militancy—like the ones in the 1880s or the 1930s through the Second World War—protect and advance working-class economic and political power.

When I worked in the labor movement, from the late 1980s into the early 2010s, as a strategic campaigner, it was assumed by the most sophisticated organizers that campaigns that might produce, at best, tens of thousands of organized workers would take many years and cost millions of dollars. At a more granular level, it would take several years to organize just one urban hotel, even with the full support of an aggressive, sophisticated organizing department. I used to write memos, sometimes just to myself, about organizing large regional campaigns across companies. But I couldn’t explain how to generate and sustain these campaigns at a sufficient size to make them worth doing in the first place. I still think, however, that “slow and steady, one worksite at a time,” is an earnest protocol for labor’s suicide.

The Starbucks organizing campaign offers an alternative to the conventional staff organizer model of how to lose the class struggle, one laborious organizing drive at a time. In just a few years, at a budget much smaller than a campaign staffed and run by a national union would require, the rank-and-file organization Starbucks Workers United (SBWU)—the name for the national Starbucks campaign undertaken by Workers United, which is a multi-industry affiliate of SEIU—has organized about 600 company-owned stores (out of about 10,000 in the United States) and forced the coffee chain to enter into negotiations for a first contract. As I write, SBWU claims it represents about 11,000 Starbucks workers, which is about 5.5 percent of the non-management workforce. Starting from zero in just four years, this is a stunning achievement. (SEIU’s earlier campaign in this sector, Fight for $15, was successful on its own terms, but it was a substitute, not a prelude, for actual mass organizing.)

How have they done it? The two books under review, one by a young organizer and a founder of SBWU, Jaz Brisack, and the other by a sociologist and higher education labor activist, Eric Blanc, are beginning to crack the code. Their books both present the Starbucks campaign as an example of a new type of worker-to-worker organizing, which means workers self-organizing and spreading their expertise to other shops via digital technology, with national unions providing logistical and legal support but otherwise maintaining a light touch.

A handful of great books about organizing have appeared in recent years. They have focused on campaigns led by union staff, and they reflect that model’s limitations. The late Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts, for example, is the book I’d give to any union staffer trying to organize a particular workplace. McAlevey’s insights as an organizer and a scholar of organizing are invaluable when discussing the nuts and bolts of the practice: how to talk to uncertain workers, how to organize a committee, how to engender buy-in for a strike action, down to the pregnant pauses required to allow a worker to fill in the space themselves with an affirmation of solidarity. I just don’t think this process scales up. (Blanc, who spoke extensively with McAlevey, disagrees.) Daisy Pitkin’s On the Line offers a poignant first-person narrative of a relationship between a rank-and-file worker leader and a union staff member, and the terrible beauty born of workers fighting to affirm their very humanity. But both McAlevey’s and Pitkin’s books require too many mind melds of class consciousness from ideologically militant staff to rank-and-file workers. This is the model that the Starbucks campaign creatively challenges.

It is a measure of how emblematic the Starbucks fight has become to a particular method of organizing and to a particular sector of the contemporary working class that Brisack and Blanc both put it at the center of their narratives. Blanc is an academic, immersed in the social science literature, who writes with the intensity of the activist he is. Brisack is an organizer on the shop floor but also, as their narrative proceeds, a strategist with an increasingly sophisticated analysis of working-class power.

Get on the Job and Organize is part memoir, part organizing campaign chronology, and part instruction manual for building a bigger and better labor movement. It is packed with quotations from Brisack, their worker comrades, and their bosses. Brisack—Southern, white, downwardly mobile, a graduate of a non-elite public university who then was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship—is the real thing: an organic working-class intellectual.

While Brisack doesn’t spend much time writing about their upbringing, we learn a bit about how they came to be a labor activist. Born in Texas to a Bengali–Romanian web consultant dad and a mercurial former school teacher mom, Brisack spent their childhood moving around the South and suffered through chronic economic hardship after the divorce of their parents. They were raised as something like a Southern Baptist, but as a homeschooler Brisack fortuitously discovered the life and works of Eugene Debs, whose universal class analysis served as an alternative to the frequently racist Southern populism of the Jim Crow era. Further illuminations followed, including the stories of the Haymarket affair martyr Albert Parsons and the Industrial Workers of the World martyrs Joe Hill and Frank Little. Brisack related to the history of American leftism through their intellectual curiosity and alienation from the various, white Southern communities of their childhood. In college, a muckraking reporter-professor at the University of Mississippi prompted Brisack to see the great radical organizers as more than inspiring figures frozen in amber; organizing could be “something you do.”

