How union organizing can change your life and the world: A conversation with Jaz Brisack

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within in these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got a really special extended episode for y’all. Today I got the chance to sit down here at the Real News Network studio in Baltimore and chat in person with someone that I’ve been really wanting to have on the show for a long time. Jaz Brisack is a union organizer and co-founder of the Inside Organizer School, which trains workers to unionize. After spending one year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, Jaz got a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, becoming a founding member of Starbucks, workers United and helping organize the first unionized Starbucks in the United States in December of 2021.

As the organizing director for Workers United, upstate New York and Vermont, they also worked with organizing committees at companies ranging from Ben and Jerry’s to Tesla. Now, Jaz wrote a really incredible and raw, funny and just deeply insightful book that was just published, and the book is called Get On the Job and Organize Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World. And it is just chock full of wisdom and firsthand experience from one of the many powerful diverse voices of what so many out there have been calling the new Labor Movement. And just to give you a taste in the introduction of their book, Jaz writes, in theory, organizing a union is straightforward. Workers decide they want to organize sign union cards, declaring that they want to join an organization and file for an election. Once they reach a large enough majority, the NLRB or National Labor Relations Board then schedules an election in which workers vote by secret ballot on whether to unionize.

If 50% plus one of the voters vote to unionize the union wins and the NLRB certifies the organization as the official representative of the workers for the purpose of collective bargaining, then the company is required to meet with the union to bargain a first contract. In practice, the process is far more complicated. Companies try a variety of methods, some legal others to prevent, dissuade, or intimidate workers from unionizing. The NLRB process is riddled with loopholes and delays. If a company fires a union leader, it can take years to win their reinstatement and companies can appeal NLRB decisions. In federal court, there are no meaningful penalties for breaking labor law beyond paying back wages and posting an admission, companies can get away with nearly any violation. The consequence for refusing to bargain with a union is a letter ordering the company to bargain with no enforcement mechanism.

Despite this workers’ enthusiasm for organizing unions in their workplace is surging today. There is a growing awareness of the necessity of unions. Organizing allows workers to take action against structural and societal injustices, including the soaring income inequality that has eroded many workers’, prospects of career advancement along with any possibility of retirement. It is also the only means of bringing democracy to the workplace and altering power dynamics in favor of workers rather than corporations. So listen, if you listen to this show, I can pretty much guarantee that you will find a lot to love and even more to wrestle with in Jaz’s book. So seriously, go check it out and let us know what you think about it and let us know what you think of today’s episode, which we recorded in late June. And without further ado, here it is my conversation with organizer and author Jaz Brisack

Jaz Brisack:

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. My name is Jaz Brisack. I am a union organizer. I’ve worked on campaigns ranging from Nissan and Mississippi to Starbucks, workers United where I was assault at the first store to unionize in Buffalo, New York to the spectrum of Ben and Jerry’s to Tesla. And now I’m working with the Inside Organizer School to expand organizing, insulting, and I just have a book out on one signal press called Get On the Job and Organize Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World about how folks can take the lessons that I’ve learned and we’ve learned on campaigns and translate that into their own jobs and lives.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, Ja, thank you so much for sitting down with me here in the Real News studio in Baltimore. Welcome to Baltimore. It’s great to have here. And like I was telling you before we got rolling here, I’ve wanted to talk to you for a number of years, and I know I’m not the only one, but obviously we were following reporting on the Starbucks unionization campaign in Buffalo very closely. Ever since then, we’ve been talking to Starbucks worker organizers at different stores across the country, California, Mississippi, Louisiana here in Baltimore. I was in the room when the first Baltimore Starbucks won their vote.

Jaz Brisack:

Oh, amazing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, so it’s really been something incredible to behold. And of course all of us in the labor media world, and I guess the broader media world, everyone’s been talking about the Starbucks campaign for the past few years. People have been talking about it online, people have been, it’s gained a lot of symbolic meaning for folks. And I guess I have participated in and born witness to so many folks who are not involved in the organizing, like trying to make a narrative out of the organizing that y’all did, we’ve been talking about this resurgence of American organized labor, right? We’ve been talking about this new young labor movement from Starbucks to Chipotle to grad workers, to all over the place. I’ve been dying to ask you for the past few years to just tell that story through your eyes from Buffalo to now. What do you see when you look at the landscape of worker organizing in America today, and where does the Starbucks Workers United campaign fit into that?

Jaz Brisack:

Well, I think I’m a labor history nerd. That’s how I got into the labor movement. I can

Maximillian Alvarez:

Tell from reading the book

Jaz Brisack:

And there other parts of the book that were cut like my 10 page dissertation on the Remington Rand typewriter strike in the Mohawk Valley formula, which RIP to my excerpt. But I think for me as a nerd and as a labor history student, there’s always been these threads and these currents either in previous organizing campaigns or latent within workers. So in a lot of ways, the Starbucks Workers United campaign and the industry project that it came out of in Buffalo where we weren’t just trying to unionize Starbucks, we were trying to unionize the entire coffee industry from give me a coffee in Ithaca to spot coffee in Rochester and Buffalo to Perks Coffee. And we didn’t turn down little shops, but we also didn’t bulk at going after the Starbucks monolithic companies. And so for me, that was very much a continuation of what the industrial workers of the world had tried to do and their philosophy of you don’t just organize one hot shop or try to build a relationship with one company.

You organize the entire industry and then you could have a strike across the sector and truly change conditions in the industry. And I think a lot of folks in the labor movement, especially on the SEIU side and some other unions that are really into lobbying and legislative advocacy think that sectoral bargaining means creating legislative reforms or fast food councils where you can shortcut organizing store by store or workplace by workplace. I think there’s no substitute for workplace democracy where workers are actually organizing their workplaces and sitting across the table from the boss on an equal footing. I think that process transforms the workplace, but I think it also transforms people’s lives. I do think especially among young workers today, the red baiting that has characterized the American dominant narratives around unions doesn’t really work anymore. And people have not just an intersectional view of organizing and the struggle for social justice, but also a deeply felt personal connection to the ways that we’re not going to have queer liberation and trans liberation until we actually have full union rights, full economic justice.

