Most weekend mornings, Jaz Brisack gets up around 5:00 am, loads her semiconscious body into a Toyota Prius, and drives across Buffalo, New York, to Starbucks on Elmwood Avenue. After a supervisor opens the door, she clocks in, checks for Covid symptoms, and helps prepare the store for customers.
“I’m almost always at the bar when I open it,” said Brisack, who has a thrift store look and long auburn hair that she parted in the middle. “I like the steaming milk, serving the ‘latte’.”
The Starbucks door is not the only one that has opened for her. As a graduate of the University of Mississippi in 2018, Brisack was one of 32 Americans to have won Rhodes Scholarships, which fund studies in Oxford, England.
Many students seek the scholarship because it can pave the way for a career in the upper echelons of law, universities, government or business. They are motivated by a mixture of ambition and idealism.
Brisack became a barista for similar reasons: she believed it was simply the most urgent use of her time and her many talents.
When Brisack joined Starbucks in late 2020, none of the company’s 9,000 US locations had a union. She hoped to change that by helping to unionize her stores in Buffalo.
But Brisack and his co-workers far exceeded their goal. Since December, when his store became the only corporate-owned Starbucks in the United States with a certified union, more than 150 other stores have voted to unionize and more than 275 have filed papers to hold elections.
His actions accompany a surge in public support for unions, which last year reached the highest point since the mid-1960s, and a growing consensus among center-left pundits that increased union membership could drive millions of workers to the middle class.
Brisack’s weekend shift represents all of these trends, plus a shift in the minds of more privileged Americans. According to a Gallup poll, union approval among college graduates has grown from 55% in the late 1990s to 70% last year.
I have seen this firsthand in more than seven years of reporting on unions, as growing interest among white-collar workers has coincided with broader enthusiasm for the labor movement. Talking to Brisack and his fellow Rhodes fellows, it was clear that the change had reached even that small group.
The American Rhodes Scholars I met from an earlier generation often said that while they were at Oxford, they were fence-sitters who believed in a modest role for government. They didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about unions as students, and when they did it would probably be with suspicion.
“I was a child of the 1980s and 1990s, steeped in centrist politics at the time,” wrote Jake Sullivan, a 1998 Rhodes Scholar who is a national security adviser to President Joe Biden and was one of Hillary Clinton’s top advisers.
In contrast, many of Brisack’s colleagues at Rhodes express reservations about the market-oriented policies of the 1980s and 1990s and strong support for unions. Several told me they were excited about Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have made reviving the labor movement a priority in their 2020 presidential campaigns.
The fight in Buffalo
Brisack moved to Buffalo after Oxford for another job, as an organizer for the Workers United union, where a mentor she met in college worked. There, she decided to take a second job at Starbucks.
“Her philosophy was to work and organize. She wanted to learn about the industry,” said Gary Bonadonna Jr., the Workers United’s top official in upstate New York. “I said OK.”
In its reaction to the campaign, Starbucks has often blamed “external union forces” that intended to harm the company, as its CEO, Howard Schultz, suggested in April. The company identified Brisack as one of these intruders, noting that she receives a salary from Workers United. (Bonadonna said she was the only Starbucks employee on the union’s payroll.)
But the impression that Brisack and his fellow employee-organizers give is one of affection for the company. Even when they point out flaws — understaffed, insufficient training, low pay for length of service, anything they want to improve — they embrace Starbucks and its distinctive culture.
Brisack and his colleagues talk about their sense of camaraderie and community — many count regulars among their friends — and delight in their coffee experience. On mornings when Brisack’s store isn’t full, employees often do tastings.
A Starbucks spokesperson said Schultz believes employees don’t need a union if they have faith in it and its motives, and the company said length-of-service pay increases will take effect this summer.
On a Friday in February, Brisack and another barista, Casey Moore, met in her two-bedroom apartment over breakfast to discuss union strategy. Naturally, the conversation turned to coffee.
“Jaz has a very barista drink,” Moore said.
Brisack elaborated: “It’s four shots of ristretto blonde – a lighter roast of espresso – with oat milk. It’s basically an iced latte with oat milk.”
That afternoon, Brisack made a Zoom call from his living room with a group of Starbucks employees who were interested in unionizing. It’s an exercise she and other activists in Buffalo have repeated hundreds of times since last fall, as workers across the country sought to follow her lead. But in nearly every case, Starbucks employees outside of Buffalo contacted the organizers, not the other way around.
