Op-Ed: A Suggestion for Terry Durack
James Barbeiro responds to the article “Serving suggestion: Could conscription ease the hospitality staffing crisis?” by Terry Durack
By James Barbeiro
The whole thing reads like a satirical article, it wasn't until the end that I realized that for real, it wasn't. I sort of wish it was. It would have left me with a better taste in my mouth.
I think the article lacks any positive analysis that holds owners and shareholders accountable for the atmosphere that they have created. One where workers bear the weight of an industry that demands far too much from them to appease an overly demanding abusive public sphere. Nor does it hold workers accountable to their responsibility to make things better.
It does seem though that workers recognize their needs aren't being met. Workers want free time, benefits, democracy in the workplace, and they want their jobs to have meaning beyond paying for their bosses' vacation homes and luxury vehicles.
If the owning class can't provide that within their framework of the restaurant industry then they will simply fail, and workers will pick up the pieces and create a new industry that feeds people- not for profit- but for the betterment of our health and wellness. (Ideally)
I think this article is harmful to a lot of people, the insinuation to sacrifice our kids to the industry? To send students who have left school Into an industry that will chew them up and spit them right back out. This "solution" takes the blame away from our educational institutions and our governments for leaving our youth un-inspired by the futures we've presented them. Kids aren't leaving school, we've left them behind. And I can't blame them for it, the future we've presented them is bleak.
According to Terry Durack, we should be asking our retired community members to pull themselves out of retirement to help supplement the lack of workers. I ask, “for what?” A few extra dollars in the hands of business owners who have already mis-managed the industry? We certainly aren't asking them to come back for good wages, or benefits, or a work life balance. But on top of this, I thought the whole point of working hard for the entirety of our short lives, and missing out on important events with our families was to be able to relax in our retirements. To catch up on lost time that we sacrificed at these lifeless family businesses. To enjoy the lives we worked so hard to build. But again thanks to the lack of social infrastructure and support for our elderly retired folks, they might not have a choice but to return to work, if they ever had the chance to leave work in the first place.
And then to proclaim that refugees and asylum seekers should be thought to serve us gives me the creeps and makes me think of the horrors being committed and the ones to come as we justify worse treatments for people who are simply seeking better lives than the ones we have ruined. When massive migrations of people come to our borders thanks to a climate crisis that the restaurant industry has a huge part to play in, I fear we will be treating them with this same kind of inhumanity, likely worse.
And all of this in the name of a big fat tip? Screw that. I'm happy to see workers refusing to "bend the knee" to crap jobs in a crap industry that pretends to be more important than it is.
I'm happy to see workers recognize that the way the industry has been run, by "industry professionals" is completely backwards and leaves us alienated from each other and our communities. The pretext that restaurants are public spaces that people can enjoy, was never true, and is increasingly clear as we see a lack of public spaces to exist during economic turmoil.
And then there's me and you. What are we supposed to do in the light of this continued attitude that workers have to sacrifice their lives for the economic benefits of restaurants?
Well, we could reject it, which seems to be happening to a certain degree.
We are certainly seeing something happening with Starbucks and Amazon unionizing.
We can certainly recognize our worth and demand better from our employers. We need to demand better for our future generations. We need to see sustainability be at the forefront, and we need to see that food guarantees are at the forefront of how the industry functions. With droughts, floods, fires and the increasing severity of climate change, restaurants will be the first to see supply chain issues, if they haven't already. Some might be the only ones able to access cheap ingredients, will they hoard them for paying customers? Or feed the community? Will chef's continue to cater to the rich, while they wither away in relative poverty, or will they stick true to their class roots and help feed the people? Who knows! The future right now is certainly uncertain and all we can do is hope to be organized enough to be ready when these questions need answers.
Hopefully people who think this opinion piece is great aren't the ones with the loudest answers to present.
Op-Ed: Thank The Wobblies For What?
Two IWW members argue that mainstream media misrepresents their union and completely misses the point on what the Wobblies contribute to the class struggle.