Trans workers aren’t marginalized to certain jobs or facing economic discrimination. We’re not going to have racial justice because a bunch of companies endorse Black Lives Matter with half-hearted words, or in the case of Starbucks X, like a Bullhorn picket sign t-shirt, that workers had to fight to even get that. But we’re actually only going to get it when workers are truly in control of their lives and have a much broader say in society and so on for every other issue, whether it’s the climate or Palestine, et cetera. So I do think we’ve tried a lot of other approaches to organizing society or reforming corporations. We’ve seen the rise of pink washing and then the fall of pink washing. And I think people have seen that unions are the only place where workers can really build power that is fully independent from capital and from the state. At least when it’s done.

I think that’s really attractive to folks. The other thing I think is really fascinating is I came into the labor movement reading about Eugene Debs and Joe Hill and Mother Jones and Lucy Parsons, so many other folks who’ve been organizing or coming in with their own experiences and also their own canon of radical influences. And so in Buffalo, so many of my organizing coworkers were reading Stone Butch Blues, Starbucks, workers United did an event in New York City and everybody wanted to go to Stonewall. I think people have a much broader view than I did at 18 of how the labor movement connects to all these other issues. And I do think that’s responsible for seeing kind of an expansion of the labor movement from the post red scare wages, benefits and working conditions kind of union advocacy into a much broader true social justice movement.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I mean that really hits me in my core because I try not to lose sight of that fact because I remember myself as a 18-year-old low wage worker who grew up quite conservative, but also grew up just one hair of a generation behind or in front of you. And I think my childhood in the nineties in Southern California was like spent believing that, still believing the residual points about that red scare narrative that unions were important in the past, but not anymore that unions were outdated bureaucratic institutions that limited of individual workers’ ability to excel and succeed in their job. All of that was stuff that I grew up with and what it translated to on the job, whether I was working at retail pizza delivery guy or factories and warehouses, was that when I was enduring and my coworkers were enduring really shitty conditions and bad treatments, there were only two options in our mind, stay and just grin and bear it or leave and go find another job.

So I am constantly amazed by anyone, whether they’re young or old, any worker who takes that step to say there’s another way and to stay and fight for what they deserve and to band together with their coworkers to achieve it. And so I say all that to say that when we’re assessing where we are now in the movement in this country, I really don’t want anyone to lose sight of that fact that if there are more people and new generations taking that step, that in itself is a huge win for working people in this country. That being said, I want to drill down a little deeper and ask how we would realistically assess where that movement is right here, right now in the year of our Lord 2025. Because again, from the media side, I’ve noticed as someone who’s constantly trying to get these workers stories out there and get people to commit to them and invest their energy, their hope, their solidarity in these worker struggles, I’m very open about the fact that, yeah, I’m a journalist, but when workers are fighting for a better life, I want them to win.

Jaz Brisack:

Objectivity serves the boss, not us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Exactly. It really, really does. And these are our fundamental basic rights and human rights. I don’t think saying that and defending that compromises my position as a journalist in the least.

Jaz Brisack:

But during the legal review for the book, I was asked how I had taken all the notes for the campaign, and a lot of it was based on conversations that I had with workers during these campaigns. And the reviewers were like, well, did you ask Nissan for comment? Did you call them and ask them if they were racist? And I was like, what do you think Nissan would say if I called him up? And I was like, hello, remember me also, were you racist? So yeah, I think we have to actually just call it like it is instead of doing the both sides thing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I wholeheartedly agree. And again, that applies to folks who are not the bosses as well, like all of us people on the, I guess we could call the progressive lefts. People who have, I think for good reasons really cheered on the Starbucks Workers United campaign. People who have, I’ve seen firsthand every time we share a new story of another store voting to unionize, people get really amped up again, that narrative builds that this is a new labor movement, a resurgence of labor. We’re storming, storming the castles of corporate America and taken shit over. But those same people I’ve found over the years, it’s really hard to get them to share that same commitment and excitement and investment in the stories of workers getting fired for organizing stores getting shut down for ostensibly nont retaliatory reasons. But I think very obviously for retaliatory reasons, and I’ve interviewed those folks too, I’ve interviewed the young people like you who led unionization campaigns at Home Depot in Philly or Chipotle in Maine who lost their jobs.

Their story fell out of the news cycle, but the narrative that people online have been using them for still persists, right? And I feel like we’re not taking into account that this is a long struggle that the bargaining for Starbucks work is united is still ongoing. It’s not like we haven’t won the whole kitten caboodle yet, but people are sort of talking about it as if we have. So it’s a very long roundabout way of asking where would you place the current union upsurge the labor movement over the past few years? Is it what people online are saying?

Jaz Brisack:

Well, I think we’re in a crisis point. I think there’s a huge surge in people wanting to organize and wanting to form unions and seeing unions as a fundamental force for democracy in their workplace, for building a better life, for transforming society. And so I think that momentum is there and is spreading. I write in the book about how no organizing effort is ever wasted. I think that’s true. A campaign like Bessemer at Amazon in Alabama transformed the way that people were thinking about union busting made people, they got so close that people were like, wait a second, you can take on Amazon. And then a LU was able to have a slightly easier path, I think, to having organizing conversations. Folks in Buffalo, Starbucks stores were watching this and being like, Hey, if they could do it, we can do it. And so I think there is this, if they can do it, we can do it Mentality, which is really core to this organizing is contagious.