Brisack is a twenty-something with a very old soul. Unlike their fellow union activists, they didn’t have an interest in seeing Barbie. I laughed out loud when, as a teenage volunteer organizer in 2017 during the UAW drive at the Nissan auto plant in Canton, Mississippi, they bonded with their beloved mentor, the legendary organizer Richard Bensinger, over their mutual love of Phil Ochs. It was during that losing Nissan campaign that Brisack adopted an analysis, based on their lived experience, that has stayed with them throughout their organizing career: the top of the union, balancing many commitments and goals, and also scarred by chronic failure, may sometimes betray the workers and staff members on the ground.

Brisack and Bensinger, a consultant to the UAW for this campaign, were certain that if the union organized a nationwide boycott of Nissan, the company would capitulate to the pressure and recognize the union at the Canton plant. But the union leadership didn’t want to invest in what it considered to be a doomed campaign and instead organized to lose, prematurely filing for an election the union lacked the strength to win, with the goal of “quietly abandon[ing] the project.” Whether their faith in the potential of a boycott was correct or not, there is a profound poignancy to a young organizer discovering in the prosaic details of their own bitter fight the grimmest, world-historical lessons of Kronstadt and POUM—or, more analogously, what Barbara Kopple captured in her mordantly titled 1990 documentary American Dream, which was about the UFCW double-crossing one of its meatpacking locals.

The cynical labor bureaucrats in Detroit only made Brisack more determined to fight and win. In one of the most interesting sections of the book, Bensinger, with Brisack’s help, started a school to teach labor activists how to “salt,” a vanguardist tactic in which union activists get hired at companies with the express goal of helping to inspire a union drive. The activists have a double consciousness. They are outsiders who become insiders—big-picture, ideologically conscious strategists who immerse themselves in the micro-procedures and local knowledge of what is now their own workplace. Salting drives employers crazy, but it’s legal, and, as Brisack notes, without it “we’re saying as trade unionists we will stand on the sidelines and wait for the occasional Spartacus or Boadicea to show up.”

The centerpiece of Brisack’s story is the Starbucks organizing campaign, which started in 2021 in Buffalo, where Brisack became a salting barista, and then expanded all over the country. Although neither Brisack nor Blanc underscore this point, the corporate ownership of Starbucks gave the SBWU an opening that unions don’t have at McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, and most other fast food outlets. Those stores are almost entirely franchised, forcing an organizing drive to deal not with one “boss” but countless dispersed bosses.

Brisack is suspicious of national union leadership and enraged by union-busting companies, but they love their rank-and-file comrades. Their affection for and solidarity with them spills from the page. When Brisack met Bensinger, they declared him to be the “reincarnation of Eugene Debs,” with blue eyes that “shone with solidarity.” (From what I know of him, Bensinger must have laughed reading this.) Workers, too, are extolled. “Phil was a burly and passionate activist with a strong sense of justice.” “Dave was easy going and warm hearted with a deep love of cats and the Ramones.” This can get a bit cloying, but Brisack gets to a larger truth via their unconditional testimonials about SBWU’s worker-activists. The militant core is savvy, worldly, and iconoclastic. Starbucks relies upon this edgy, young workforce and the customer milieu from which they emerged—a lynchpin of the company’s business model, but a vulnerability during the fight with SBWU.

Paradoxical tensions coursed through both the SBWU’s organizing campaign and Starbucks’s frenzied counterattack. As Brisack notes, 70 percent of Starbucks workers are women, and a highly disproportionate number of SBWU’s strongest supporters are gender nonconforming (including Brisack), gay, and/or trans. As both Brisack and Blanc remark, Starbucks has earned a reputation in the LGBTQ community for being relatively generous in providing gender-affirming-care benefits, which serve both workers and the corporation’s self-satisfied projection of caring capitalism.

Indeed, in the Starbucks organizing campaign, gender nonconformity is a modality through which class is lived. And Starbucks sought to exploit both gender and racial social categories by portrayed itself as a conscious company. Starbucks management reminded Black baristas that the union’s leadership was mostly white. Women managers flown in from Seattle made ostentatious references to their own lesbianism at captive audience meetings. Every worker was special to Starbucks in their own way, the managers said. So why bring in a third party that doesn’t understand the beautiful social ecology the company has created and encouraged?

