Janine Jackson interviewed Jacobin‘s John Logan about Amazon and Starbucks organizing for the October 7, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

Janine Jackson: Between well-paid people telling you that the solution to high prices is unemployment, and the news of the latest weather catastrophe separated by several pages from the news about how fossil fuel profits are doing really well, and then the story of the latest outright violation of basic human rights by police or by the courts—it is very meaningful to see news about how another group of Starbucks baristas or of Amazon warehouse workers has got together and decided to fight for better working conditions and dignity for themselves, and to encourage, by extension, all who witness their example.

Worker organizing—inside or outside of unions—is the counter-narrative, and the counter-reality, to the corporate control and co-optation we see everywhere around us. It matters very much how these efforts are portrayed in the press.

Joining us now to talk about that is John Logan. He’s professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, and he’s been writing about organizing within the corporate world for Jacobin. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, John Logan.

John Logan: Hi, very glad to be on. Thank you for inviting me.

JJ: Listeners probably know that organizing has been happening, but we hear maybe less about the lengths—or depths, we might say—that super-powerful, successful company owners are going to to resist workers getting together to represent themselves.

Meanwhile, we do see publicity for those companies all day and all night, in ads and social media promotions and supposedly “earned news” by outlets that present a “secret menu” or a “hidden deal” as a news event.

So maybe let’s start with your recent piece for Jacobin on this. Starbucks and Amazon have been violating actual law, according to the National Labor Relations Board, in their fight against workplace organizing, yes? It’s not just distasteful, they’re actually violating the law.

JL: Right. You know, an important thing to say straight off is the law itself is very weak, so there is so much that Starbucks and Amazon can do to fight unions that is legal under the National Labor Relations Act. All sorts of things that would not be legal in other advanced democracies, but are legal in the US.

But they’re not just doing that. They’re doing things, and doing them again and again, that are clearly unlawful. And in the case of Starbucks, the National Labor Relations Board currently has over 350 open unfair labor practice charges against Starbucks.

And that’s truly a stunning number within a relatively short period of time. We’re talking about a campaign that really only started in August of last year, in Buffalo and upstate New York, and for the first few months, really until December, January, was only in Buffalo, and then subsequently spread nationwide.

The only comparable thing that I can think of is the UAW dispute with Caterpillar in the 1990s, where eventually there were over 400 unfair labor practice allegations against Caterpillar. But that campaign took place over a seven- or eight-year period. So Starbucks is really just operating as if the law does not apply to it.

What happens is that Starbucks violates the law. The regional director in Buffalo issued a complaint against Starbucks in May, saying that Starbucks had committed almost 300 individual violations of federal labor law in Buffalo alone, in a three-month period leading up to the first elections in December.

The company is alleged to have fired over 100 pro-union baristas. It has closed union stores in Buffalo and Ithaca, New York; in Seattle, in Portland and unionizing stores in other places.

This is a remarkable union campaign that’s now spread to over 240 Starbucks stores around the country, [which] have voted to unionize. But there’s no question, if it were not for these rampant, unlawful union-busting practices, it would be 2,000 or 3,000. It would be far, far more stores.

The one thing that Starbucks did that had the greatest impact is in April, it announced that it was going to increase wages and benefits, but only for non-union stores. If you had voted to unionize or if you were engaged in organizing, you would not be getting these new benefits and wages. And finally it implemented these in August.

Later in August, the NLRB said this was unlawful. This was clearly designed to create a chilling atmosphere and to discourage workers from becoming involved in the nationwide organizing campaign.

What did Starbucks do? It said, we think that is wrong, we’re going to fight it. And then in September, it announced yet another wave of increased benefits that apply only to non-union workers.

And with Amazon, Amazon is still contesting the result of the historic victory of the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island on April 1. Amazon is still not accepting that result. The NLRB recommended that Amazon‘s election objections be dismissed in their entirety. They were the most frivolous objections, many of them. They were all thoroughly investigated, they were all dismissed. Amazon has said, we don’t accept that.

It now goes to the regional director. Regional director will undoubtedly agree with the hearing officer. Amazon will then appeal it to the full board in Washington, DC. Because it’s objections and not a complaint, they can’t appeal to the federal courts immediately, but they can simply refuse to bargain on the basis of, they don’t accept the election result.

Then the union has to make a complaint. The NLRB would come out with a bargaining order. Amazon can say, “We’re still not bargaining, because we don’t accept the election was fair.” And so the board would have to go to the courts to enforce the bargaining order. All of this will take months, if not years.

And Amazon and Starbucks know that time is on their side. Time is not on the side of pro-union workers.

So Andy Jassy, the new CEO of Amazon, has already said, this is going to be a really long fight over the election result, not over anything else, but over accepting the election result, where workers very clearly voted to support the Amazon Labor Union.