Once people understand, Hey, I don’t have to tolerate this treatment. Hey, I should actually have a respectful work environment. Hey, I should have a say in my life. People don’t want to go back to relinquishing that. And I think that’s also, especially in a high turnover industry, folks are going from one campaign to the next. And so for example, the person who helped launch the Tesla campaign in Buffalo had worked at Perks Coffee and then it spot Coffee and take in their experiences of organizing as a barista into a different sector, but it’s not organizing across sectors isn’t that different. So I think we’ll keep seeing that desire building, but at the same time, I think the labor movement isn’t fully meeting this moment. I think the workers need advice. There’s an oversimplification sometimes I think of worker to worker organizing where it’s like this is all spontaneous.

This doesn’t take planning. Workers have this innately, and I think it’s true that workers, as soon as you tell people, Hey, it doesn’t have to be like this. We have power actually, despite everybody saying we don’t. People do typically want to organize and are willing to take on the risks in order to be part of something so much bigger. But the Starbucks campaign wouldn’t have worked if it was fully spontaneous. We needed to use salts, which means folks who get jobs with the goal of organizing. We needed folks who’d been through union campaigns before, including I was drawing on my own experiences. We had Richard Bensinger who’s an amazing organizer and mentor and who’d been organizing for 50 years. And if we’d just tried to do it totally spontaneously, it probably wouldn’t have worked. People have tried to do that before. Starbucks has responded by firing workers and the same kinds of union busting that we saw later in the campaign.

But the role of the big unions or the parent unions isn’t so much controlling every little detail of the organizing effort. That should be a democratic process within the organizing committee, but it should be to actually bring down the hammer and put the leverage and pressure on a company to force them to respect workers’, right, to organize. And so our core demand on all these campaigns from Nissan to Starbucks to test the Divin and Jerry’s was sign the fair Election principles, which are a code of corporate conduct that set a higher standard labor law in this country is terrible, super weak, no penalties doesn’t, the process moves so slowly that workers are still waiting on reinstatement years and years later.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Are you

Jaz Brisack:

Still waiting? I’m still waiting on reinstatement. Good luck to me with the new Labor Board, but the old Labor Board wasn’t so great either. So if we’re looking to the law for victory, we are going to keep looking for a long time. We have to find the ways outside of the law to hold companies accountable at Ben and Jerry’s. They didn’t just recognize the union out of the goodness of their hearts. No company recognizes a union out of the goodness of their hearts unless it’s, we had a coffee shop or a restaurant campaign in Rochester where an adjunct professor who taught labor studies was like, I want to open a restaurant and I will voluntarily recognize you. That was one in a million or a billion. Ben and Jerry’s has busted unions in the past, but they read the room and they were like, it’s more compatible with our image to just recognize this than risk the brand damage they would do by union busting.

And they were very aware of what was going on with Starbucks. They were like, we want headlines. And they got headlines that were B, Ben and Jerry’s don’t be Starbucks. And so they were thrilled about that. They were fist bumping us in negotiations over that. But all of that to say that’s what moves companies is pressure and potential damage to their brand. And that’s what these unions must do. If the Teamsters had actually tried to hold Chipotle accountable after they closed the store in Maine and retaliated against workers in other places. And also after workers at the Lansing, Michigan store successfully formed a union despite management’s attempts to stop them from organizing, I think we might have a very different scenario where you could actually hold a company accountable and then organize the rest of the company. That was what we did at Spot Coffee in Buffalo.

The company went from firing workers for organizing through a grassroots community, boycott into signing the para election principles, reinstating the fired workers, and signing a really good first contract. That was the idea that we were going to take to Starbucks was if they violated workers’ right to organize, they would face a similar boycott that would call the question on will the public and the labor movement allow a company to get away with this so much longer story. The International Union was never terribly interested in calling a boycott. They had alternative ideas and Berlin Rosen press consultants and other advisors who had a very different view of the world and of how you win a union campaign. But the reason that Starbucks ended up facing enough pressure to at least nominally come back to the bargaining table was a global grassroots boycott of the company over attacking the union when we took a stand in solidarity with Palestine. And so I think that proved that boycotts do work even though unions are not always the most proactive in calling them.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and just on that note, I know there’s so much here beyond Starbucks to talk about, but maybe to just sort of round us out here in the first part of the conversation, I know folks listening are probably dying to note where do things stand with Starbucks Workers United and that whole effort right now?

Jaz Brisack:

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s complicated. I’m no longer working for Workers United. I’m still awaiting my reinstatement at Starbucks, but I think we had a lot of momentum when Starbucks under the gun of the boycott was like, Hey, we want to come back to the Bargainy table. I think things have dragged on for a long time and that only benefit Starbucks, that delays do not ever benefit a union. And so they were able to replace the CEO who had been perhaps more conciliatory with the guy from Chipotle who had been overseeing that Union vesting, and they were able to wait for the Trump administration to come into place. And it’s not like the previous administration had been so great, but now they have full control probably over that process.

Maximillian Alvarez:

If that doesn’t tell you where we are now, nothing will. Right? Because my mind goes to the Pittsburgh Post Gazette strikers who I’ve been interviewing on this show for the two and a half years that they’ve been on strike longest running strike in the country right now that has now straddled both the Biden and the second Trump administration. And the point of fact is that under both administrations, these workers who have been on an unfair labor practice strike, have had rulings in their favor, multiple rulings in their favor, offering total clarity of the fact that the Pittsburgh Post Gazette owners are not bargaining in good faith, not abiding by their legal duties. And still the workers remain on strike still. They wait still the slow death by a thousand cuts of people forgetting about them and bills piling up. That’s the reality that they’re going through while still heroically holding the line. And now we are facing an NL Rrb that has been defunct for months while Trump has been illegally removing keyboard members. But looking ahead, a functional NL rrb under this administration, as you rightly pointed out, gives none of us any realistic hope.