For its part, SBWU is divided between its self-consciously leftist organizing cadre and the wishes of many of its rank and file. These workers, as Brisack reports, even union supporters, admire the company, buy into its socially conscious self-regard, and believe that they would be even better “partners” (Starbucks’s trite and implicitly anti-union term for its workforce) with management if their Seattle bosses would permit them to collectively bargain. Brisack is not crazy about this approach, but understands its utility: “it was strategically invaluable to position our union as a positive and collaborative force rather than a threat to the company. More important, it was what Starbucks workers themselves wanted, and what they believed their union would provide.” Brisack made pragmatic adjustments to their “Wobbly” worldview. A militant cadre has often provided the spark in momentous organizing struggles, but that same cadre must also adapt to those who want a union in the quotidian capitalist here and now—a point Brisack ruefully concedes in the conclusion to the book.

The core issues at actually existing Starbucks—scheduling uncertainty, arbitrary work rules, and low wages—affect baristas not only in Buffalo but around the country. After SBWU petitioned the board for three store elections in Buffalo, including at their Elmwood worksite, interested Starbucks workers bombarded the Buffalo union pioneers with requests for support and tips on how to do it. A worker-to-worker campaign was born—or “just Richard [Bensinger] and one hundred-plus Starbucks partners in a group chat.”

With or without Bensinger, the Buffalo workers were providing ideas, tips, and encouragement to their comrades everywhere. The campaign lacked the high ratio of staff organizers to workers that is considered the standard in organizing models. Workers ran the guts of the campaign, including communications and social media, which to Brisack is an unqualified good, but which Blanc, also a fan, admits can lead to a “less tightly run ship.”

Soon the campaign spread around the country. That’s when Starbucks dropped the happy talk and brought out the typical union buster’s playbook. The company suddenly provided important new benefits—but only to non-organized stores. It arbitrarily closed a local store. It mucked around with the schedules of union activists and then started making the working lives of pro-union workers miserable, forcing them to quit or sometimes firing them. (Eventually, Brisack quit too, when they saw that the company was trying to split their coworkers off from them.) The company’s move to flat-out intimidate and punish workers who supported the union slowed what had become a massive wave of union certification votes and, in the vast majority of cases, organizing victories. Brisack saw stressed out workers, even strong union advocates, worry about keeping their healthcare and getting enough shifts to earn a living. Yet the basic structure of struggle remained in place, peopled now by hundreds of committed activists like Brisack, and supported behind the scenes by SEIU, Workers United’s parent union, doing critical ancillary work in the courts and with government agencies.

The Starbucks campaign is unfinished at the end of Brisack’s book, as it remains at this writing. Brisack moved onto other fights. They were involved in a promising but abortive campaign at a Buffalo Tesla solar parts plant in which the perfidy of national union leadership again enraged them, to the point that they even blew up at their beloved mentor, Bensinger. A victorious campaign at a large Vermont Ben and Jerry’s store followed. Brisack ends the book by insisting that neither victory nor defeat ever ends the working class’s fight for justice, freedom, and power. Lotta continua.

Fast forward to the present: the company is now actually negotiating with SBWU and those 600 or so organized stores. Howard Schultz, the fanatically anti-union corporate celebrity and embodiment of the company, has retired yet again. This departure deprives SBWU of a personalized adversary, per the organizing axioms of Saul Alinsky, but also permits more pragmatic company leadership to weigh the costs of continued war with its workforce and part of its customer base.

For now, the only contract offer Starbucks has come forward with is lousy, and while organizing victories continue, the critical mass of stores necessary for a comprehensive national strike probably hasn’t been reached. As that situation continues to gestate, the workers’ leverage against a “hipster” company remains what it has been all along: undercut the faux-egalitarian, youthful coolness of the brand. That’s why Starbucks agreed to negotiate in the first place.

Brisack’s book provides thick description that demonstrates Blanc’s central argument: in modern America, only worker-to-worker organizing—with logistical and legal help, and necessary yet very light organizing staffing, from national labor organizations—can possibly achieve the kind of mass unionizing seen in decades past. Blanc’s We Are the Union explains in lucid, straightforward prose why this method has been so effective at Starbucks and other consumer-dependent companies, and why it promises to be more successful still.

According to Blanc, there are three commonalities in the worker-to-worker organizing model: workers have a “decisive say” in campaign strategy; workers start to organize before a national union joins the fight; and workers train other workers how to organize. (Brisack depicts all three.) Blanc contrasts worker-to-worker organizing with the same organizing models that used to vex me when I wrote my memos. Progressive organizing often ends up oscillating between efforts that are “well rooted but small,” like small community-based nonprofits, or “poorly rooted and big,” like a march with no follow-up.

