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Why Union Drives Are Succeeding

College-educated workers are driving a spike in union organizing.

Jaz Brisack, a Rhodes scholar, on her way to work in February at a Starbucks in Buffalo, where she helped unionize co-workers.Credit...Brendan Bannon for The New York Times

After decades of declining union membership, organized labor may be on the verge of a resurgence in the U.S. Employees seeking better working conditions and higher pay have recently organized unions at Starbucks, Amazon, Apple and elsewhere. Applications for union elections this year are on pace to approach their highest level in a decade. I asked Noam Scheiber, who covers workers and labor issues for The Times, what’s behind the latest flurry of union activity.

Ian: You recently profiled Jaz Brisack, a Rhodes scholar and barista who helped organize a union at a Starbucks in Buffalo that was the first at a company-owned store in decades. Why did she want to work there?

Noam: Jaz comes out of a tradition. We saw it during the Depression; people with radical politics taking jobs with the explicit intention of organizing workers. The term for this is “salting,” like the seasoning. The practice has had some limited success in recent decades, but we’re seeing a broader revival of it, and Jaz is part of that. Several salts got jobs at Amazon and helped organize a facility on Staten Island. Academics like Barry Eidlin and Mie Inouye have written extensively about this.

Jaz is very public about her beliefs. She wore a Karl Marx sweatshirt at Oxford University and once pressed the University of Mississippi’s chancellor — during a reception in Jaz’s honor — to remove a Confederate monument from campus.

She’s idealistic and ambitious, but being a social creature hasn’t always come naturally to her. She told me that when she first got to college, she was “incredibly socially awkward,” partly because she’d been home-schooled. Yet she would kind of will herself to do things that required interacting with strangers in order to advance the cause, like passing out fliers to promote a union campaign at a nearby Nissan plant.

Employees at nearly 200 other Starbucks have organized since Jaz’s store unionized in December. Did they follow her lead?

After their union won, Jaz and the other organizers got inquiries from Starbucks workers all over the country. They would go on Zoom calls and tell them how to get started. I was with the Buffalo organizers on the day the union won at a Starbucks in Mesa, Ariz., the first outside Buffalo during the campaign. One worker at Jaz’s store, Michelle Eisen, had been in close contact with the Mesa workers. I went to dinner with her and some of the other Buffalo organizers that night, and they were giddy. They took pride in what they’d set in motion.

So these things catch on. Whenever I cover a union campaign these days, I ask, “Have you been paying attention to what’s going on at Starbucks? At Amazon?” Invariably the answer is not just yes, but, “We were inspired by it, we were motivated by it, it showed us it could be done.” That was the case when I interviewed Trader Joe’s and Apple workers. And, historically, unionization tends to happen in spurts.

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Workers waiting to vote on a union outside Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse.Credit...DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York Times

College graduates seem to be driving this spurt.

A key part of the story is the radicalization of the college-educated worker. You had a grinding recovery from the Great Recession followed by the pandemic. Being college-educated doesn’t necessarily mean being on board. But whether it’s Starbucks, Amazon or REI, college-educated workers have been heavily involved.

As a group, college-educated Americans are becoming more liberal than working-class Americans. Has that been a barrier to organizing workers without degrees?

College-educated workers often get the ball rolling, but they’re pretty skilled at bringing together a diverse group. I talked to Brima Sylla, a Liberian immigrant who helped organize his co-workers at the Staten Island Amazon facility. He’s got a Ph.D. in public policy and speaks several languages. He helped sign up hundreds of people, a lot of them fellow African or Asian immigrants. Another organizer was Pasquale Cioffi. He’s a former longshoreman and has a more traditional working-class background. He was good at talking to noncollege folks and Trump supporters. Having a coalition that put Brima and Pat together helped the union win.

You compared today’s organizing to the 1930s. What parallels do you see?

The Great Depression was obviously a traumatic moment. The financial system was breaking down. The economy was collapsing. Unemployment was at 25 percent. But by 1936, things were substantially better, though still not great. That’s been true during the pandemic, too. A lot of people lost their jobs in 2020, but by 2021, the labor market was tight, and workers felt empowered. That one-two punch — a traumatic event, and then things improving — is a recipe for successful organizing.

Your profile of Jaz reads differently from many Times stories. You talk about yourself — like her, you were a Rhodes scholar and interviewed your former classmates, contrasting their business-friendly outlook of the late 1990s with her skepticism. Why did you write it that way?

