Most weekends in the weekend, Jazz Brisak gets up around 5, drives his semi-conscious body into a Toyota Prius and makes his way through Buffalo to Starbucks on Elmwood Avenue. After a supervisor unlocks the door, she enters, checks for Covid’s symptoms, and helps prepare the store for customers.
“I’m almost always at the bar if I open,” said Ms. Brisak, who has an aesthetic appearance and long reddish-brown hair that parted in the middle. “I like to steam milk, pour latte.”
The Starbucks door is not the only one open to her. As a senior at the University of Mississippi in 2018, Ms. Brisak was one of 32 Americans to win Rhodes Scholarships to fund training in Oxford, England.
Many students seek a scholarship because it can pave the way for a career in the highest ranks of law, academia, government or business. They are motivated by a mixture of ambition and idealism.
Mrs. Brisak became a barista for similar reasons: she believed that this was simply the most urgent claim to her time and her many talents.
When she joined Starbucks in late 2020, none of the company’s 9,000 locations in the United States had a union. Ms. Brisak hoped to change that by helping to reunite her Buffalo stores.
It is unlikely that she and her colleagues have gone far beyond their goal. Since December, when its store became the only corporate Starbucks in the United States with a certified union, more than 150 other stores have voted in favor of unionization, and more than 275 have filed for election. Their actions come amid growing public support for unions, which peaked last year in the mid-1960s, and a growing consensus among center-left experts that growing union membership could displace millions of workers. in the middle class.
Ms. Brisak’s replacement over the weekend represents all of these trends, as well as another: a change in the views of the most privileged Americans. According to Gallup, union approval among college graduates rose from 55 percent in the late 1990s to 70 percent last year.
I have seen this first hand in more than seven years of reporting on trade unions, as the growing interest among white-collar workers has coincided with wider enthusiasm for the labor movement.
In a conversation with Ms. Brisak and her fellow scientists from Rhodes, it became clear that the change has even reached this rare group. American scholars from Rhodes, whom I encountered a generation earlier, used to say that while they were in Oxford, they were middle-class people who believed in the modest role of government. They didn’t spend much time thinking about unions as students, and what they thought would probably be skeptical.
“I was a child of the 1980s and 1990s, immersed in the centrist politics of the age,” wrote Jake Sullivan, a 1998 Rhodes scholar who advised President Biden on national security and was a senior contributor to Hillary Clinton.
In contrast, many of Ms Brisak’s classmates in Rhodes have reservations about market-oriented policies from the 1980s and 1990s and strong support for trade unions. Several have told me that they are enthusiastic about Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have made reviving the labor movement a priority in their 2020 presidential campaigns.
Even more than other indicators, such a change could herald the return of unions whose membership in the United States is at its lowest percentage in about a century. This is because the people who win prestigious scholarships are the ones who later take power – who decide whether to fight the unions or negotiate with them about whether the law should make it easier or harder to organize. of workers.
As recent union campaigns at companies such as Starbucks, Amazon and Apple have shown, the conditions of the struggle are still largely determined by corporate leaders. If these people are increasingly sympathetic to work, then some of the key barriers to unions may fall apart.
On the other hand, Jazz Brisak is not waiting to find out.
The Battle of Buffalo
Ms. Brisak moved to Buffalo after Oxford for another job as an organizer at Workers United, where she also worked as a mentor she met in college. Once there, she decided to take a second concert at Starbucks.
“Her philosophy was to get to work and get organized. She wanted to teach the industry, “said Gary Bonadona Jr., a senior employee of Workers United in upstate New York. “I said “OK”.”
In its rejection of the campaign, Starbucks often blames “outside union forces” for intending to harm the company, as suggested by its CEO, Howard Schultz, in April. The company identified Ms Brisak as one of those intruders, noting that she was paid by Workers United. (Mr Bonadona said she was the only Starbucks employee on the union’s salary.)
But the impression created by Ms. Brisak and her fellow organizers is that she is attached to the company. Even when they point out shortcomings – insufficient staff, insufficient training, low pay for internships, anything they want to improve – they embrace Starbucks and its distinctive culture.
