SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
had been part of some “secret
plot” to unionize the coffee giant.
Starbucks also seemed to be
less than truthful. It flooded the
Buffalo market — and Fleischer’s
Elmwood store — with “support
managers” from around the
country who worked alongside
the baristas. The company said
the multimillion-dollar cam-
paign was designed to fix a mar-
ket in crisis: stores that were
understaffed, dirty and strug-
gling with insect infestations. But
it seemed to Fleischer that the
“support managers” were also
there to intimidate and spy on
union supporters.
Every few weeks, the company
summoned Fleischer and the oth-
er Buffalo baristas to mandatory
meetings designed to undermine
support for the union. The pre-
sentations warned that Workers
United — the larger union with
which the baristas were hoping
to affiliate — was losing members
and raising its dues, which the
company said could cost baristas
as much as $600 a year. “I need
that $600,” Fleischer said she
thought. “That’s a month’s rent.”
Sometimes she surprised her-
self with her long-suppressed
grievances and her assertiveness.
In one meeting she told Rossann
Williams, who oversees all of
Starbucks’s North American
stores, that the company’s ap-
proach to taking time off for
mental health, which required
baristas to find someone to cover
missed shifts, was “unaccept-
able.”
“I can’t believe I said that,” she
told Brisack after the meeting.
“But it is unacceptable,” Bri-
sack replied. “And that’s why you
need to be on our store’s bargain-
ing committee when we win.”
In November, just days before
the ballots were mailed to the
baristas, Fleischer filed into a
hotel ballroom in downtown Buf-
falo for an hour-long address
from Howard Schultz, the com-
pany’s founder. Schultz agreed to
go to Buffalo after learning that
Kevin Johnson, the company’s
chief executive, hadn’t visited the
city. Schultz’s trip was a sign of
how badly some top executives
and board members inside Star-
bucks wanted to stop the union
drive. They worried that a suc-
cessful organizing campaign
could depress Starbucks’s stock
price, that the union would make
it harder to fire malingering em-
ployees or hurt relations between
workers and their managers.
Schultz seemed to view the
union campaign as a personal
affront. He had stepped down as
chief executive in 2018, but Star-
bucks was still very much the
company that he had built over
30 years.
Clad in a gray cardigan and
khakis, Schultz gazed out at hun-
dreds of 20-somethings arrayed
around him in the hotel ball-
room. “I don’t want to give a
speech. I don’t have any notes,” he
told them. “I just want to speak
from the heart about what I
believe this company is about
and what we’ve tried to do over
these many years in building a
different kind of company.”
Soon Schultz was speaking
about his father who returned
home from World War II and
worked a series of “really tough,
blue-collar jobs” in Brooklyn be-
fore he suffered an injury at work
that left him “bitter and angry”
and his family dependent on
charity to survive. “I experienced
at the age of 7 the imprinting
shame, the vulnerability, the em-
barrassment of a family that was
really destitute,” Schultz said.
His goal at Starbucks, he con-
tinued, had been to “build the
kind of company my father never
got a chance to work for.”
As he was speaking, Fleischer
was remembering her own strug-
gles. She thought about her single
mother, who had worked a $7.25-
an-hour job at Wegmans and
depended on federal aid to feed
Fleischer and her brother. She
thought about the Christmas
when she was 8 and overheard
her mother saying that they were
on the verge of losing their house.
She thought about how hard she
worked to earn a bachelor’s de-
gree in social work and how,
despite all that hard work, she
still carried $25,000 in student
loan debt and qualified for Med-
icaid.
She had been poor her entire
life, and it had never been a
source of “shame” or embarrass-
ment for her.
A few yards away, Schultz was
talking about the “expensive”
benefits he had provided to even
his part-time baristas: a company
health plan, a stock option pro-
gram, free online college through
Arizona State University, online
mental health counseling. “Who
forced us to do it? Who pushed us
to do it? No one,” he repeated
again and again and again.