And he said, the NLRB is not going to rule against itself, meaning they’re going to take this all the way to the courts.

And so what that means, and I apologize for going on….

JJ: I appreciate it.

JL: What it means is that Amazon and Starbucks can win by losing at the NLRB,  simply because of their resources, because of their determination to fight to the death, because of their ability to appeal and delay at every stage.

Even if every decision goes against them, which almost certainly it will, they can still undermine these union campaigns, simply by using months and months and years of delay.

JJ: It’s exactly as you’ve reported: Momentum is an important force for folks who are doing any kind of social activism—organizing momentum, feeling that you’ve got the wind at your back.

And so these deep pockets, this is where that money comes in, to just delay and delay and delay. And there’s an expression that we hear from corporations sometimes, or their lobbyists, that they talk about “skating where the puck’s going to be.”

In other words, the law is not on their side and they know it, but they are confident in their ability to either draw it out long enough, or to actually get their legislative arms at work in bending the law.

So in other words, they can just de facto live the conditions that they want to live while workers are really on the edge and are really, in the example of Amazon that you cite, they’ve won this election and yet they still have to go to work, knowing that management hates them, and is trying to take away what they’ve won.

I just, to bring it to media, I feel like if media would tell the story from a different perspective, it would change a lot.

JL: Yes. And, you know, there has been some good media coverage of these stories. The problem is it’s all very fragmented. We need stories that explain the Amazon Labor Union story and the Starbucks Workers United story in their entirety, and the myriad of unfair labor practice charges of unlawful behavior that they have been subjected to by these companies, and how that makes it virtually impossible for pro-union workers to get a fair choice, as the law demands that they get when they’re up against these companies.

As you said, Amazon has a 150% turnover rate in many of its warehouses, and an entirely new workforce every nine months or so. It’s deliberately trying to drive pro-union workers out of the workplace.

Starbucks is doing the same. It’s firing them, it’s reducing their hours. It’s introducing new scheduling policies that are targeted in a way that pro-union workers will be driven out of the workplace.

So they’re delaying recognizing unions, they’re delaying bargaining with unions, and all the time, their retaliation against the union doesn’t get better after the union wins; the union-busting actually gets worse after the union wins.

So it’s just a very clear indication that they think the choice on whether or not a union comes into Amazon or Starbucks should be made by them, should be made by Howard Schultz, the interim CEO of Starbucks, or Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon.

The law says it is the workers who are supposed to decide, but they don’t accept that, they think they should ultimately make the decision.

And they have even said so explicitly. In an interview with the New York Times, Howard Schultz said that he would never engage—”never,” that was his word—he would never engage with the union, because the customer experience would be undermined if a “third party,” as he sees it, were to come into the stores.

But the law doesn’t say—I don’t accept that the customer experience would be undermined in any way, but even if that were true, which it’s not, the law says that’s not the point.

The point is it’s the workers’ choice whether they want union representation. It’s not his choice. It’s not to do with the customer experience. It’s to do with what the workers want.

And a lot of these Amazon workers and Starbucks workers have stood up for their right to unionize heroically. But you shouldn’t have to be a hero in order to exercise what is supposed to be a federally protected right.

JJ: Absolutely. Let’s get into Howard Schultz’s rhetoric just for a minute, because these companies, they have image-management as a fully funded department, right? So you would hope that reporters would have their guard up, recognizing that.

So you hear workers described as “partners,” and why would you bring in “outside agents” to “disrupt our relationship”? Never mind that the unionbusters never come from the place where the organizing drive is. They’re always brought in on a plane, but, you know, OK.

It’s all such horse hockey. It’s such gaslighting about what the actual worker/owner relationship is about, and my feeling is that corporate media propagate that line, frankly, when they not just report earnestly on owner rhetoric about “partners,” but also when they report these issues as though workers and consumers were different populations with different interests. That seems to me a fundamental failure of reporting here.

JL: Yeah, no, I totally agree. And if you look at Starbucks, Starbucks is spending tens of millions of dollars in this anti-union campaign. It’s using the country’s largest, and in fact the world’s largest so-called union avoidance law firm, Littler Mendelson—scores of Littler attorneys all over the country are trying to undermine workers’ right to choose a union.

It’s also using the world’s largest PR firm, Edelman, to help with this anti-union messaging.

And as you say, to talk about these unions as third parties—of course, we know that’s never true, it’s just always the line anti-union corporations use. But in these particular campaigns, it could not be more clearly nonsense.

I mean, Amazon Labor Union didn’t exist two years ago. It was formed by Chris Smalls, who was sacked for protesting inadequate Covid safety precautions. The lead organizers were all Amazon workers inside the JFK8 Staten Island facility. The workers are the union in a very, very real sense. The union is not an outside party.

