Apr 20, 2022 7:00 AM

A TikTok Army Is Coming for Union Busters

Online activists Gen-Z for Change targeted Starbucks and Kroger for anti-union firings. Now they plan to take aim at Amazon.

One pink and one blue rope tied together in a knot against a black background

Elise Joshi was scrolling through Twitter’s standard rage-bait late one night in February when she saw a Tweet that galled her enough to take action. Starbucks, the supposedly progressive coffee chain, had just fired seven employees who were trying to unionize a store in Memphis, Tennessee. (Starbucks told CNN the firings weren’t retaliatory, but the workers claimed otherwise.) The 19-year-old Joshi immediately fired up a group chat with two fellow union sympathizers. “We could find the Starbucks applications there and tell ppl to blow it up w fakes,” she texted.

“That’s something we can do,” responded Sean Wiggs, a college student who studies computer engineering. He knew because he’d done it before. Within two hours, Wiggs coded a script that would let users auto-submit a pile of fake job applications to replace the Starbucks workers, using a temporary email service to generate disposable email addresses. Twenty-one-year-old coder Sofia Ongele spun up a website, called Change Is Brewing, and populated it with simple instructions on how to use the script, which users could leave running in a browser tab. (She had coded a similar website in January to spam Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s critical-race-theory tip line with Bee Movie lyrics.) The trio began pushing the site out on TikTok and reposting across their social media channels.

“It’d be a real shame if people used the website and let Starbucks know unionizing is good and they shouldn’t be firing workers for trying to unionize,” Ongele told her 285,000 TikTok followers. “The link may or may not be in my bio.”

Ongele’s cheeky tone captures the style of a lot of the posts by Gen-Z for Change, a coalition of progressive digital activists. Joshi serves as the organization’s director of operations, Ongele as digital strategy coordinator, and Wiggs as a digital strategy associate. Labeled the “progressive movement’s TikTok army,” the group has amassed a collective 540 million social media followers, garnering “more views than CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News,” as they like to point out. Like-minded groups are clamoring for airtime on their megaphone, landing Gen-Z for Change a White House briefing on the war in Ukraine, and a parody of said briefing on Saturday Night Live.

Launched in 2020, the group rebranded from its original moniker, TikTok for Biden, after the president’s inauguration. The makeover also meant a broader remit, with content creators trumpeting issues from climate change to foreign relations. Over the past couple of months, members have begun to turn their attention to the labor movement. After Starbucks, they spammed the Kroger-owned supermarket Ralph’s, which posted temporary replacement jobs after unionized workers there authorized a strike. Next, they’re setting their sights on Amazon.

Since they launched Change Is Brewing, the trio says 140,000 people flooded the application pool for Starbucks’ Memphis store and another location in Buffalo where unionizing workers were also fired. Last week, when Starbucks posted a job for a director of corporate labor counsel with experience in “strike contingency planning,” the organizers rallied their followers, who submitted 40,000 phony applications. Shortly thereafter, the company removed the posting. Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

The activists are not content to simply cause an occasional ruckus; they’re looking to seed a movement. Joshi notes that they could have run the applications themselves in the background and likely had a similar effect. “But having people participate and feel like they've contributed to the labor movement, maybe we created another generation of organizers. Maybe they're [saying to] themselves, ‘Hey, I work at a restaurant too. Maybe I’ll try to organize my workplace and mobilize people that I work with.’” (She also notes that they always ask permission from the organizers before launching a campaign.)

Although none of the three activists have been union members, the labor movement’s recent successes tapped into their longing for tangible progress when so many of the issues they care about seem deadlocked, especially in the federal government. “Unions are taking over the country,” says Joshi. “And people want to get involved with that, because it's one of the coolest things that we have ever seen. And it's one of the most promising, optimistic things that we've seen. We've needed optimism for such a long time. We've lacked it.”

Joshi is cognizant of the temptation to wallow in pessimism, and she says she fell victim to it when she first started posting terrifying climate change videos to TikTok. The algorithm loves those videos, some of which traffic in “climate doomism.” They get tons of views, but they don't spur action. “Inspiring and mobilizing [Gen Z] is the goal, even if that is going to get you 10 percent fewer views,” she says. “Because that's what's important, getting people off the app and doing something about it.”

The reckonings that came with the pandemic shone a light on inequities in the workplace, says Ongele. “And I think that unions are a really great way to level the playing field as it relates to the big guns at corporate and HQ and the people on the ground doing the work.”

Public approval of unions has been on the rise over the past decade, thanks partly to social media, says Tyler Quick, a PhD student at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism who studies social media and political economy and has worked as a labor activist. He traces this back to the wave of graduate student unionization campaigns that began in the mid-2010s. “Graduate students are young people. They are online. Some of the most prolific influencers are graduate students or recently graduated students. And a lot of their rhetoric and ideas were able to seep through the social media public sphere such that, by the time we got to 2020, when people are really fed up with neoliberal capitalism, the intellectual seeds were already sown.”

While the Gen-Z activists learned little about unions in school, news of a resurgent labor movement reached them through the news and over social media, and led them to question some of their own early work experiences.

Wiggs says he was fired “unjustly” from his high school job at a fast-food restaurant, despite doing everything that was asked of him, showing up early to his shifts, and routinely covering for coworkers. When he needed to attend an event at his high school, he was told that since nobody could cover for him, he’d be fired if he didn’t come to work. “I thought that was pretty crazy, how you can do everything right in this country as it pertains to being a good worker and being a productive member of society. And these companies have no obligation to respect you or your time,” Wiggs says.

Wiggs first saw an opportunity to marry his coding prowess with his activism when the anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life launched a tip line to report violations of SB8, the state law passed last year criminalizing abortions after six weeks. Wiggs coded a bot that auto-filled the tip line’s questionnaire with bogus tips and memes. A few months later, he coded a similar script that sent phony job applications when Kellogg’s was advertising to replace striking workers. Gen-Z for Change caught wind of this work and asked him to come aboard. When Joshi texted him about the Starbucks postings, he was able to adapt the code he’d used for Kellogg’s. None of the employers used captcha or email verification on their job postings, which made his job much easier.

Now the group is strategizing about how to target Amazon, which they see as a much more formidable opponent. “It's so massive that there are very few things you can do with equal scope that are actually going to be damaging to Amazon,” says Wiggs. While reputation tarnishing was part of their Starbucks strategy, Joshi doesn’t think that will work with Amazon. “Starbucks is known for being progressive. But Amazon is known for having workers pee in bottles,” she says. “I don't think it's going to be as easy as our past stuff. But we're coming for them.”

Gen-Z for Change’s half-a-billion-strong audience makes it an attractive partner to traditional organizations looking to reach a younger crowd. Earlier this month, the AFL-CIO, the US’s largest federation of unions, reached out to the activists after spotting the Ralph’s campaign. The federation, which has its own TikTok page with a much more modest follower count, invited members to an informal meeting it convened between union allies and researchers using advanced data tools in organizing campaigns. Although the meeting was introductory and no formal partnership was inked, an AFL-CIO spokesperson says “the door is open.”

“What I'm hoping is that we created a new generation of organizers who understand digital tactics and social media algorithms better than most past organizers,” says Joshi. “Now we have this knowledge of how to run campaigns successfully, how to get people out to vote, how to go beyond views and actually make a tangible difference. And now, we're all real organizers. Digital organizing is legitimate organizing.”

Updated 4/20/2022 14:30 ET: This piece has been updated to correct Elise Joshi's age as 19, not 20.