Fleischer felt as if she was
being “scolded by a parent” for
her ingratitude. She started goo-
gling Schultz and found an article
that said that he was worth more
than $4 billion and no longer felt
grateful at all. Now she was
annoyed.
“If you have $4 billion, you
should absolutely be providing
these benefits to us,” she recalled
thinking.
As soon as Schultz had fin-
ished speaking, a woman in a
black leather jacket jumped up
from her seat and strode toward
him. “I am an organizing member
of Starbucks Workers United,
and I am a barista,” she shouted
as she held aloft a copy of the
union’s “fair elections principles,”
which asked the coffee giant to
give union backers equal time to
make their case, and which the
company had declined to en-
dorse.
A Starbucks executive in a
$500 down vest stepped in front
of the young woman, blocking
her path to the company founder.
“Howard Schultz, please, if you
care!” she yelled.
But Schultz had already
slipped out the ballroom’s back
door.
Four days later, Fleischer
asked Eisen to meet to discuss the
union. Her biggest worry was the
extra $600 a year in union dues.
Eisen assured her that any new
contract would have to boost pay
to cover the extra dues expense or
it would be rejected by the union.
Fleischer said she hoped that
she might someday be able to sit
on her store’s bargaining com-
mittee, where she could press
Starbucks executives to improve
barista training and change the
sick leave policy that she had
complained was “unacceptable.”
Later that afternoon, she texted
Eisen that she was going to vote
for the union.
“I AM really passionate about
this job and company, and I want
my voice to be heard,” she wrote.
“I don’t know how else to make
that happen. But if/WHEN we
unionize, I want to be part of the
change that comes from it.”
***
Brisack, Eisen and Fleischer
locked arms, their eyes fixed on a
live video of a NLRB lawyer who
was counting the votes to deter-
mine whether their Starbucks on
Elmwood Avenue would become
the company’s first unionized
U.S. store.
More than four months had
passed since Brisack and Fleisch-
er’s first conversation about the
possibility of organizing a union.
The lawyer slit open the first
envelope. To win, the union need-ed at least 14 of the 27 employees
on the store’s rolls to vote yes.
Surrounding the three Elmwood
baristas were several dozen Star-
bucks employees from across
Buffalo.
The first seven votes were all
“yeses.”
“Landslide!” one barista called
out.
“Where’s Rossann?” yelled an-
other, a reference to the head of
Starbucks’s North America oper-
ations who had spent long
stretches of the campaign in their
Buffalo stores and had repeatedly
urged the baristas to oppose the
union.
Five consecutive no votes fol-
lowed. “What’s happening?” Bri-
sack whispered to Eisen who shut
her eyes and squeezed Brisack’s
left hand tight. Soon they were up
to 13 “yes” votes. They needed just
one more to go their way, and
they would officially be a union.
The NLRB lawyer opened the
next ballot.
“Yes,” he read.
Brisack, Fleischer and Eisen
clutched each other in a group
hug, and Eisen started to cry.
“Elmwood! Elmwood! Elm-
wood!” the baristas around them
chanted.
The NLRB lawyer counted the
votes at two more Buffalo Star-
bucks. One voted narrowly
against joining the union, and a
third store’s results remained in-
conclusive because of objections
to some ballots that several
weeks later were decided in the
union’s favor.
“We’re incredibly excited to
announce that we have won the
first unionized Starbucks in U.S.
history,” Eisen told a dozen re-
porters who had gathered at the
union’s office in a converted fac-
tory where Buffalo laborers once
manufactured World War II-era
warplanes.
The reporters asked essential-
ly the same question: What exact-
ly did the baristas want from
Starbucks? More affordable
health insurance? More predict-
able hours? Better pay? “A new
employee who starts today makes
63 cents less an hour than I do
after 11 years,” Eisen said. “So, is
that an issue? Sure.”