Jaz Brisack:

It’s better if we just wait it out. They can’t roll badly if they’re not doing anything

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right. Nothing’s better than what

Jaz Brisack:

I would prefer that the administration does not roll in me case and just kicks the can down the road.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I think that’s fair. Well, and in that vein, I kind of want to, in the grand tradition of this show, maybe dig a little deeper into your story and then we’ll carry that story through to this book and all the other critical insights in there. But yeah, I was curious to know where your path as an organizer began and what that path looked like as you got more invested and interested in labor history, more involved in real life labor organizing, and to the point that you got hired at Starbucks as assault someone who was going in with the explicit intention to work and help workers organize there. So yeah, where did that path begin for Jasper’s act?

Jaz Brisack:

Well, I am originally from Houston, Texas. My parents are a strange combination. My dad is an immigrant from India and worked in the intersection of the tech industry and marketing and communications at companies like Bechtel. And so there was not a lot of union activism where organizing going on in that sector. He was never a union member. It wasn’t a topic of conversation. And then my mom was sort of a southern populist in ways that could be left wing, like some of UA long’s platform and then could be right wing other parts of the same platform or Ross Perot’s candidacy, et cetera. So I had this very unusual mix of looking up to people like Anne Richards and Barbara Jordan, and then also hearing anti-immigrant messaging, watching documentaries like Waiting for Superman, which was one of the first Koch brother funded documentaries about teachers unions. That was one of the first messages that I heard about unions in the current day.

So my pathway was down this weird rabbit hole of I became an atheist, not a very popular move. And my household, especially with my mother and I was really into the history of free thought, especially in the South, got very into the Scopes Monkey trial. We were living in East Tennessee at the time. I was in four H where people were like, oh, you believe in evolution? That’s devil worshiping. So I was very present in the world that I was in as a homeschooled kid in the south. And so the lawyer who had represented the teacher during the Scopes Monkey trial was named Clance Darrow. I read his autobiography and the thing that really struck me in his autobiography was the way he talked about Eugene Debs and was like Eugene Debs was the greatest guy I ever met. He really believed in all of these things.

So I googled Eugene Debs. The first search result was the Marxist Internet archive and Deb’s speech to the court that was sentencing him to jail for encouraging draft resistance during World War I. And it was your honor, years ago I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. And I said then, and I say now that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free. So some might say I had not actually become quite as atheist as I professed to be, and in fact just transferred my loyalty to the Christian Trinity, to Eugene Debs and Joe Hill and

All of my labor heroes. But I think it was a better path for my zeal to embark on. And at that time, I was working at a Panera Bread in East Tennessee. It was not a good job. We were making seven 50 an hour and I was seeing my coworkers going through really tough times. I was experiencing the really physical nature of these jobs and working 10 hour days, and I was like, wait a second. Didn’t the Haymarket martyrs give their lives for the eight hour day? But we don’t have the eight hour day. But I didn’t know that union organizing existed. I thought it was an amazing chapter in history and that it had kind of subsided with the World War I purges of the Wobblies. I hadn’t heard or seen anything really since. And so I was in that state of affairs when I got to the University of Mississippi and met a journalism professor named Joe Atkins who I had lobbied to get into his class.

I was like, I love labor. You cover labor. Please let me in your class. I got in after somebody dropped the class, and then he was like, Hey, this exists. He was the first person who was like, this isn’t just something you read about. This is something you can do. And so he connected me to Richard Bensinger who had been organizing for 50 years. He had been the former organizing director of the A-F-L-C-I-O before they fired him for organizing too much and pushing unions to do too much. He was the former organizing director of the UAW, and this was an interesting moment. Bob King had just been age limited out of office, and Dennis Williams who would end up going to jail had taken over. And so the Nissan campaign was in full swing in Canton, Mississippi. Richard was living mostly in Canton working on the campaign. And I got involved in what was really literally a life and death struggle for workers. There were huge health and safety issues going on in that plant. It was also kind of a final push to organize in the south, but one that didn’t meet with full support from the union leadership who didn’t really believe in organizing and hammers

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and just for listeners, about what time was this and how old were you at this point?

Jaz Brisack:

I was 18 when I first got involved in 2016, and we went to a vote in the summer of 2017. And so at first my job was organizing student support for the campaign as part of an attempt to hold the company accountable by organizing everything from community groups to civil rights, environmental groups, et cetera, to students who would Tougaloo students in Jackson were having occupations of the plant headquarters, and Nissan was scared of these things. They trialed a dealership leafleting trial run for a boycott, and it was remarkably effective. Nissan marketed itself as a very progressive company. They were marketing to black customers, young people, queer people. They were sponsoring pride parades, cutting checks to the naacp, the Merley and Medgar Evers Foundation, the Sierra Club, anything that they could find. And so the leverage to expose what they were doing in the plant versus what they said they were doing was there. But Dennis Williams was building his little golf course mansions with workers’ dues money and was not exactly interested in committing to that fight.

Maximillian Alvarez:

When did the compass lead you to Buffalo?

Jaz Brisack:

Well, after we lost Nissan, which was really heartbreaking, I remember driving back to Oxford, Mississippi just crying the whole way and listening to S on repeat. I really believed and still believe in the labor movement as the most useful thing that people can do to try to change the world and to try to get people on a really fundamental level, greater humanity, greater life, greater ability to actually be people outside of the workplace, which is designed to strip as much of your individuality and autonomy away from you as possible. And so I didn’t want to give up on that fight. I had two more years of school I wanted to drop out every day. Richard was like, please stay in school. So I instead did political work and Jackson was an abortion clinic defender, but I was just waiting to graduate and be able to get back into the labor movement.