Same thing with Starbucks Workers United. That union is affiliated with an established union, Workers United, but the only reason it’s had such incredible success is because of the dynamism of its intrepid worker organizers, Starbucks workers who are organizing their own stores all across the country.

And so you could not have clearer cases where you have these multi-billion dollar corporations spending tens of millions of dollars on trying to prevent workers from exercising what’s supposed to be a federally protected right.

Whereas, on the other side, you have workers inside warehouses, inside coffee shops, talking to each other and talking about the benefits of having an independent voice, and how that’s necessary to get respect and dignity at work.

But as you said, to have any stories in which you give Starbucks and Amazon any kind of credibility in their anti-union statements, in these cases, is just truly ridiculous, because we know what’s happening here.

We know that these are grassroots organizing campaigns. Workers who earn $15, $17, $18 an hour, maybe, at Amazon, against multi-billion-dollar corporations who will spend whatever is necessary and who have unbelievable expertise, sophistication and a total disregard for the law. They will do anything they can.

If they can break the union legally, they would probably do so, but they don’t care. Their only objective is to keep the union out. And so if it takes committing, in the case of Starbucks, hundreds and hundreds of violations of federal labor law, the penalties for doing so are absolutely meaningless. So they will do that. That is so clearly the case with these campaigns.

JJ: And yet in the face of that, and that’s where I want to go to, because it seems to me that more and more people are just not falling for that bluff.

I wish media would take seriously this kind of, “Nice job you got there. Shame if anything were to happen to it.” But in the face of that, and in the face of the news coverage that says Amazon, for example, is a genius company, that’s capitalism doing what it should. And that separated, as you call out, from a story that they might also do about how Amazon workers have to pee in a jar, you know?

But it’s still a separate story from, “Isn’t Amazon a fantastic example of what we want from companies?”

Nevertheless, support for labor unions is growing. Union election petitions are growing. Strikes are growing. People are ceasing to fall for it.

So let’s maybe end with that, just like, it’s happening anyway. And then maybe your thoughts about how journalism could help rather than hinder.

JL: We don’t even need journalism that’s cheerleading for the unions. We just need journalism that explains what happens, the incredible pressures that American workers are subjected to when they try to exercise their legal right to form a union at companies like Starbucks and like Amazon.

And the entire labor movement does owe a great debt of gratitude to these workers involved in these two campaigns, because, as you said, it has spread, to Trader Joe’s, to REI, to Apple retail stores, to Chipotle, to other places; to Home Depot, we heard most recently.

But what it does is, it gives people an education in how our labor laws don’t work. More people are engaged with the issues than has been true for decades. As you said, in the most recent Gallup poll on this, 71% of the American public approve of unions, even higher numbers among young workers.

And that despite the organizational weakness of unions, despite the fact that unions only represent 6.1% in the private sector. The last time unions had that level of public approval was 1965, but unions represented almost 30% of the workforce back then.

And so we see it very clearly among young workers. Overwhelmingly young workers approve of unions. But they have really, really low rates of union membership, and that’s because young workers work overwhelmingly in what I would call young workplaces, places like Starbucks, places like REI, places like Trader Joe’s, and those workplaces are overwhelmingly non-union.

And because of the weak laws, and particularly because of the incredibly strong employer corporate opposition, it is very difficult for them to form unions in those workplaces.

But as you said, despite that, we now have a wave of organizing throughout the country. People are taking inspiration from the union victories at Amazon and at Starbucks.

They’re thinking, “We should do that in our own workplace. We don’t just have to quit. We can stick around and organize, and try to win respect and dignity at work.”

And so a lot of these campaigns will not be successful, because they’re all David versus Goliath stories. There’s another Amazon Labor Union election in Albany next week. I’m hopeful, but we don’t know what the outcome will be. But it would be a remarkable win again if they were to win in Albany.

But despite that, something historic is changing. You have, as you said, the growing number of people talking union: Amazon workers, Starbucks workers, museum workers, nonprofit workers, gallery workers, tech and online media workers. It’s growing.

More people are paying attention to labor issues. Something has changed as a result of the pandemic. We don’t know what the legacy of these particular campaigns is going to be. But I think there’s very good reason to believe that the labor movement, as a process by which people get together collectively to win dignity and respect at the workplace, these movements at Starbucks and Amazon have shown there’s still a great deal of life left in that process.

JJ: All right, we’re going to end on that note.

We’ve been speaking with John Logan. He’s professor and director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University. You can find his work on 21st century organizing at Jacobin.org.

John Logan, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JL: Thank you for having me on. It was a pleasure.

 

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This post was originally published on CounterSpin.