Post by ck4829 on Feb 13, 2022 14:41:02 GMT
Starbucks Workers Need a National Day of Protest and Solidarity
It’s time for an all-labor national day of action to defend Starbucks workers.
The Starbucks baristas, REI retail workers, Amazon warehouse workers, striking Warrior Met mineworkers and concrete truck drivers, along with other workers bravely organizing and fighting back, are at the forefront of resisting unbridled corporate greed in this new Gilded Age. But they won’t succeed if the fights are limited by region or industry. We need to mobilize workers throughout the labor movement to demonstrate that there’s still substance to the labor maxim, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
It mystifies and disturbs me that regional and national labor bodies that ought to be pulling out all stops for these baristas, retail workers, and others don’t seem to recognize that this moment demands their full energy and focus.
Last week, Starbucks workers in several New York City stores petitioned for union elections, bringing the number of unionizing stores to seventy-two since the fall. The weekly spate of new Starbucks election filings represents a breakthrough for labor with potentially historic implications.
The executives are counterattacking: last week, they fired seven Memphis baristas who had led the organizing in that city. Yet the AFL-CIO’s pinned tweet in the aftermath blathered on about “another victory for working people today with the release of the first report from the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment.”
Victory? Really? It’s a report. But this is the most important thing the AFL-CIO leadership wants us to get animated about — not the bravery of low-paid workers taking on the billionaire class.
www.jacobinmag.com/2022/02/starbucks-workers-union-fired-rei-amazon-strike
It’s time for an all-labor national day of action to defend Starbucks workers.
The Starbucks baristas, REI retail workers, Amazon warehouse workers, striking Warrior Met mineworkers and concrete truck drivers, along with other workers bravely organizing and fighting back, are at the forefront of resisting unbridled corporate greed in this new Gilded Age. But they won’t succeed if the fights are limited by region or industry. We need to mobilize workers throughout the labor movement to demonstrate that there’s still substance to the labor maxim, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
It mystifies and disturbs me that regional and national labor bodies that ought to be pulling out all stops for these baristas, retail workers, and others don’t seem to recognize that this moment demands their full energy and focus.
Last week, Starbucks workers in several New York City stores petitioned for union elections, bringing the number of unionizing stores to seventy-two since the fall. The weekly spate of new Starbucks election filings represents a breakthrough for labor with potentially historic implications.
The executives are counterattacking: last week, they fired seven Memphis baristas who had led the organizing in that city. Yet the AFL-CIO’s pinned tweet in the aftermath blathered on about “another victory for working people today with the release of the first report from the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment.”
Victory? Really? It’s a report. But this is the most important thing the AFL-CIO leadership wants us to get animated about — not the bravery of low-paid workers taking on the billionaire class.
www.jacobinmag.com/2022/02/starbucks-workers-union-fired-rei-amazon-strike