In the fall of 2020, I returned to Buffalo, New York, after a brief stint in grad school in the United Kingdom. The pandemic was in full swing, many of the restaurants and cafes I'd been helping workers organize at were temporarily or permanently closed, and many workers were laid off. Just before the COVID lockdown, I had been trying to help a Starbucks barista organize their store on the University at Buffalo campus. Management found out and fired them, supposedly for cursing on the job. Based on the lessons I learned from working with them, and from attending and helping run Inside Organizer School trainings on workplace organizing, I decided to get a job at Starbucks with the goal of helping launch a union campaign, a practice known as "salting."
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The below excerpt from my new book Get on the Job and Organize tells some of that story. Some context on individuals who appear here and are introduced elsewhere in the text: Josh Armstead is a UNITE HERE organizer and Inside Organizer School trainer; Richard Bensinger is my organizing mentor and original co-conspirator on the Starbucks Workers United campaign; Gary Bonadonna is the leader of Workers United in Upstate New York; and Cory Johnson is a long-time worker organizer who helped organize Spot Coffee before joining me as a Starbucks salt.
It was pumpkin spice season at Starbucks. The leaves had fallen across Buffalo and a chill was in the air.
After extensive Reddit searches and consultations with barista friends, I had determined that 10:00 a.m. was an ideal time to follow up on my application. I carried a manila envelope containing my curated résumé and cringy cover letter, which professed my excitement to “learn more about the work, expertise and care that goes into the crafting of every drink and to build relationships with customers and coworkers.” I had practiced the art of doing what every job applicant does: telling my pro spective employers exactly what they wanted to hear. With that in mind, I swung open the glass door of the Elmwood Avenue Starbucks and switched on the highest-pitched, best customer-service voice I could muster.
“Hi there, Jazzy Jaz!” said JP, the nine-year shift supervisor who had learned my name the first time I went in to inquire about a job and who made sure to comp my iced coffee each time I came back.
“Is Patty in today?” I asked, making sure to smile behind my mask.
As JP went to get her from the back, I watched the baristas bobbing behind the bar. The hiss of steam from the espresso machines mingled with the sound of their voices calling out drinks and the sputter of a spent cold brew keg. Their motions were smooth and constant: The espresso machines were never idle.
I could feel my heart rate climbing. Was it even possible that Starbucks would hire me? I wondered. One Google search and I would be found out as a union organizer, my cover blown.
I rehearsed my carefully crafted narrative. Before even submitting the online application, I had scrubbed my social media and set all platforms to private. I had pried the rusty solidarity, y’all! tag from my car and crafted a narrative that hid my prior union work without lying outright. Patty emerged from the back, an energetic figure wearing a green apron. “Hi, Jaz!”
Due to Covid, the café furniture was stacked by the front windows.
Patty gestured for me to pull down a chair, and we sat down at one of the unused tables, where she began looking over my cover letter and résumé.
“Rhodes Scholar, that’s nice.” Then, looking down my cover letter, she murmured with approval, “‘People-facing position,’ I like that.”
She told me that she had hired a few other people and wouldn’t be able to start me for a few weeks, and that she would call me in a few days to follow up.
She didn’t.
I began thinking that Starbucks had found out I was a union organizer and that Patty was ghosting me accordingly.
“Keep following up,” Josh Armstead told me. “Keep playing the role. They’re not that bright, they don’t know.”
It took two months for me to actually start work—two months of constant second-guessing. I don’t think I would have gotten hired without Josh as my salting coach. He had helped prep my résumé and cover letter, sharing examples of his and giving advice (including reminding me that it was pretty much impossible to be too enthusiastic about the company when I began questioning whether my exuberance had been a giveaway).
Josh believed I would get hired and made me believe it, too. Gary and Richard had their doubts. Would they google me? Was my lack of barista experience an issue? (It wasn’t—Starbucks likes hiring people they can train their own way.) Why did Patty keep disappearing? Was this really a good use of time, or was there other organizing work I could be doing that would be more productive?
After each visit to the store or meeting with Patty, I would call Josh to debrief what had happened. He helped guide my next steps: how soon to go back for another coffee, when it was appropriate to follow up by phone, how to get an email address. He was always encouraging, always supportive, always providing reminders of management incompetence (hadn’t they hired him, a union vice president, into what should have been a highly guarded food service target?) and, more important, of the mission and reason for salting.
Finally, while I was on a Zoom call with Richard—still deep in Covid quarantine—and Gary, discussing other organizing matters, I got a phone call from Patty: Starbucks was offering me the job. Even then, it was still weeks before I clocked in for the first time: Red Cup Day, Thanksgiving, administrative snafus, and other trainees kept pushing back my start day. Finally, on December 14, I went in for my First Sip.
Over Christmas blonde roast and lemon loaf, Patty told me about Starbucks’ benefits and social responsibility practices, then sent me to the back room with the iPad to start my computer training. My favorite training video urged partners—Starbucks’ term for workers—to “become one with the flow of espresso into the cup.”
