-What do we got?
-Worker power!
-What do we got?
-Worker power!
-I’d say we’re seeing the biggest surge in unionization in decades.
-Unions have brought wage earners so much security and
freedom and dignity.
-The only other time in American history when we saw such clamor
to unionize was in the 1930s, during the Great Depression.
-This is Flint.
This is how history looks in the making.
-What do we want?
-Unions!
-When do we want it?
-Now!
-My name is Brandi Alduk and I've been a
Starbucks worker for three years.
So yeah, this is, like, the union town hall now.
This is our union or town hall equivalent.
Um, here’s usually where I just do the
union meetings.
Oops, don’t judge me, laptop’s really broken.
During the pandemic, as employees feared for their safety and their jobs,
Brandi Alduk joined a wave of American workers trying to form
unions at restaurants, retail stores and warehouses.
-So see, I have – Oh, not on this.
I even have, like, Starbucks stickers
we’ve designed.
As we started opening back up, there were a lot of
altercations with customers about wearing masks.
When people started getting Covid in the store,
there was no protection because we were just
literally on top of each other.
-These employees at the Astoria Boulevard Starbucks have become
the first in Queens to file for a union election.
-I've had people destroy bathrooms.
Um, I've had people shoot up in the bathroom.
So it is usually the people who are getting, like, paid
the least amount of money handling those types of situations.
-About 100 workers at three Starbucks stores in Buffalo are
deciding whether to form a union.
[Cheering]
-But to see that Buffalo was actually able to succeed
made it be, like, hey, if Buffalo can do it,
then why can't I do it?
In 2021 and ’22, filings for new unions in the U.S. surged 53 percent.
Workers pushed to organize at companies from
Starbucks to Amazon, Apple to Tesla.
It’s a burst of union activism in hard economic times,
much like the 1930s.
-In the 1920s, the great American word was prosperity.
Now the 30s have begun and there is a new word:
depression.
At the height of the Great Depression, with some 13 million
Americans unemployed, President Franklin Roosevelt persuaded
Congress to support his New Deal reforms, including the 1935
National Labor Relations Act.
Also known as the Wagner Act,
it guaranteed private-sector workers the right to form unions.
-In the 1930s, the economy was changing in another
fundamental way.
There was the real creation of mass production industries.
A lot of workers who felt they weren’t being
treated well, who weren't unionized, and thought, how do we make
things better?
-Never again will we work in this job under conditions as they have been
in the past.
After hundreds of Michigan auto workers died during a
record-breaking heat wave in 1936, General Motors workers demanded
union representation.
-General Motors had tried everything – spies and intimidation.
GM resisted, and in December, workers at factories in Flint
organized a strike – with a twist.
-The workers had sat down.
They would not work and they would stay
in the factory until General Motors signed the contract with their union.
Company representatives ordered the men off private property.
The men sat.
-The traditional strike is, leave your post, you go outside, you carry a
picket sign.
Some smart workers said, you know, there’s this new
tactic, a sit-down strike, where if we sit in, a new worker can’t come and
do our job and I can’t lose my job because we’re sitting in.
-This is not vandalism you see there.
They are breaking these windows to let the air in and to let
the tear gas out.
-General Motors got the police to attack the workers one day and
break the windows and throw in tear gas.
The tear gas was blown back in the face of the cops and the
cops went away.
-This is how the sit-down strike was won, 41 days after the workers
stood up to General Motors by sitting down.
-The biggest effect of this strike is not just that it resulted in the
unionization of General Motors, but that it spread to so many other
industries, so many other cities.
In 1937, nearly two million Americans staged strikes in
industries from textiles to steel, and union membership surged.
But with the decline of manufacturing and
the growth of a largely non-union service sector, unions lost ground.
Today, just 10 percent of workers are in a union, even as polls show
public support for them is at a six-decade high.
-Major gains in unionization have typically come in bursts historically.
And they’ve often occurred in exceptional times.
The Great Depression is obviously one example.
For a lot of workers, the pandemic has changed how they
think about their jobs, how they think about their employer.
It’s changed their willingness to fight back.
-Amazon workers at a warehouse in Staten Island
voting today to unionize.
After the initial success at Amazon and Starbucks, groups of workers
at Microsoft, REI and Trader Joe’s also voted to unionize.
But momentum has slowed.
-Workers at a Philadelphia Home Depot have rejected a proposal that
would have formed the first labor union at the retail chain.
Unions have historically had less success organizing workers in the
healthcare, tech and service industries that now dominate the
U.S. economy.
Some of those workers are skeptical that joining a
union would bring better wages and benefits.
And today, as in the 1930s, efforts to form unions face
pushback from companies.
-The customer experience will be significantly challenged and
less than if a third party is integrated into our business.
Both Starbucks and Amazon have been found in violation of federal
labor laws for threatening and firing workers who engage in union activity.
The companies deny wrongdoing.
-No contract.
-No coffee.
-No contract.
-No coffee.
-No one went into this campaign expecting an easy win.
You're up against a multibillion-dollar company.
Brandi Alduk and her co-workers won their vote to unionize, but after
almost a year still didn’t have a contract.
The National Labor Relations Act requires Starbucks to
negotiate, but cannot compel the company to reach a deal.
-It will be long, it will be hard, and maybe it won't be the numbers that
we are expecting going forward, but I have hope.
Otherwise, why would I be organizing?
-It is very hard to form a union in the United States.
This has been a constant from the late 19th century
to the present.
-We’re fighting for our rights.
And we’re staying here until we win.
-If we don't get it, shut it down!
-Something historically is happening here, by workers shifting
the center of gravity the way that workers in the 1930s shifted
the center of gravity.
-You will stand in solidarity with us.
-And maybe these will be the ones that win.
Maybe these will be the ones that set up a future victory.
Maybe they won't.
But something is happening
that hasn't been happening in a very long time.