There was and is a longstanding problem in the South where unions are like, it’s hard to organize in the South, therefore we don’t organize in the south, therefore there is no union density in the south. And so it’s this kind of self-defeating prophecy. Of course, companies historically have fought unions harder and view organizing, especially militant interracial organizing as a threat to their entire social structure because it is, I mean, even in the 1880s when the Knights of Labor were trying to organize sugar cane workers, the bosses who were the plantation owners were also the KKK. And so they massed the black workers who were participating in this really cool interracial militant effort. And so workers in the south have always had more of an uphill battle, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t do it. It means that we have to do it and we can’t walk away from not organizing store by store because we’re in a right to work state, not organizing, because some folks will say, oh, labor law is racist.

That means we can’t do it. And it’s like, guys, labor law sucks everywhere. Yes, it does have racist origins, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t organize inside and outside the law but toward the same goals. So I think that was an excuse that a lot of unions made and make at that time. And so I ended up going to Buffalo in 2018. Richard asked me to be part of a collective of organizers who are setting up a program called the Inside Organizer School, and that brought together folks from all kinds of different unions, including unions that historically had a lot of beef with each other like Workers United and Unite here to meet on common ground, not argue about turf wars and jurisdiction, and actually focus on how do we organize the unorganized union density has been dropping the right to organize is not a real fact at best.

It’s something that’s on paper and unenforceable. And so this school was designed to teach people how to organize within their own workplaces, whether they were already working at a company or whether they were getting a job with the goal of organizing. And so we set out to recruit salts who would get jobs and start campaigns. And I was involved initially with some of the recruiting for Workers United in upstate New York on the coffee shop program and on other campaigns. And then I ended up working, or I ended up moving to Buffalo because workers at Spot Coffee got fired after the store in Rochester, had unionized workers in Buffalo, reached out management, found out about this and fired half of the workers who came to the first meeting. Nobody else could stay in Buffalo to help with picketing the next day. And so I was like, I can stay. This is fine. Two weeks later I was stuck in Buffalo and Richard was like, now you’re the lead organizer. And I was like, no one asked me. I did not agree to be the lead organizer. In fact, this is terrifying. That’s a lot of responsibility I have to get these workers jobs back. But that was the beginning of my deep involvement in the Buffalo Coffee Project.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, you said you wanted to get back into the labor movement, like alright, the labor movement sucked you right into the thick of things. And I’m curious to learn a bit more about the need for the inside organizing school and to help folks who are listening to this understand what it has been bringing to the table that wasn’t there before, the problems that y’all are kind of working to solve within the organized labor movement. Could you talk a bit more about the sort of need that the Inside Organizer school grew out of and sort of the path that it’s been charting for workers and organizers over the past seven years and how that’s different from maybe the more traditional models of organizing?

Jaz Brisack:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the NSAID Organizer School is really based on the idea that organizers are going to be most effective when they’re in the workplace. Labor law is pretty weak on giving union organizers access. If a company wants to campaign against the union, they can require people to go to anti-union meetings, plaster the workplace with vote no signs. And other propaganda have people in one-on-one meetings with their managers who they have relationships with and often like or trust or the managers have power over their job. And so their word carries a lot of weight. The union does not have access to the plant. The organizers cannot just pull people off of the line and have a meeting about why they should unionize. And so you’re reduced to leafleting at the sidewalk or trying to house call workers and talk to people when they’re not working at their houses.

And so that’s a really unequal playing field in addition to the fact that the union exists to give workers more democracy, but it doesn’t have control over people’s livelihoods. And so companies know that they hold the cards of who gets fired, who gets promoted, how the workplace is functioning, and they will use all of those things to try to crush organizing. Salting is the best way for workers who want to organize to get a headstart on what the company is going to try to do. Just about every single company will try to bust the union and the labor Professor John Logan is always saying companies will do anything lawful and unlawful to crush unions. And that’s been the case on just about every single campaign I’ve ever worked on

Maximillian Alvarez:

Can confirm from this side too. I’ve also seen the truth of that statement

Jaz Brisack:

Up against all of those odds. Salting gives workers who want to organize the training on how to have an organizing conversation, how to connect with a union ahead of time so that you’re not having organizing conversations in the workplace and then scrambling to find a union who will take you on, which is often uphill battle, so that you’re not just going in and being like, Hey guys, have y’all thought about unionizing? I

Maximillian Alvarez:

Fell out. Kids

Jaz Brisack:

Was actually, nine times out of 10, the company finds out about organizing campaigns because someone is really excited about unionizing and goes back to the workplace and it’s like, guys, look what we are going to do. And then often folks get fired before there’s any way to prove that the company knew what they were doing. So salting means quietly building relationships, quietly getting things in order to be able to launch the campaign with enough workers, support a big enough committee that when you go public and the company finds out about it, they can’t crush the momentum and you have a better chance of getting through. And then instead of listening to captive audience meetings on tape afterwards or debriefing with workers, folks who are interested in organizing are inside the workplace, able to talk to their coworkers, able to present the union’s side. It’s still an unequal footing as somebody who’s tried to play this role in captive audience meetings, but it’s much better than just letting management dominate the narrative and then having to do damage control after.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Right? I mean, again, I remember being in Bessemer, Alabama, outside of the Amazon facility there and standing on the sidewalk at the intersection where people would drive up to park at the Amazon facility, but there were our WDSU organizers there standing there hoping to just have at most a minute while people were waiting at the red light to give them some pamphlets to ask them how it went in there, if there was anything they wanted to talk about or learn about the union. That’s what we’re talking about is inside that building that organizers were not allowed into. Amazon could require workers to sit in these captives audience meetings and just be berated by lies and half-truths about what the union was, what it was going to mean, issue, all these sorts of threats to workers about what would happen to them if they did try to unionize compared to one minute or less at a traffic light on their way out of work.