The next day, a coworker named Cassie Fleischer took over my training. Cassie was perhaps the kindest person to ever work at a Starbucks. She was serious and thoughtful, with big blue eyes, wispy blond hair that she often dyed brighter shades, and a love of sunflowers that was evident from the tattoos on her arm. Thorough and by the book, she was incredibly caring and ensured things were done to standard without making anyone feel bad. She made perfect microfoam and artistic Frappucinos and ensured that the iced tea backups always steeped for exactly five minutes.
I set about training with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. Steaming milk was fun. Sampling “dead” espresso shots to understand the importance of speed (which actually revealed the poor quality of our coffee, since high-quality espresso doesn’t die) was less pleasant. Learning the customer support (CS) job rotations—ice, milks, sleeves, beans; rotating through cycle tasks of dishes, cold brew, backup making, bathroom cleaning, spot sweeping, front door cleaning—only to be summoned when the coffee brewer was empty: “We’re out of Pike!”—was intense, but I tried not to let on. I was determined to be endlessly cheerful and eager to learn.
Right after I was trained, Cassie began training a new “green bean,” the Starbucks term for a new hire, who hadn’t reached the increasingly darker roasts that Cassie wryly told me she had attained. While I was washing dishes, Cassie came in the back without her green bean, looking slightly exhausted.
“How’s it going?” I whispered.
“She keeps saying how overwhelming CS is. And I get it—but it’s not going like it did with you.”
At the end of my training, Cassie gave me a hand-decorated, Cricut emblazoned tumbler with my name on it and a beautiful note about how training me had helped her to see the things she loved about the company again after the burnout of working through the pandemic. It was an incredibly thoughtful and kind gift. I teared up as I read the note, which Cassie made me open in front of her. Everything about Cassie was genuine, and she was letting me in on her life outside work as well.
I wished I could be open with Cassie about how the second job I casually mentioned was actually with the union and about my hope of organizing our workplace. Even though I was afraid management would discover my background and I knew I couldn’t risk talking about unionizing that early in my time at the company, I felt twinges of guilt about hiding key details. I knew secrecy was essential: if Starbucks found out about my background, it could fire me just as it had fired Benny. Still, I wanted to be able to be as genuine with Cassie as she was with me.
Being "fully trained" at Starbucks is a misnomer. None of our new hires at Elmwood, myself included, were ever given our certification tests, which were supposed to measure our ability to steam milk, sequence, and perform other tasks to standard. To compensate for the company’s lack of training, I borrowed the deck of recipe cards and took them home with me, spending a few evenings memorizing and practicing remembering the correct build of each drink and the ratio of espresso shots and syrup pumps to cup sizes.
At work, I learned that different baristas had wildly different expectations and styles, and I learned to accommodate as best I could. Some were possessive of the sticker printer above their machine, while others appreciated their coworker grabbing stickers and helping out. One coworker was adamant that steamed chais tasted better with less water and more milk; I learned to make the drinks differently if I was working alongside them. One shift supervisor, concerned about my milk-steaming technique, got the glass from the back that was labeled with the lines to which foam should go for a latte versus a cappuccino and had me practice. I came in on my days off or came back after a shift to help cover for a coworker who’d called off from work. I was often frazzled—particularly when I was put in the more challenging positions that required juggling tasks and anticipating needs during peak—but tried not to let on, except by apologizing excessively. Coworkers attempted to break me of that habit, even joking about deducting a dollar per “sorry” from my tips, but to no avail. It became a running joke.
Meanwhile, Cory left Spot Coffee and applied to a Starbucks in a Buffalo suburb as a rehire with the company. During his previous stint with the company in DC, he had wanted to start a union campaign and even reached out to the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW), who ghosted him. They weren’t interested in starting a campaign at Starbucks because they believed that it was too difficult: the stores were too small, the turnover rate too high, the scale of the company too massive.
There had been previous attempts to unionize Starbucks. In the 1980s, the UFCW had organized several of the first Starbucks cafés in Seattle. When Howard Schultz took over as CEO later that decade, he encour aged workers to decertify, or vote out, their union. He was ideologically anti-union, writing in 1999, “I was convinced that under my leadership, employees would come to realize that I would listen to their concerns. If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union.”
In 2004, workers in New York City tried to organize with the Industrial Workers of the World. They filed a petition with the NLRB to hold an election at their store. Starbucks tried to argue that rather than forming a union at that single store, workers had to organize every store in Manhattan. At Starbucks’ request, the George W. Bush administration’s NLRB agreed to impound the ballots until they could determine the bargaining-unit question. Realizing that the Board would almost certainly side with Starbucks, the IWW pulled their petition and decided not to file for any more elections. Instead, they adopted a strategy of directly advocating for workplace changes rather than seeking union recognition. They won the right for Starbucks workers to wear union pins, got the company to recognize Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a holiday, and pressured management to make some improvements and rescind other unjust policies.