Organizing is not what it used to be. As Blanc underscores, workplaces today are more geographically dispersed and dramatically smaller than they were during the great waves of unionization. This transformation has a huge effect on organizing strategy. In the past, for example, the UAW could bring GM to heel by organizing a couple of large plants, given that plants were pretty much all large and thus there weren’t very many of them, and controlling a few could disrupt the company’s manufacturing process. In 1939, Blanc writes, 76 percent of autoworkers were employed in plants of 1,000 workers or more. During the Great Depression, GM’s sixty-nine plants employed an average of almost 3,500 workers, and U.S. Steel’s 121 plants employed a little under 2,200 each.

Today, retail workers far outnumber manufacturing workers, who have declined from about 30 percent of the workforce in 1939 to 9 percent today. In the commanding corporations of the modern consumer economy, workers are distributed across many more workplaces, raising the costs to organize any given one, while lowering the strategic impact on the company’s profit generation. Walmart, the largest U.S. employer, employs an average of 283 workers at its 4,600 U.S. workplaces. Amazon, the second largest U.S. employer, employs an average of 856 workers at 1,285 workplaces. And Starbucks, eighth on the list, employs an average of a mere sixteen at over 15,000 workplaces.

There’s no way to organize these companies via the staff organizing model or the strategic targeting the labor movement has devoted itself to in the past several decades. There aren’t enough staff organizers, and there isn’t one key factory, mill, or even Amazon warehouse that will allow labor to control an entire production template or supply chain.

Blanc also observes that housing sprawl has correlated with smaller workplaces. Dense working-class communities are no longer prevalent. The “compactness of urban working-class life led to the flourishing of clubs and organizations . . . among workers of all backgrounds.” But longer commutes, often in private cars, fray the bonds of community, making it almost impossible to gather a majority of workers together at the same time in one venue. Again we can see why the reasonable option for unions might be to promote worker-to-worker organizing spread via social media.

In addition to Starbucks, Blanc uses several smaller case studies where worker-to-worker organizing has been effective and won first contracts, including a burger chain in the Pacific Northwest that forged an independent union and a small coffee chain based in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago that chose a mostly hands-off IBEW as its parent union. He also shows how worker-to-worker techniques have been used by established unions: the NewsGuild—a part of the CWA—pioneered a member organizing program that offers training, mentoring, and virtual workshops from worker organizers around the country. We see how companies selling consumer products to cosmopolitan customers create an opening for worker insurgents from that same cohort.

Despite the successes and proof of concept, these are all somewhat fragile endeavors, in danger of lacking resources and campaign cohesion at crucial moments of the fight. But as Blanc insists, that “is a necessary price to pay for involving far more people, more widely, and more deeply.” It is not that national unions have nothing to do in these campaigns but deduct the impending dues money. Smart, experienced staff organizers, like Bensinger, are a great resource for rookie worker organizers to draw upon. Capable labor lawyers are necessary to navigate our bureaucratized, juridical labor regime. Everything in an organizing campaign ends up being more expensive than one would hope, and a large union can provide needed infusions of cash. But unions must let go of the leash and push against their own institutional inertia.

Toward the end of We Are the Union, Blanc identifies five “driving forces” behind the good headlines for labor recently, which also include the UAW’s resurgence and the Amazon warehouse victory. Of the five factors, three of them—the pandemic (which created a unique opportunity for worker pushback against workplace safety and health dangers), a tight labor market, and an aggressively pro-labor NLRB and other state policy favoring unions—are what Blanc labels “short term.”

Of those short-term factors, it is worth noting how the Biden labor board, led by the creative former CWA general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, really made a difference in its brief moment of power. As Blanc asserts and Brisack grudgingly admits, there would probably have been no successful mass-scale Starbucks campaign unless the NLRB had permitted the union to organize store by store. And the union election protocols, indeed the entire rusty framework of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, much mocked by labor activists (including me) over the past couple of generations, provided a clear, procedural roadmap to convey to interested baristas around the country. In fact, Blanc’s survey of organizing workers indicates that just knowing there was a relatively easy-to-follow protocol to win your own union made unionization seem more conceivable. Trump has already reconstituted the NLRB, swiftly firing Abruzzo and hiring other anti-union officials. The effects of these changes are predictable, but remain to be seen. One way or another, the state matters.