That’s the uneven playing field that we’re talking about. And that was apparently still too much for Amazon because as the great Kim Kelly also reported at that time, Amazon pressured the city to change the timing of those traffic lights so that workers actually had less time to talk to organizers there. That was a proven story. So just trying to give some more meat to what jazz is saying, the playing field is so incredibly uneven, and that does really speak to the need for models like salting, like you’re talking about, where workers who have a knowledge of organizing and a goal to organize can get inside the walls as it were. And I also know that you mentioned this in the book, and another point to just make is that as assault, you also, you have to earn your keep. You got to, yes, you’re in closer proximity to people and you can talk to them and build relationships, but part of that is also doing the work being taken seriously as a fellow worker who knows what the hell you’re talking about.

Jaz Brisack:

No, exactly. You have to be a good coworker. You also have to be normal. And there are many who would insinuate or say directly that I was not actually that good at being normal. Elli, one of my very close friends who was part of the Tesla campaign tried to tell me that I was not to talk to the Tesla committee about random labor, history, fact, and that I should do advanced reading on anime and video games to have more to relate to people on. But my experience in my workplace was, of course, I didn’t talk much about labor because I was undercover and didn’t want to expose that I was a labor nerd. But if you lead with caring about people and caring about their lives and sharing cat photos, you can get a long way so you don’t have to fundamentally change your personality besides kind of knowing when to back off how to build relationships and really participate in the workplace comradery.

If you’re bad at your job, obviously you’re not going to build that kind of trust in those kind of relationships. But I worked at Starbucks for eight months before ever saying the word union, and my role wasn’t to be the vanguard of the revolution. It was to find people, whether it was Michelle Eisen, whose family were coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, who had a deep sense of social justice and a deep commitment to unions and who quickly saw that her legacy at Starbucks could be helping build a union for everybody who would come after her. And Hazel Dickens fire in the hole started playing in my head as we were talking because it’s like, I’m going to make a union for the ones I’ll leave behind. And so it was this very full circle poetic moment, which I did not share with her because I actually can keep my labor back to myself sometimes

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, be normal,

Jaz Brisack:

Be normal. But my coworker, Angela, who had been working jobs since she was I think 13 or 14 before we had any conversations about the union, while all that was deep underground, she was like, we could catalyze a revolution. And so you’re on the lookout for people who have it within them and have the desire. And then it’s like, Hey, what if we actually did what you talked about? I wanted to talk to you because you said this, and I think I know a guy in that case, Richard, but in any case, there’s a way that we could actually put this into practice and there’s a union that would back us up that is the difference often between people throwing Karl Mark’s birthday parties and chatting about unionizing and actually doing it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s keep tugging on that thread because I could genuinely talk to you for hours, but I know I only have you for maybe another 10 minutes or so, and I want to make sure that we round out the conversation really bringing things back to your vital new book, which as you mentioned is called Get on the Job and Organize. And it really pulls together a lot of these critical lessons that you have learned firsthand through your experience as a worker organizer, but also that you’ve learned through your history nerd research and all the conversations that you’ve had with folks. It’s a really critical book, and I would highly encourage anyone who’s even remotely interested in organizing and wants to understand why folks like us are constantly championing organizing and saying, this is your right. You should exercise it.

There are a lot of really deep philosophical existential things there, like you even mentioned, to organize for a better life and work towards a better life is to be more human. It’s to fight against the dehumanization that we experience day in, day out in this crushing capitalist system of working just to live. So I want to ask if we could talk about some of the key themes that you’re bringing together in this book, key lessons that you’re offering for folks. Let’s start, since we were talking about the captive audience meetings, you have one chapter with a very eye-catching title called Corporate Terrorism. I was wondering if maybe we could start there and you can expand a bit on what you mean by that. I think it’s a very powerful way to put it.

Jaz Brisack:

So I should say I should give some credit to the folks where I got some of these lines, get on the job and organize was the slogan of the industrial workers of the world in 1917. And it reflects their philosophy that there’s not this sharp distinction between a union organizer and the rank and file that they didn’t have a big budget. And so a lot of folks who were leading organizing were getting jobs, either migrant jobs, farm worker jobs, factory jobs, anything with the goal of helping organize and build union density. And so I think that philosophy of the labor movement and the idea that union organizers should be working in the industries that they’re organizing and familiar with, what workers are actually going through and not just having their sweet pie cards jobs and becoming kind of pundits or talking heads ironic that now I’m maybe becoming appendant more to self criticize leader, but I think I wanted to get a job at Starbucks because I didn’t just want to go into a staff job without experiencing organizing a workplace myself. And then the corporate terrorism line comes from how Richard would describe what companies were doing, and terrorism is instilling fear for political reasons and trying to terrorize people out of taking a stand or with some kind of agenda. And that’s exactly what corporations are doing. Terrorism is usually a slur directed at people who are resisting oppression by the powers that are in place that are practicing the oppression. I think highly recommend Patrice CU Colors when they call you a terrorist. I think we see this obviously with Freedom Fighters around the world.

Maximillian Alvarez:

One of our highest, most viewed videos in the time that I’ve been the editor-in-chief of the Real News Network is an incredible documentary piece that we shot in the West Bank of Occupied Palestine. And the title of that is a direct quote from one of the women that we interviewed. They call us terrorists, is the name of the documentary. And the whole documentary is showing this oppressed, brutally unimaginably, repressed population of Palestinians in a refugee camp displaced from their homes 50 years prior, just living a bear life where the walls are constantly closing in, where family members are constantly dying and talking to them about what it means to be called a terrorist and what actually they are fighting for. And just like I’m seeing images of that documentary as you’re talking about this, and it really does, I think force and has forced a lot of us to think critically about how that term’s thrown around and how we have been conditioned to see certain people, especially people of certain skin colors and certain parts of the world as owning that term and not looking at things like the tactics of corporations weaponizing fear to prevent people from exercising their rights as also and in fact, more so a truer understanding and definition of what terrorism really is.