They express a sense of camaraderie and community – many of them consider themselves regular customers among their friends – and enjoy their coffee experience. In the morning, when Ms. Brisak’s store is not busy, employees often hold tastings.
A Starbucks spokesman said Mr Schultz believed employees did not need a union if they believed in him and his motives, and the company said salary increases based on seniority would take effect this summer.
One Friday in late February, Ms. Brisak and another barista, Casey Moore, met in the two-bedroom rental apartment that Ms. Brisak shared with three cats to discuss the union’s strategy over breakfast. Naturally, the conversation turned to coffee.
“Jazz has a lot of barista drink,” Ms. Moore said.
Ms. Brisak clarified: “These are four blonde ristretto – this is a lighter roasted espresso – with oat milk. It’s basically an ice latte with oatmeal. If we had sugar cookie syrup, I would take it. Now that that’s not the case, it’s usually clear. “
That afternoon, Ms. Brisak made a call to Zoom from her living room with a group of Starbucks employees interested in unionization. This is an exercise she and other Buffalo organizers have repeated hundreds of times since last fall as workers across the country try to follow suit. But in almost every case, Starbucks workers outside of Buffalo turned to the organizers, not the other way around.
Updated
June 17, 2022, 4:50 p.m. ET
This particular group of workers in Mrs. Brissack’s college town in Oxford, Miss., Seemed to demand even less difficult sales than most. When Ms. Brisak said she was attending the University of Mississippi, one of the workers motioned for her to leave, as if her celebrity had overtaken her. “Oh, yes, we know Jazz,” the worker exploded.
Hours later, Ms. Brisak, Ms. Moore, and Michelle Eisen, a longtime Starbucks employee also involved in the organization, met with two union attorneys at the union’s office at a former car plant. The National Labor Council counted the ballot papers at the Starbucks election in Mesa, Arizona – the first real test of whether the campaign is taking root nationally, not just in a union stronghold like New York. The hall was tense when the first results appeared.
“Can you feel my heart beating?” Mrs. Moore asked her colleagues.
After a few minutes, however, it became clear that the union would win the defeat – the final count was 25 to 3. Everyone turned slightly, as if everyone had suddenly entered a world of dreams, where unions were much more popular than they had ever imagined. . One of the lawyers swore before thinking, “Anyone organized down there.”
Ms. Brisak seemed to catch the mood when she read a text from a colleague in the group: “I am very happy to be crying and eating a one-week ice cream cake.”
Black antifree T-shirt at the official event
For once, it seems that Mrs Brisak is on a different path. As a child, she adored Lyndon Johnson and imagined running for office. At the University of Mississippi, she was elected president of the Democrats College.
She had developed an interest in work history as a teenager when money was sometimes limited, but it was largely an academic interest. “She had read Eugene Debs,” said Tim Dolan, a national scholarship adviser at the university at the time. It was like, oh my God. Come on. ‘”
When Richard Bensinger, a former director of organization at AFL-CIO and United Automobile Workers, came to speak on campus, she realized that union organizing was more than a historical curiosity. She talked about her path to an internship in a union campaign in which he was involved in a nearby Nissan plant. It didn’t go well. The union accused the company of campaigning for racial division, and Ms. Brisak was disappointed with the loss.
“Nissan has never paid for what it did,” she said. (In response to allegations of “intimidation tactics”, the company said at the time that it had tried to provide information to workers and clear up misconceptions.)
Mr Dolan noted that she was getting tired of basic politics. There were times between her sophomore year and her junior year when I pointed her to something and she said, “Oh, they’re too conservative.” I sent her an article in the New York Times and she said, “Neoliberalism is dead.”
In England, where she arrived in the autumn of 2019 at the age of 22, Ms. Brisak was a regular at the Solidarity Film Club, which screened films about labor struggles around the world, and wore a sweatshirt with a picture of Karl Marx’s head. . She generously interpreted the term “black tie” at an annual dinner in Rhodes, wearing a black coat over a black antifa shirt.
“I went and got dresses and everything – I wanted to fit in,” said a friend and fellow scientist from Rhodes, Leah Crowder. “I always…
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