By Jean-Carl Elliot and Sylvain Pankhurst
Put bluntly, Malcolm Harris’s recent article for The Nation, “We Can Thank the Wobblies for the Biggest Labor Story of the Year" doesn’t really say much of substance about Wobblies (members of The Industrial Workers of the World, or “IWW” for short). That’s not unusual for mainstream coverage of the IWW and, in his defense, he did a better job than many, even citing “Labor Law for the Rank-and-Filer”: a short book that is influential among American IWW organizers. Nevertheless, by focusing on the public campaigns (Starbucks and Burgerville), the emphasis remains on the tip of the iceberg and misses what it is that separates the IWW from mainstream business unionism.
Harris also repeats the most consistent sin of mainstream commentators, relegating the IWW to an historical object, rather than acknowledging it as an existing (and growing) organization. While his chronology is a bit different, and he thankfully admits to the existence of the IWW in this century, he still posits that the IWW’s value as inspiration, implicitly saying “We should thank the IWW for SEIU Starbucks organizing.” On the contrary, we should thank the IWW of the early 2000s for the IWW of today – the IWW that has learned from the mistakes Harris holds up as a model.
For example, Harris lauds the activist element of the Starbucks Workers Union in targeting “the brand itself,” in a public relations-focused dimension of the campaign. This approach resulted in numerous firings, and ultimately played a part in the IWW removing “Going Public” as a module in its Organizer Training 101. In other words, the lesson that was drawn from the experience is actually the opposite of what the article suggests. What gave the Starbucks Workers Union its power, led to relatively sustained organizing in some cases, and what separates it from heavily media-driven unionization efforts was building relationships on the ground and winning changes with direct action.
Direct action, as a term and as a concept, is conspicuously absent from The Nation’s version of the IWW. While it acknowledges that the IWW has made use of “wildcat” actions and sabotage, it doesn’t stop to dwell on what exactly these were, or of their significance. It quite explicitly posits actions of this type as a sign of weakness – a last-ditch effort that workers resort to out of desperation in the absence of legal protections or contract language. In fact, the opposite is true!
What makes the IWW revolutionary is that it sets direct action and direct democracy as the defaults in organizing. One famous story that The Nation neglects to mention involves a group of IWW baristas who walked off the job during a shift when the temperature got too hot. They left their supervisor alone to deal with the heat and the impatient customers. They came back with a fan which had “Courtesy of the IWW” written on it, plugged it in and got back to work. Management installed fans immediately and arranged for an AC unit to be installed. There are dozens more stories like this, where concessions were won through workers exercising their power to disrupt the workplace.
In an IWW campaign, actions of this type don’t culminate in formal recognition and signing a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). Even in instances where a collective agreement might be signed, it is not an end unto itself. Rather than pointing toward “partners becoming partners” with management, the IWW strategy is prefigurative, “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” In less highfalutin terms, wobbly organizing teaches workers the skills of running things for ourselves. Rather than seeing workers’ empowerment as stopping at negotiating conditions with Starbucks, Amazon, or whichever petty small-business tyrants, it is about transforming the ways we relate to each other, and realizing our collective power to transform the conditions of our lives.
CBAs are as often a barrier to collective power as an asset. As time passes from the initial union drive, their purpose tends to increasingly be preservation of the legal status of the bargaining unit. And what tends to result is that “the union” becomes synonymous for the staff and paid people at the top who administer the contract. Workers will come and go, and their membership in the union only lasts as long as their employment at that particular shop. Everything from grievance handling to contract negotiations becomes the turf of an entrenched leadership, and workers pay dues to keep a “subscription” to their services. When an issue arises, workers are compelled to “work now, grieve later.” Instead of being dealt with by unionized workers collectively, shop floor problems are handed over for legal wrangling to people who may have never set foot in the workplace. This is exacerbated by the fact CBAs almost always (and always in Canada) contain a “no strike clause” which prohibits collective action during the life of the agreement. In some cases, workers, including IWW “dual card” members, have actually organized and taken action in defiance of the terms of CBAs.
