Photograph by Elliot Stoller – CC BY-SA 2.0

How many graduates of Buena Vista Elementary and Lowell High School in San Francisco have become labor book authors?

Probably not many–other than Eric Blanc, whose mother taught in that city’s public school system (and served as union president) and whose father was long active in its central labor council.

Blanc became a teacher himself and drew on that experience when writing his first book, Red State Revolt: The Teachers Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics. It chronicled the 2017-18 uprising in public education in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, and other states.

Now an assistant professor at Rutgers University, Blanc has just published a more wide-ranging study, We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big. It grapples with a perennial question facing the labor left—namely, what kind of break with business as usual, within established unions, would help more private sector workers win union recognition, first contracts, and strikes?

A member of DSA, Blanc argues that the current imbalance of power between labor and management in the U.S. can only be changed, for the better, with large-scale, coordinated organizing efforts rooted in the rank-and-file. His most detailed case study focuses on the four-year union recognition drive at Starbucks, one of the biggest restaurant companies in the world, with 380,000 employees and market value of $108 billion.

In the U.S., that workforce is relatively high-turnover, widely dispersed and fragmented into small, retail store size groups. The author’s interviews with founders of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) take us behind the scenes of an amazingly durable campaign that began when “ten young radicals started salting Buffalo Starbucks stores in early 2021.” (One was Jaz Brisack, now a “practitioner in residence” at the UC Berkeley Labor Center).

“Worker to Worker DNA”

During its early months, SBWU filed almost two representation petitions per day at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This implanted what Blanc calls “worker-to-worker DNA into the entire subsequent trajectory of the campaign.” Because of its do-it-yourself spirit, the campaign’s initial Labor Board election win rate was a remarkably high 80 percent. According to Blanc, SBWU could not have gained such traction if the organizing had been done in more conventional fashion, with heavy reliance on full-time union staff.

Backed by Workers United/SEIU, SBWU has since helped about 11,000 baristas win bargaining rights at 525 Starbucks stores in 45 states. SBWU had to develop union majorities, unit by unit and maintain them before, during, and after hotly contested NLRB voting. For two years, SBWU endured what Blanc calls a “scorched earth union busting campaign of unparalleled intensity and breadth,” with an estimated price tag of $250........

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