When Joe Tessone and his fellow Starbucks baristas walked into a pep rally with management at their store in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood in August, the bosses were ready. A trio of higher-ups passed around copies of the preamble to the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World and warned the hourlies against the radicalism of the old anarchist-socialist One… return to article
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Reader Comments (4)Page 1 of 1 pagesHi Mischa. Nice article and I don’t want to be picky, but my point was not so much to DEFUSE employer resistance as to ELIMINATE it as a determinant of union membership.
It’s the employer’s right to fight with a union over the terms of an employment contract. It’s not the employer’s right (though of course they do so all the time) to determine what organization an employee may join to represent them in dealings with employers. As Franklin Roosevelt put it around the time the NLRA was passed: “workers ought to be free to choose any representative they want, whether it be an individual, a union, the Royal Geographic Society, or the Akhond of Swat.”
Of course, to give this reasonable assumption real life requires that unions, not just the Royal Geographic Society, be willing to accept workers as members, irrespective of their majority status. But as you point out in your article, the good news is that more and more unions, and now even labor federations, are doing just that. This is an important and very welcome break from postwar union practice.
Posted by Joel Rogers on Oct 5, 2006 at 6:24 PM Very interesting article.
It is about time that trade unions everywhere understood that the war waged against trade unions and the post war ‘settlement’ in the West is never going to go away, and that the rules have changed.
Solidarity unionism is nothing more than unionism, period. The fostering of acts of social solidarity in the workplace, and linking them with solidarity actions elsewhere, will do more to build a new, relevant and sustainable labour movement than a ton of windy manifestos and tinkering with structrures. Reclaiming the discourse and practice of human rights and democracy, at work and in the wider society will have explosive consequences for an elite that apparently never knows when enough is enough.
Posted by Jane Doe on Oct 6, 2006 at 12:25 AM Starbucks is a good symbol of capitalism. It’s all about marketing. It’s about taking, not giving. The product is crap. I don’t know why exactly, although I suspect it’s just the same old story of cost cutting. They probably use cheap coffee on top of cheap labor (growers and baristas). If, on top of that, they don’t know what they’re doing with it, then you’re not going to get a good product, because coffee is already easy to get wrong. It’s simply a temperamental food. But boy is it profitable! You just have to pay the growers and baristas nothing and charge the consumers a fortune which you then pocket.
Capitalists are vampires. They suck the life out of everything. It’s gotten to the point where we hardly know what’s good anymore. That’s because we never see it. (Although here in Canada, Second Cup does carry decent coffee. No, I don’t work for Second Cup). The only thing capitalists invest in are schemes to maximize profits, regardless the cost to others and to the quality of the products and services they offer, not to mention the environment.
Capitalism has won. It’s all we have. But that doesn’t mean that it’s affordable. It isn’t.
Posted by Arby on Oct 10, 2006 at 7:36 AM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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