But working at Starbucks had convinced Cory that baristas desperately needed a union to improve their standard of living—to raise pay and improve benefits, and to have protections and a voice at work. He was also aware that Starbucks baristas could pick up shifts at other Starbucks locations that needed additional coverage. He learned of the BuffBux group chat, a group of hundreds of baristas across Buffalo who would post pleas for baristas to come pick up hours or take their shifts, or to offer to do so, and got both of us added to it.
Picking up shifts would become a critical part of our organizing efforts. It allowed us to bounce around the district, meeting people, earning the respect and thanks of new coworkers, and learning which people might be interested in or important to forming an organizing committee.
As I became integrated into the social world of Starbucks partners, it became increasingly clear just how difficult organizing the company could end up being. The experience of guiding workers from the sidelines as an external organizer was very different from trying to start a campaign in one’s own workplace. In theory, I knew the steps of organizing from inside:
1. Become a good coworker in the eyes of management and coworkers and begin building relationships outside of work.
2. Map the workplace.
3. Identify key leaders.
4. Build a diverse and representative organizing committee. This will be the group that will do the work of unionizing. Start by having conversations with the workers who are most likely to be supportive and able to keep a secret, then bring in others later, closer to the date of your first organizing committee meeting.
5. Have your first organizing committee meeting, where workers can ask questions and decide whether to form the committee. Try to make sure you’ve already talked to enough workers that there will be people there who are committed to making this happen, so that the meeting goes well and other workers see the optimism and enthusiasm of their coworkers.
6. Take the committee public with a letter to the company and launch the campaign’s social media accounts and website.
7. Give the committee union cards to sign up their coworkers and try to reach as strong of a majority as you can.
8. Once you reach 65–70 percent or higher, file for elections with the National Labor Relations Board.
Putting these steps into action at Starbucks was far more challenging than I’d anticipated.
For one thing, turnover did turn out to be a significant problem: I would start making jokes about Che Guevara with a coworker or listening to them vent about work and the lack of respect from the company, only for them to quit a few weeks later. The pandemic, too, hastened many workers’ exit, taking long-term key leaders out of the shop.
The small size and inevitable cliquishness of Starbucks stores was another issue. All workplaces develop social in-groups and develop rifts—between openers and closers, front of house and back of house, or other groups. At times, I worried that Starbucks workers were more annoyed with each other than with the company. My mental map of influential workplace leaders was constantly called into question by conversations with coworkers who would share their frustrations and concerns. I would listen to others’ complaints about coworkers, trying to validate without agreeing, while panicking that someone I had identified as a key leader was actually perceived in a very different way.
From the beginning, we attempted to assess our stores and those we picked up shifts in, ending up with constantly evolving lists of coworkers and notes. Mine were not always particularly relevant to organizing, consisting partly of notes about coworkers’ affinity or aversion to cats or houseplants, bullet points on arguments about football that happened on shift, what subjects they were studying in school, whose papers I could offer to edit. Cory’s were more coherent: notes about which stores workers had transferred from, their social networks, who was likely to be a leader.
But mine were redeemed by the gems of information they contained:
• Told me we are not allowed to criticize any customer’s order to each other etc when I said 15 pumps of syrup was a lot
• Really likes my chocolate muffins
• Likes bluegrass
• Likes cats but does not have
• Wears a lot of black, “how are people supposed to know I’m goth?”
• Used to be history major, focus on Russian history—1945 period b/c country modernized, story of Peter the Great
• Likes being my cold bar when I am hot bar
• Brought up 16 Tons, Pinkertons (also said history degree meant “you don’t want to make any money”)
Some of the observations were less humorous. I jotted down when coworkers brought up issues—from dietary restrictions that couldn’t be accommodated by Starbucks’ food offerings, to a history of management minimizing health issues or telling one coworker to “just fix” her depression, to concerns about pay and arguments between coworkers about whether being paid the same as new hires justified working like new hires. We were at work when the January 6th insurrection happened, and I listened to my coworkers’ outspoken horror: Many of them had been in the Black Lives Matter protests the summer before, and I paid attention to which ones talked about confronting cops and helping organize events.
The most encouraging conversations revolved around other union campaigns; some of my coworkers were friends with Spot Coffee committee leaders, while others were paying close attention to current events. The previous November, Amazon workers had filed for a union election in Bessemer, Alabama, with the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union (RWDSU). Over the winter, they inched closer to an election, facing legal delays at the NLRB and fierce union busting from the company. Throughout the process, Starbucks workers were watching. Coworkers brought it up to me at work: “Do you think something like that could ever happen here?” At the time, I made mental notes and gave restrained answers: “That would be amazing!”
Copyright © 2025 by Jaz Brisack. From the book GET ON THE JOB AND ORGANIZE by Jaz Brisack, published by One Signal Publishers, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.