The reality, though, was that
Eisen, Brisack and Fleischer
wanted something bigger. In the
first hours following the union’s
victory, Eisen didn’t feel joy or
relief. Rather, she felt “resent-ment and anger” at how hard
Starbucks had fought to prevent
their store and others from
unionizing. The company had
postponed the balloting for
months with unsuccessful legal
challenges and targeted pro-
union baristas for the smallest
slip-ups, such as minor dress-
code infractions or accidental
swearing. In the case of the store
where votes were still in dispute,
the union charged that Starbucks
had attempted to dilute support
by more than doubling the staff.
Eisen told the reporters that
she wanted the company to stop
fighting, sit down with them and
“negotiate the best contract that
the service industry has ever
seen.”
Brisack stepped forward.
“We’ve said from Day One that all
we had to do was win one store,”
she added. And now that they
had won it, the Elmwood baristas
expected Starbucks to recognize
their new power.Three weeks later, the Elm-
wood baristas went on
strike. The day before they
walked out, Brisack, Eisen and
Fleischer took part in an emer-
gency meeting with three Star-
bucks executives and a company
lawyer to discuss the omicron
outbreak that had sidelined 10
Elmwood staffers.
The sides talked in circles for
nearly three hours. The baristas
asked Starbucks to close their
store for five days to stem the
outbreak and give people time to
return from isolation. When that
request was rejected, they
pushed for more robust protec-
tive equipment, such as KN
masks. The Starbucks executives
responded that they were “very
confident” in their safety proto-
cols and that there were enough
healthy baristas at Elmwood to
“meet the needs of the business.”
The next morning, around
5:45, a worker, who had gone to
the emergency room just days
earlier for a non-covid illness,
told Eisen that he was too weak to
finish his shift. He had come in,
he said, only because he didn’t
want to let down his co-workers
when they were already missing
so many people. Eisen drove him
home and returned to the store.
“I’m about to walk out of this
place,” one of the baristas com-
plained to her.
“Let’s do it,” Eisen replied.
“This is ridiculous.”
She quickly got assurances
from the union that it would
cover their lost pay and that
Starbucks couldn’t fire them for
striking. Then she quietly con-
sulted with the other baristas —
starting with Fleischer.
“Are you sure this is the move?”
Fleischer asked nervously. “Is
now the time?
“If we’re not going to walk out
over our health and well-being,
then there’s not anything worth
walking out for,” Eisen said. Bri-
sack woke to a series of texts
about the walkout from Fleischer
and raced down to the store to
join them.
Soon they were all standing on
the sidewalk and Eisen was text-
ing the rest of the workers to let
them know what had happened.
The store, staffed by a manager
and a shift supervisor, remained
open for about 45 more minutes
until the overwhelmed shift su-
pervisor uttered an agreed-upon
safe word — “Oklahoma” — and
the manager locked the doors.
The store stayed closed for two
days before Starbucks reopened
it with a mix of Elmwood workers
who chose not to strike and otherStarbucks personnel.
Brisack, Fleischer and Eisen
spent the five days after the
walkout on the sidewalk picket-
ing alongside their co-workers.
Inside the store, a few of their
overworked and frustrated col-
leagues struggled to serve the
store’s customers. Fleischer tried
not to make eye contact with
them through the windows. To
Fleischer, it was “kind of baffling”
that the company hadn’t given
them anything. Even their rela-
tively small request that Star-
bucks pay their out-of-pocket
costs on coronavirus tests was
denied. “I was expecting them to
do or say something,” she said.
She didn’t regret backing the
union, which had given her a
sense of mission and purpose.
But she was starting to doubt that
they would even be able to nego-
tiate a pay raise big enough to
offset their union dues. And she
worried that it would be awk-
ward when she and her fellow
strikers eventually returned to
work.
On Day 4 of their frigid, five-
day protest, Fleischer worked up
the courage to ask Brisack a
question that had been weighing
on her for months.
“Did you plan on all this hap-
pening when you started at Star-
bucks, or was it just a coinci-
dence?” she asked.