The IWW model of solidarity unionism teaches workers the tools to execute actions on the job, in a concerted fashion with their coworkers. It shows how small actions can demonstrate the power of solidarity in order to recruit more workers to a campaign. When a worker leaves, they remain an IWW member, and can take these skills with them to future workplaces (and teach them to other workers).
One campaign that came up a bit more recently than the IWW Starbucks Organizing was an effort at dual carding with CUPW in Edmonton Canada. The campaign lasted about a decade, but many of the tactics built on the Starbucks organizing including dozens of “march on the boss” actions that had over 100 people participating at times. The campaign eventually subsided but not without forcing management to hire 200 more staff at a time when they were actually considering downsizing and layoffs.
The IWW preserved the legacy of these wins through writing articles and pamphlets and incorporating the lessons learned into its organizer trainings. Each year, the union trains hundreds of members in the basic tools of solidarity unionism that have been learned from Starbucks Workers Union and the campaigns that followed. With each training comes new organizers, with new organizers come new campaigns, with each campaign come new lessons, and with each new lesson comes revisions to the training. In other words, the legacy from the IWW Starbucks Workers Union is not just more union cards being signed; it’s more and improved organizers. The legacy isn’t more CBAs; it’s more organizing where workers ourselves wield power.
Workers’ Memorial Day Reminds Us To Fight For Safe Workplaces
Each year on April 28th, labor unions celebrate Workers’ Memorial Day. The holiday was created in remembrance of the hundreds of thousands of workers who are killed and injured in the workplace each year. In spite of this holiday and government bureaucracies like OSHA within the United States, the working class is still subject to deplorable working conditions that can ultimately send us to the hospital or even to the morgue. Delivery drivers have had one of the ten deadliest jobs in the US for two decades now and line cooks have become the most susceptible workers to death from coronavirus since the pandemic began. Despite the rapid growth and profitability of the food service and delivery industry, we see yet another example of how that wealth has been hoarded at the expense of workers' bodies and lives.
Why is this?
To put it simply, laws don’t make bad things go away. After all, robbery and murder are illegal, yet they are daily occurances. Wage theft is illegal, yet it’s a multi-billion dollar industry. The same logic applies to health and safety laws. The penalties for subjecting workers to unsafe working conditions are typically fines. Sometimes fines can act as a deterrent, but only inasmuch as they would actually prevent the workplace from functioning. In reality, fines merely help put price tags on our bodies and lives. If the fines from severing a limb or ending a life are cheaper than improving the workplace, then the employer is probably going to risk the fine and keep business as usual. Ultimately, our power as workers doesn’t lie in our ability to call the regulators;it’s in our ability to make business as usual more costly for the employer. We make this happen through direct action on the job.
What does direct action look like?
Direct actions can take all sorts of forms, but generally speaking it usually entails workers disrupting workflow or solving workplace issues directly, without the involvement of third parties like inspectors or representatives . A common direct action tactic is a walkout, where workers simply stop what they are doing and leave the workplace until management fixes the problem. Members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) union at Ellen’s Stardust Diner in New York City used this tactic to address issues with the heat and carbon monoxide leaks at their workplace. They brought their demands to management and when the problem wasn’t solved, the workers walked off the job until it was safe to come back. Another example comes from a group of IWW baristas at Starbucks. The shop didn’t have air conditioning and it was getting hot. The workers asked the manager to buy a fan but he said it would be too expensive, so the workers walked off the job and left him there by himself to deal with the long lines of angry customers in the sweltering heat. When they returned, they had a fan which they had bought with their union dues, which had “Courtesy of the IWW '' written on it. The last thing the company wanted was for the union to appear more competent than they were, so Starbucks had fans brought in immediately and installed air conditioning as soon as possible.