Once I understood Jaz’s background and role in the Starbucks campaign, my first thought was, “Wow, this probably wouldn’t have happened among my cohort of Rhodes scholars.” My reflex was to compare it to my group and marvel at the differences. It seemed more honest, authentic and compelling to just own that.

More about Noam: He joined The Times in 2015 after almost 15 years at The New Republic and lives near Chicago. After a bad experience involving a late-night cup of coffee, his college humor magazine and an 8 a.m. math class, he avoids caffeine.

  • How Amazon fought back after workers organized a Staten Island warehouse.

  • But a similar effort to unionize a nearby Amazon facility failed.

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President Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia yesterday.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
  • President Biden is framing his meetings with Middle East autocrats as an effort to contain Russia and outmaneuver China.

  • Russia’s defense minister ordered troops to step up attacks in Ukraine.

  • President Vladimir Putin is making sweeping changes to school curriculums to shape the views of young Russians.

  • Europe is at a fragile moment: It is confronting tests of its democracies, a plunging currency and the war in Ukraine.

  • Dozens of wildfires have swept across Europe, driven by a heat wave.

  • The pandemic is still a driving factor behind the world’s economic woes.

  • A conservative lawyer pitched Donald Trump in late 2020 on a “martial law” plan to overturn his election loss.

  • Some residents of a North Dakota city were excited about a new mill and its promise of jobs, but its ties to China turned others against the project.

  • New state abortion bans will likely have an outsized impact on the youngest pregnant girls.


The Sunday question: Should Biden have met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia?

Biden’s meeting on Friday with Prince Mohammed after condemning him for a journalist’s murder affirms the idea that the U.S. only selectively cares about human rights, Agnès Callamard argues in Foreign Affairs. Yasmine Farouk writes that while it may not have been Biden’s main objective for resetting relations, the meeting was a chance to pressure Saudi Arabia on human rights.

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The Laylit party in Brooklyn.Credit...Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times

On the dance floor: A Middle Eastern party scene is thriving in Brooklyn.

Travel woes: It’s getting harder to get a passport quickly.

Sunday routine: A cruise boat captain tries to steer crowds as close to the Statue of Liberty as possible.

Advice from Wirecutter: Moving your home office outside this summer? Bring a fan — not just to keep you cool, but also to repel mosquitoes.

A Times classic: A timeless tomato tart.

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Credit...Michelle Mildenberg

Forget the beach reads: These historical novels are worth the weight.

By the Book: The last great book that Teddy Wayne read was Alison Espach’s “Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance.”

Our editors’ picks: The journalist Katy Tur’s memoir, “Rough Draft,” and nine other books.

Times best sellers: Henry Kissinger’s “Leadership,” which profiles statecraft strategies, is a nonfiction best seller. See all our lists here.

The Book Review podcast: Our critics discuss “Why We Did It,” by Tim Miller.

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Villagers planting trees in Brazil.Credit...Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

On the cover: Can planting a trillion trees save the world?

Recommendation: Talk to yourself.

Tip: How to recover from being ghosted.

Diagnosis: A mysterious fall was the first sign that something was wrong.

Eat: The case for grilling cucumbers.

Read the full issue.

  • Stephen Bannon, the former top adviser to Donald Trump, will go on trial tomorrow on a charge of contempt of Congress.

  • Maryland will hold its primaries on Tuesday.

  • Vladimir Putin will meet with the leaders of Iran and Turkey on Tuesday.

  • Italy’s prime minister, Mario Draghi, is expected to address Parliament on Wednesday to clarify the country’s political future.

  • The Jan. 6 committee will hold a hearing on Thursday to walk through a minute-by-minute accounting of Donald Trump’s actions during the Capitol riot.

  • Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game is on Tuesday. First up is its Home Run Derby tomorrow.

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Credit...Julia Gartland for The New York Times. (Photography and Styling)

Rethinking your grocery budget because of inflation? Emily Weinstein suggests moving away from meat and embracing beans and vegetables with these and other recipes: pasta with tuna, capers and scallions and vegan coconut-ginger black beans.

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Here’s a clue from the Sunday crossword:

45 Down: Language in which “khoobsurat” means “beautiful”

Take the news quiz to see how well you followed the week’s headlines.

Here’s today’s Spelling Bee. Here’s today’s Wordle. After, use our bot to get better.


Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.

Matthew Cullen, Claire Moses and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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Ian Prasad Philbrick is a writer for The Morning newsletter. More about Ian Prasad Philbrick

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Union Drives Are Succeeding. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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