This particular group of workers, in the college town of Brisack in Oxford, Mississippi, seemed to require even less effort than most. When Brisack said that she had also attended the University of Mississippi, one of the staff interrupted her, as if her celebrity preceded her. “Oh yes, we know Jaz,” the worker launched.
A few hours later, Brisack, Moore and Michelle Eisen, a former Starbucks employee also involved in the organization, met with two union lawyers in the union office in a former auto plant. The National Labor Relations Board was counting votes in 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 when the first results came in.
Within minutes, however, it was clear that the union would win by rout – the final score was 25 to 3. Everyone was a little excited, as if they had suddenly entered a dream world where unions were far more popular than would never have imagined.
Brisack seemed to capture the mood when he read a message from a co-worker to the group: “I’m so happy I’m crying and eating a week old ice cream cake.”
Brisack suddenly seemed to be on a different path. As a child, she idolized Lyndon Johnson and fancied running for office. At the University of Mississippi, she was elected Democratic Student President.
She developed an interest in labor history in her teens, when money was sometimes tight, but it was primarily an academic interest. “She had read Eugene Debs,” said Tim Dolan, the university’s national scholarship adviser at the time. “It was like, ‘Oh my God. Wow!'”
When Richard Bensinger, former director of organizing for 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 got an internship in a union campaign he was participating in at a nearby Nissan plant. Did not went well. The union accused the company of running a racially divisive campaign, and Brisack was disillusioned with the defeat.
“Nissan never paid a consequence for what it did,” she said. (In response to accusations of “scare tactics,” the company said at the time that it had sought to provide workers with information and clarify misperceptions.)
Dolan could see that she was growing tired of mainstream politics. “There were moments between sophomore and junior year when I would guide her towards something, and she would say, ‘Oh, they’re too conservative.’ I would send her a New York Times article and she would say, ‘Neoliberalism is dead’.”
In England, where he arrived during the fall of 2019 at the age of 22, Brisack regularly attended a “solidarity” film club that showed films about labor struggles around the world. She liberally reinterpreted the term “black tie” at an annual Rhodes dinner, wearing a black coat over a black “antifa” T-shirt.
“I went and got gowns and everything; I wanted to fit in,” said a friend and fellow Rhodes fellow, Leah Crowder. “I always loved how she never tried to fit in at Oxford.”
Looking for 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 let me know. “I don’t think we can lose,” she said of the vote at her store. At the time, no corporate-owned Starbucks in the country were unionized. The union would win there by a ratio of more than 2-1.
It’s hard to overstate the challenge of unionizing a large corporation that doesn’t want to be unionized. Employers can inundate workers with anti-union messages, while unions do not have protected access to workers on the job. While it is officially illegal to threaten, discipline or fire workers who wish to unionize, the consequences of doing so are generally minimal.
At Starbucks, the NLRB issued complaints judging the merits of these allegations. However, the union continues to win elections – more than 80% of the more than 175 votes in which the council declared a winner. (Starbucks denies it broke the law, and a federal judge recently rejected a request to reinstate pro-union workers that the labor council said Starbucks had illegally forced out of.)
Although Brisack was one of dozens of early leaders in the union campaign, the imprint of his personality is visible. In store after store across the country, workers who support the union do not give ground in meetings with company directors.
The challenge for Brisack and his colleagues is that while the young, even the youngest elites, are increasingly pro-union, change has not yet reached many of the country’s most powerful leaders. Or, more specifically, change has yet to come to Schultz, the 68-year-old in his third round as Starbucks CEO.
Schultz has long opposed unions at Starbucks, but Brisack, for example, believes that even corporate executives can be persuaded. She recently spoke on an Aspen Institute panel on workers’ rights. She even considered using her Rhodes connections to make a personal appeal to Schultz, something Bensinger despised but which other organizers believe she can achieve.
“Richard is making fun of me for even considering asking someone from Rhodes to broker a meeting with Howard Schultz,” Brisack said in February.
“I’m sure if you met Howard Schultz he’d think, ‘She’s so cool,'” replied Moore, his co-worker. “He’d say, ‘I see. I’d like to join a union with you.’
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
