Home / General / Where’s the Organizing Energy At?

Where’s the Organizing Energy At?

/
/
/
1965 Views
Richard Bensinger, left, who is advising unionization efforts, along with baristas Casey Moore, right, Brian Murray, second from left, and Jaz Brisack, second from right, discuss their efforts to unionize three Buffalo-area stores, inside the movements headquarters on Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021 in Buffalo, N.Y. Workers at three Starbucks stores in Buffalo will hold union elections next month after winning a case before the National Labor Relations Board. (AP Photo/Carolyn Thompson).

There’s now a clear trend. We’ve seen a series of significant strikes and unionization attempts in places of work that all have one thing in common–they are performatively liberal? What I mean by that is that they give off a public image of places where people can express themselves, be comfortable, and fight for social justice. Places where being transgender or wearing a Black Lives Matter button is OK. Places where customers come in expecting to be comfortable in the same manner. Places where science matters. Places where the pandemic is taken seriously. What am I talking about here? I’m talking about Starbucks, REI, higher education, media companies, tech to some extent, K-12 teachers. These workers have a lot in common. They tend to be more highly educated than other workers. But they are often working crappy jobs with crappy wages. They may often trend white, but certainly not always. They tend to be younger than the average worker. They have greater access to social capital than other poor people. In short, these are the Bernie base. And they are acting on it by taking advantage of their employers who might claim a patina of liberalism because it fits their public image, but are as bad on worker rights as any other company. They are pretty unlikely to take their corporate masters seriously and accept the bad lives they are being forced to live.

I was reminded of these connections again with this profile of some of the people organizing Starbucks. They are young, they are often non-binary or queer, they are pissed about the economy, their debt, their working conditions. Why wouldn’t they organize?

It’s way to soon to say what this will all lead to. But at least as I see it, the real connections is that these workers all labor in sites of performative liberalism and these particular kind of workplaces have backed themselves into a corner by talking about activism publicly and attracting a customer base likely to support unionization of the workers they see every day.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar
Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views :