“Mourn the dead; fight like hell for the living!”
Mother Jones famously said “Mourn the dead; fight like hell for the living!” As the 2022 Workers’ Memorial Day approaches, let’s keep our martyrs in our hearts and minds, but let’s also remember that we possess the collective power to bring forth a new world from the shell of the old. Let’s put that power into action!
Historical Events and Holidays:
April 1 - New York City Brewery Strike (1949)
April 2 - 30,000 Las Vegas workers strike at 50 hotels and casinos (1984)
April 6 - IWW members picket at Chicago Liquors in Minnesota (2013)
April 14 - Bussa’s Rebellion (1816)
April 21 - Waiters strike in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia (1853)
April 21 - Sip-In at Juluis’s Bar (1966)
April 22 - “Occupy the Farm” begins (2012)
April 27 - Great Mustache Strike (1907)
April 28 - Workers’ Memorial Day
April 29 - Arby’s workers strike for pay, PPE (2020)
Are Starbucks Workers Really Getting ‘Organized’?
An Organizer’s Op-Ed of Sorts on the Recent Starbucks Unionizing
I’m seeing a lot of excitement about the recent flurry of “unionizing” at Starbucks. I welcome this trend too and I hope that it spreads far within and beyond the giant coffee chain, but I can’t help also feeling a bit of skepticism about what this unionization actually entails and what it leaves to be desired.
I’m going to offer a summarized critique of the run-of-the-mill “business unionism” that I see Starbucks Workers United practicing, provide a bit of historical context for the organizing that the press is leaving out, and lay out a brief argument for a better, more effective model of organizing that will be useful not only to workers at Starbucks, but at any workplace in any industry, right now.
Before I explain my skepticism, I’ll say this: I’m rooting for the Starbucks workers. But - while I don’t want to assume too much about how the organizing at Starbucks is being done, what I’ve seen so far fits into a pattern of “unionizing” that’s very familiar and has a lot of problems.
It’s helpful to understand the unfortunate truth that there’s often a very big difference between “unionizing” a workplace and truly “organizing” workers, which is what really shifts the balance of power on the job in favor of the workers so that they can address their grievances effectively. “Unionizing” and “organizing” as concepts are not necessarily at odds, but the difference can be profound and have vastly different outcomes.
Unionizing is often a numbers game: the formula is essentially to get 30% of the workers to sign cards authorizing an external organization to bargain on their behalf, make a pitiful public appeal to the moral decency of the powerful, and POOF!, you have a “union”. But what history and my own experience demonstrate time and again is that this tired formula not only de-emphasizes (if not deliberately prevents) workers’ actual involvement in the process, but it puts union bureaucrats in the driver’s seat of the organizing campaign and sets it on a trajectory that’s much more predictable and deferential to the employer. But that’s not all.
Usually the campaign is crushed, because it was playing by the rules that were written by and for the employers in the first place (see also: virtually all labor law). Then sometimes they “succeed” (meaning, they won an election), but the problem persists: the workers have little or no training on how to conduct their own organizing effectively and have learned to rely on their very docile (despite occasional big talk) union brass and a legal system better described as a cruel joke for workers. The employer may play along and throw peanuts at the workers, but their power over workplace conditions remains essentially uncontested. Often, promises are unkept and conditions backslide. Oh, in the process, maybe you helped some “pro-labor” politician who spoke at your rally get a few more votes. It’s “unionism” on the terms of the employers and the law, and it’s a path rife with costly shortcuts when it comes to truly building workers’ power.
Organizing looks very different. It understands that the workers hold the key to their own better future, and it focuses on worker-to-worker relationship building—fostering the bonds of solidarity that allow workers to discover this “key” and then use it. It means starting with what matters most to the workers and organizing around that, instead of projecting issues and solutions onto them. It means offering education and training that empowers and emboldens workers without insulting their innate intelligence. It means mobilizing supporters without them acting in the stead of the workers. And by damned, it means discovering and flexing that muscle of collective power on the job, where workers are most powerful. It’s “unionism” on the workers’ terms, and it doesn’t matter if the employer, the press or anyone else decides it’s a “union” or not. You can call this phenomenon a “union”, or you can call it “banana” for all I care. The content—workers acting like a union—is what’s important.