Jaz Brisack:

No, exactly. I mean, the terrorists aren’t people like he La Ked. They’re people who are responsible for the oppression that people are facing. And so I use corporate terrorism very intentionally because I think it is potentially controversial and I want people to think about how they define terror and terrorism in their own heads. And I mean, it’s not exactly the same narrative, but it’s very similar to how companies are like since the Civil War and certainly since the Civil Rights movement, the biggest trope about union organizing, but it’s not exclusive to the South, is these outside agitators coming in, stirring up these workers who would otherwise be totally happy and contented. And then Howard Schultz continued that by saying about me and the other salts in Buffalo, if that’s not a nefarious thing to do to get a job at Starbucks and try to unionize from within, I don’t know what it is.

And so when we use unconventional tactics to try to advance our organizing and trying to fight for humanity, we’re called nefarious or shady or terrorists. And when companies fire workers and make people lose their jobs and drive people to mental breakdowns and even to suicide because of the retaliation that people are facing, that’s just the way it is. That’s fine. That’s when people are under occupation or facing occupation and state repression and brutal policing and all of these other things. That’s the way it is. And if you resist that, you’re a terrorist, which is why I intentionally put lines trying to compare what we were doing with only having to win one Starbucks to the IRA, only having to be lucky once. I think we need to make these connections because the forces in power connect all of these struggles against oppression. And you have Palantir making contracts with every repressive regime, whether it’s the US government and ICE and their recent new contract to make a dossier on every person and surveil everyone or their longstanding behaviors and profiting off of the apartheid and genocide and Palestine. They’re using these AI tools to decide who to kill and how. And automating a genocide aside,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And they’ve been doing it like Palestine has been a laboratory to develop technologies of repression for quite some time. Again, we’ve also published powerful documentaries that’s like children of men in real life, where we filmed one that was just at a checkpoint in the West Bank at like three in the morning working people waiting for hours in the dead of night to pass through this Orwell in checkpoint that is cameras tracking their faces, facial recognition technology. I mean all manner of surveillance has been developed and tested out in the most repressive parts of the world.

Jaz Brisack:

And our police departments are all going over there to train on exactly how the IOF is repressing people. And then coming back and doing that same thing in Atlanta or in Ferguson, Missouri or anywhere in Baltimore.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You’re sitting here in our studio right across the street and all over downtown here, there are signs on Lampposts saying this camera is an eye witness.

Jaz Brisack:

Wow.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And every time I pass by one of those, I think of something I heard Chelsea Manning say when she was speaking in Ann Arbor when I was living there, and she said, I got out of prison and all I see is more prison. And you mentioned Palantir, you mentioned the way the Trump administration is sort of using it’s connections to big tech and this massive interlocking apparatus of surveillance to build dossiers on American

Jaz Brisack:

Citizens. You get a terror charge for keying a Tesla and the Tesla is the one filming you do it to the Tesla.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and not to spitball too much about this, but just to really drive home that point about the need to use terms like terrorism and to see the double standards by which the powerful weaponize those terms to achieve their political ends. I’ve been interviewing folks back home in LA where the protests are happening as we speak. We’re recording this near the end of June, 2025. As the National Guard and active duty military are stomping around my home as ice is abducting people off the street, many of these armed agents of the state wearing face masks jumping out of unmarked cars, while at the same time Trump and other officials are saying that it’s a crime for protestors to wear masks to protest. So that again, should just really underscore for you that you should not take these terms at face value. You should always understand how they’re being deployed by the powerful to maintain their power and to reduce hours.

But I don’t want to go off on too big of a tangent there. I think your point is very, very well made and really important. What are some of the other, by way of rounding, like some of the other kind of key takeaways in this book, again, we’re not going to be able to sum up this whole rich text in an hour conversation. The hope is that folks after listening to this will go read the damn book. But I guess for folks out there listening, folks who have maybe wanted to organize their workplace, folks who have seen on social media and your victories in the Starbucks Workers United effort, they’ve seen victories elsewhere in the past few years, and they’ve had that same thought that you mentioned earlier. If they can do it, why can’t we? What are some other kind of key points that folks will find in this book to help them continue down that path?

Jaz Brisack:

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the main takeaways besides it’s not rocket science, anybody can do this. We were literally a sleep deprived band of 20 year olds crashing on each other’s couches and going to drag bars to sign up our coworkers between their numbers, and then going to open our stores at five in the morning the next morning. If we could take on this multinational corporation, it can be done. We were not geniuses. We were pretty normal, pretty ragtag people, and we did it. I think another takeaway I really want people to get from this is I, if you have a job, you should have a union. I think there’s often a conception that people are unionizing jobs that they hate or unionizing jobs in response to really terrible conditions. And I think pushing back on both of those things is really important.

I mean, people who are putting in the work, you talked earlier about folks typically think they have two choices, either suck it up and bear it or quit. And I think people who don’t care about their jobs or are just doing their job, getting a paycheck and going home aren’t going to put in all of the effort that it takes to dedicate yourself to a union campaign. It can absorb your whole life for a while. And I think the folks who are willing to take that on are the most committed to the company, are the ones who are really trying to hold the company accountable. I mean, we had a leaflet during the Starbucks campaign that was the company’s mission and values, and every way that forming a union was upholding these values that Starbucks doesn’t truly believe in. And so I think positivity is more unifying than negativity, especially when you have a company trying to terrify everyone out of organizing.