Brisack replied that she hadn’t
known whether it would be possi-
ble to unionize the coffee giant
when she took the job at the
Elmwood store. “I’d try to orga-
nize any place I worked, but this
wasn’t a grand scheme,” she said.
Without the union and, even
more important, the support of
other Buffalo baristas, there
would have been no union drive.
Another barista standing near-
by weighed in: “Are you like a
union vigilante? Are you just
going to leave and go to some
other coffee shop now?”
Brisack believed that the labor
movement was the only vehicle in
the country for building power,
outside of politics and big busi-
ness. She had long ago given up
on politics. Even though union
membership had been in a death
spiral for decades, she still be-
lieved that unions could serve as
a liberating force that could ad-
dress the country’s most dire
problems: poverty, racism, in-
equality.
Her four months fighting Star-
bucks had given her a visceral
sense of how hard the battle was
going to be. “How are we ever
going to overthrow capitalism
when it’s this hard to unionize a
single store in Buffalo?” she had
said, half-jokingly, after Elm-
wood’s victory.
To succeed, she knew that the
union couldn’t afford to negoti-
ate a “good enough” contract
with Starbucks. “It has to be a
great one,” she said. And she
realized that a single unionized
store was never going to compel
the company to negotiate in good
faith.
Every day, new Starbucks
stores were petitioning the NLRB
for union elections. The grass-
roots movement was spreading
via Instagram and Twitter and
had grown by mid-February to 78
stores from all over the country:
Rochester, N.Y.; Kansas City, Mo.;
Santa Cruz, Calif.; Eugene, Ore.;
Tallahassee; Everett, Wash.
Starbucks was still fighting the
unionization push, but now it
was waging a much tougher and
potentially more expensive
multi-front war.
Brisack also knew that the
company, which espoused liber-
al values and even sold a Star-
bucks-themed Black Lives Mat-
ter T-shirt, was vulnerable to
allegations of union busting. In
February, Starbucks fired seven
employees in Memphis who
were seeking to unionize their
store. The company said the
workers violated security rules,
but the union claimed the firings
were retaliation for labor activi-
ty. “This might be a turning
point,” Brisack said of the Mem-
phis firings. “They can’t do this
and be the company they say
they are.”
The bigger the baristas’ move-
ment, the greater the chances
that Starbucks’s resistance would
provoke a backlash that might
damage its bottom line. Sixty
stores out of 8,947 probably
wasn’t enough. The union might
need 600 or even 6,000. It would
need help from activists, politi-
cians and possibly celebrities.
When she thought about her
own future, Brisack’s thoughts
turned to her childhood hero
Eugene Debs, who set her on her
journey to Buffalo. Debs famous-
ly had said: “When I rise, it will be
with the ranks [of the working
class], and not from the ranks.”
Brisack wanted to do the same.
Her plan was to stay in Buffalo in
the apartment she had decorated
with furniture from Goodwill,
continue as a barista and build a
movement that she believed
could change Starbucks, and
shift the balance of power in
America back to people like Eis-
en, Fleischer and her.PHOTOS BY LIBBY MARCH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Jaz Brisack, left, and Michelle Eisen, leave a bargaining training discussion in Buffalo last month. Eisen’s 11-year tenure with Starbucks
didn’t suggest she’d support changes a union could bring. But the pandemic, which took a toll on her mental health, changed her views.Jaz Brisack counts American socialist Eugene Debs as a personal hero. His work attuned her to the
great labor battles of the early 19 00 s and put her on a path to a full scholarship at the University of
Mississippi, a failed campaign to unionize a Nissan plant and, eventually, her Rhodes scholarship.“While there is alower class, I am init, and while there isa criminal element, Iam of it, and whilethere is a soul inprison, I am notfree.”
Eugene Debs, a personal hero
of Jaz Brisack, to a jury that was
about to convict him of inciting
resistance to the draft during
World War I