With this understanding, “organizing” is essentially about building relationships with workers, while “unionizing” is about building a relationship with the employer. If a union’s purported aim is to advance the interests of workers, then why would it spend so much energy on the latter?
If it wasn’t already clear - I’m not anti-union. Quite the opposite. What’s important here is how we define and practice unionism, and I take exception to the prevailing definition and practice of it today. I often say that “union” is a verb more than it is a noun. If in a “union” you don’t see workers themselves in the driver seat, together, taking action on the job where they have the most power, developing their own sense of agency to change their conditions, and practicing meaningful solidarity with workers in adjacent nodes in the supply chain and beyond when called upon to do so… then it’s hard for me to think of it as much more than an expensive dog and pony show put on by highly paid “Labor Relations” professionals. That’s a lot less compelling isn’t it?
It takes time to build up a solid committee of workers who can take successful action on the job, win better conditions and defend their gains, who are prepared to weather the storm when the employer inevitably pushes back, and who truly share and take ownership over the work of organizing. Building workers’ power through organizing is not a numbers game (although clearly the more workers involved, the merrier); there are no shortcuts, and no ballot victory or formal bargaining agreement will replace the far superior power of the organized workers.
Interestingly, there is actually historical precedent for this kind of genuine organizing at Starbucks. While the press is sounding the trumpets for the “first unionized Starbucks” locations in history, you may be surprised to learn that the recent organizing led by Starbucks United is not the first organizing effort at Starbucks. Like, at all. In fact, it was the grassroots Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) that made the first major organizing foray into the coffee chain starting around 2004. The IWW’s Starbucks campaign lasted for several years and involved hundreds of workers, and it was arguably the IWW’s most visible and successful organizing endeavor during that time. The workers’ creative, ambitious, and often successful direct actions made tangible improvements in workplace conditions and transformed those involved from despondent subjects of corporate tyranny into dignified workplace militants. Their actions also generated considerable buzz in the press, as did the nefarious union-busting tactics employed by then-CEO Howard Schultz (sound familiar?). But perhaps because none of those workers attempted the formalized union election process (which was actually a strategic decision on the part of the workers), even sympathetic media today somehow do not consider this union activity “unionizing” and they make zero mention of it today.
That particular wave of IWW organizing at Starbucks eventually waned. Victories were achieved, mistakes were made, and many of its participants eventually transitioned into other industries. The campaign’s successes, as well as its blunders, proved to be valuable lessons that the IWW absorbed into its training curricula and its organizing methodology. The campaign also dispelled any illusions the IWW had about working within the “labor relations” system.
But the more important piece here is that the experiences the workers shared and the lessons they learned during those years have followed them, and they continue to provide them with a rich source of confidence and wisdom as they confront new injustices in the workplace and beyond. They’ve taken the union with them and it will likely be with them for life. The task of the labor movement today should be to find better ways of sustaining what these workers started, especially as unprecedented numbers of new Starbucks workers step onto the stage of history to assert their dignity.
So, it remains to be seen how things will play out in this recent unionizing wave at Starbucks. I’m hoping for the best outcome for the workers and I’ll gladly do what I can to support them in improving their conditions if called on to do so. But this is a timely opportunity to address some lingering concerns I have with unions in the mainstream today, and to advocate for a better unionism that workers can actually get excited about and use today.
To learn more about organizing and how you can also do it, visit www.iww.org.
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Mike H is a longtime organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World union and is a co-author of Wobblyism: Toward a Revolutionary Unionism for Today. Big woop. He couldn’t be bothered with Twitter but he does respond to good faith inquiries at shelloftheold@gmail.com. Holler.