Blanc’s final two driving forces—new communication technologies and youth radicalization—are what give the worker-to-worker organizing model its biggest oomph, and he believes they will “continue shaping the labor movement . . . for the foreseeable future.” Starbucks would have had a much easier time defeating a store-by-store organizing campaign twenty-five years ago (given the huge number of workplaces, store-by-store organizing was considered delusional). Today, the digital tools of mass and micro communication—whether connecting thousands across the country or permitting a five-person strategy session to convene during a blizzard—create mechanisms through which solidarity can spread.

Workers, of course, have to want to use these tools to build unions. And this is where an increasingly leftist generation of younger workers pulls its weight. The leftist turn has several sources; Blanc mentions some that also are expressed by activists in Brisack’s book. Bernie Sanders hovers over Brisack’s organizing journey, making several cameo appearances. He is not so much directly influential as he is a talismanic symbol of anti-capitalist fervor. Black Lives Matter, particularly the evanescent yet enormous actions in 2020, inspire many. As we see in Get on the Job and Organize, gender nonconformity can be refracted through class struggle, with workers demanding both necessary healthcare and dignity. Labor struggles also beget other labor struggles, according to Blanc’s research. And winning begets more winning. So finding the trigger is key.

Blanc notes that worker organizers of union campaigns in recent years have been “disproportionately college educated.” We can see this tendency affect the resurgent lion of midcentury manufacturing social unionism, the UAW: over a quarter of its current membership are graduate students. Key union officials and staff members come out of a post–Great Recession, ideologically self-conscious sector of downwardly mobile workers within the degenerating knowledge factories. This fissured intellectual labor force is now central to the logic of labor organizing in our moment. A few become professors and other professionals, allies to the struggle, while many others become baristas or low-wage workers in higher education, media, and nonprofits.

So far, unions are not clamoring to promote worker-to-worker organizing. Blanc hopes to see investment in an expanded Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), an independent initiative founded by DSA, the UE, and Bernie boosters, including Blanc himself, among others. EWOC provides support to any worker from any industry looking to organize their workplace, by connecting them with an experienced, volunteer leftist labor organizer. Right now, it’s an effective but small operation. Just 5,000 workers have reached out to EWOC since its founding in 2020, but Blanc argues that it could reach many more if it was properly funded by the institutional labor movement. The two main obstacles to this expansion are the hesitancy of establishment labor and potential limits to EWOC’s reach. Incumbent unions, protective of legacy workers, staff members, and their stolid yet real place in the hierarchy of civil society, are deeply risk averse. And although EWOC has gotten publicity pushes from influential leftists like Bernie, AOC, and Hasan Piker, worker interest in EWOC’s support has mostly been limited to “the young radicalized milieus around DSA, Labor Notes, and left unionists across the country.”

Together, Brisack and Blanc’s books elaborate an organizing process that promises something larger, more democratic and egalitarian, and more effective than giant rallies that quickly evaporate or grueling staff-led campaigns that cost too much and take too long. Worker-to-worker organizing isn’t Excalibur, but, as Blanc argues, “this new organizing model is workers’ best bet to win widely.”

What these books do not and cannot do is extend our horizons beyond what leftist politics itself can change for now. There are tens of millions of working-class Americans who are today immune to the emancipatory promise Brisack and Blanc offer their readers. Those working-class Americans are a segment of the Trumpian cross-class coalition of rural and small-town wage workers, independent contractors, professionals, small business owners, and state agents of law enforcement. A long-gestating post-1960s animus against cosmopolitan urbanism unites this coalition; while the rural remnant of post-CIO unionized workers (a waning group of extraction industry, steel, and aluminum workers) lie mostly in a defensive crouch. The much larger, non-union, wage-working component of this reactionary alliance has, by and large, not joined the organizing campaigns described in these books and elsewhere. The newly organized workers of the “young, radicalized milieus” have not been able to, in Blanc’s words, “break beyond the echo chamber.” That can only occur through the painstaking work of political struggle.

Worker-to-worker organizing, while not a theory of social change, does reward our search for a plausible method by which to fight the boss. Brisack and Blanc (and others like McAlevey and Pitkin) have described how workers’ social consciousness transforms them into new social beings during an organizing fight. This happens even with workers not predisposed to support the union. Worker-to-worker organizing puts the onus on peers to carry each other forward in struggle.

If intellectual labor matters at all, then Brisack and Blanc have produced valuable and provocative texts that could contribute to new pathways for labor’s growth. We cannot now know what yet we might concoct in the merciless laboratory of history.

Rich Yeselson, a member of the Dissent editorial board, worked in the labor movementfor over two decades.