I think it’s really important to present an idea of what the world could look like if we win and talk to people about what they could really change and how their lives would be different. But I think trying to change that narrative of the disgruntled union organizer is really important. And then I think the other takeaway is you can’t separate out all these threads. And so we’ve just been talking about all of these connections between the oppression that we’re facing. I think the Starbucks campaign was led by folks who were active in all kinds of other struggles, whether they had been protestors for racial justice, whether they were queer workers and trans workers who were seeing the stripping away of their rights every day, especially folks in places like Oklahoma City or Tennessee or Florida who were organizing a union to be able to have self-defense and collective self-defense against these structures. And yeah, I mean, I think our stance with Palestine was we were slammed for doing it. People were like, that’s a liability. That’s a black eye for the labor movement. You are using your platform of being on this union campaign to express your own politics that don’t relate to union organizing. And I think,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Again, those politics being you shouldn’t slaughter people.

Jaz Brisack:

No, exactly. And they hadn’t said the same thing when we were taking stances around trans rights. They hadn’t said the same thing when we were taking stances for the most part around kicking cop unions out of our labor federations. And they were like, well, these things affect our members. So does genocide. So even if you’re not Palestinian or not part of the group that’s being facing the genocide, which many of our members and workers were and are, being in a country and having your tax dollars and your government massacring people learning how to do that better and more effectively against you by their experiences over there, it’s not disconnected. It’s fundamentally important. And if we don’t have solidarity on one issue, then why should we expect anybody else to have solidarity with us? And I think without getting too deep into this, that’s a lesson that a lot of the labor movement that’s flirting with Trump, whether it’s the Teamsters and Sean O’Brien or the UAW being like, oh, we’re going to negotiate about tariffs with the Trump administration. It’s like, guys, you can’t pick and choose what parts of a fascist agenda you want because your goal as a union should not be to unionize the guards in the concentration camp. It should be to actually overthrow the fascist dictatorship. And we’re not exactly moving fast enough in that direction. So

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, we are not, and I want to way of asking a last question really drive this point home, right? I think this is where your path and mine meet. I mean, we’re physically sitting in the same room right now. We’ve had very different paths that have led us to being in this room. But I think for me at base, this show from the very first episode I ever recorded with my dad to everything I’ve done since then for this show and at the Real News and beyond, I was telling you, I didn’t start this as a union show. I didn’t know shit about unions when I started it. And I’ve learned a lot by talking to folks like yourself over the years. But I think what it really comes down to and why I wanted to record that very first episode with my dad, who means so much to me and who I love dearly, is I tell people I started this show because I wanted to get my dad to talk about what he was going through.

And I did not want him to go to his grave feeling like a failure. And when all is said and done, everything that I’m trying to do and that I want to do is lifting up the value of life and fighting for life as such. Right? And the message at the core of every interview I’ve done is, your life’s worth more than this, than you deserve better than this. You are beautiful and you are worthy, and you can be more than just a victim of your circumstances. You can do something to change it and fight for and win that world that you and every other working person on this planet deserves. And just reading your book, hearing your interviews, seeing the passion with which you throw yourself into all these endeavors, I know that you feel the same. And I wanted to sort of end on that note because you end on that note in the book. This is not just about workers having more power to negotiate over their wages and working conditions. It is that too. But like you said, there’s a vision here for and a path through organizing to a better world, a better life, a fuller humanity. I wanted to ask you if you could just expand on that by way rounding us out.

Jaz Brisack:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I start the book with Starbucks corporate in captive audience meetings telling us that the union wouldn’t be able to change any of these other aspects of our life, our communications with the company, our role within the company that we could only negotiate over this very limited group of issues, everything else that was the company’s prerogative. And I think if that had been true, people wouldn’t have taken this on. I mean, certainly higher wages and better benefits do translate to greater life if people can afford to live and not die or suffer for lack of healthcare or dental care, et cetera. That’s really fundamentally important. But I think it is so tied in with pushing back against a system that’s designed to strip away the humanity of everybody that’s more profitable to dispose of than to actually protect and ensure has the chance to have a full life. And I get so annoyed with people who are like, well, socialism sounds good, or Communism sounds good, but our freedom or we have to be able to protect people’s freedom. Freedom to do what it’s like during the Civil War. It’s like it’s not state’s rights to do what? It’s to have slavery and it’s

Maximillian Alvarez:

Freedom to choose from 20 different toothpaste brands while all the toothpaste are locked behind plastic doors in A CVS.

Jaz Brisack:

No, exactly. Exactly. So it’s freedom for a few to maim and enslave and destroy the lives of everybody else. And I think in the US International Union tends to mean a union that represents folks in the US and maybe Canada, but you can’t separate it out. And so companies that are killing workers who are organizing on banana plantations or coffee workers or folks who are mining lithium and cobalt for our phone batteries and powering the just transition, all of these things are connected. The same systems that are trying to oppressed people in Palestine or sweep homeless encampments in California or any other thing that’s designed to make people ice obviously, and rounding up people who are not considered worthy of being here or having a social safety net. All of these things are designed to condition us to accept that some people aren’t fully human and the only way that we can actually achieve liberation is if everybody actually is treated as fully human has the same opportunities.

Yes, we can’t maintain the American standard of life in the way that it currently is if we actually transform society, but we shouldn’t be living in a society where our life and our comfort is predicated on the literal death of so many other people around the world. And I go back to the Eugene Debs lines, I’m not one bit better than the meanest on earth, but everything in society is designed to make us feel like we are, or we get numb to it after seeing genocide on TikTok for two years. So yeah, I mean, I think maybe it goes back to we’re not going to win every fight because this is a fight that’s gone on from the beginning of time in a lot of ways for people to actually have true freedom, true ability to achieve their full potential. But whether it’s James Connolly’s Easter Rising or revolts among enslaved people or union organizing campaigns, the R-W-D-S-U at Bessemer faced so much criticism for losing, but everything that proves that we can fight back and that we can build the experience and the skills needed to take that into future fights. That’s the only way we’re going to break through the system.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guest organizer and author, jazz Brisac. Go check out Jazz’s new book, get on the Job and organize Standing up for a Better Workplace and a Better World. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it makes all the difference. And we need your support now more than ever. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.