A-Infos (en) US, IWW* Delivers Cake to MOA Starbucks Workers - Wobblies Welcome Mall of America Baristas to the Union!

Saturday June 26 was like any other busy Saturday at the Mall of America 1 
Starbucks. A barista had called in sick during the morning shift, another had 
walked out in disgust the weekend prior. A Manager from another store was 
covering the shift of a barista who had been fired for union activity two weeks 
before. The store was shortstaffed, and the lines of customers were long.
But this Saturday was different. By 3:00, the grinding cacaphony of the 
frappuccino blenders died down, as a chorus of Solidarity Forever echoed through 
the Mall. ---- “When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall 
run…” ---- Workers stepped back from their tasks to crowd around the front 
counter. Managers looked on in silence. About two dozen Wobblies streamed into 
the Mall of America 1 Starbucks to welcome the workers to the union… with a cake.

A Bigger Piece of the Pie for Baristas

On the previous Monday, the MOA baristas had declared their affiliation with the 
Starbucks Workers Union, a campaign of the Industrial Workers of the World. The 
workers issued several demands to Management: fair severance pay for baristas at 
closing stores, a living wage, cost of living pay increases, guaranteed minimum 
work hours, and an end to chronic understaffing of the stores. In short, the 
baristas demanded that Starbucks live up to its own rhetoric of being a “great 
work environment.”

The Mall of America Starbucks became the first store with a union presence in 
the Mall of America, and the first union Starbucks in Minnesota.

The Return of the Wobblies
The Industrial Workers of the World first rose to prominence in the early years 
of the 20th century. Then, as now, the labor movement was in crisis. The 
institutional labor movement, organized along craft lines, excluded the vast 
majority of workers in the mass industries– primarily women and immigrants. 
Under the red-and-black banner of the IWW, these workers organized, fought, and 
won major gains until the repression of the IWW by state forces during and after 
World War I.

Today, union density in the private sector has fallen to an all-time low of 9%. 
Working conditions that our parents’ generation would have considered 
unthinkable are becoming the norm. The Eight Hour Day, long the centerpiece of 
the labor movement’s trophy case, has been stolen out from under us. Many 
service workers spend 14-hour days behind the counter at two ‘part time’ jobs. 
The middle class is no more. The ‘America Dream’ has become an unattainable 
mirage for millions of workers stuck on the treadmill of debt and low-wage 
part-time work.

IWW baristas have taken a stand. We want to show that even at Starbucks, even in 
the Mall of America, we can organize, fight, and win. We are rebuilding the 
labor movement from the ground up, based on the only true foundation of workers 
power: solidarity between workers.

We call our approach to workplace organizing ‘Solidarity Unionism.’ This means 
that workers build power by having each others’ backs, working together to 
demand change and get results, as opposed to depending on the goodwill of the 
bosses, or our fragile legal right to form unions. The task ahead of us is not 
easy. Fortunately, the workers movement has left us a wealth of lessons about 
how to organize in this climate.

Minneapolis, 1934
Before the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935, every 
union was a solidarity union. Section 7 of the NLRA grants workers the right to 
“engage in concerted activity for the purposes of mutual aid or protection.” 
Yet, even without the legal protections of the NLRA, workers built a powerful 
labor movement. The story of the 1934 Truckers’ Strike is a one of the most 
famous examples of solidarity unionism in practice.

In the early 1930s, workers in the Minneapolis trucking industry had almost no 
organization in the workplace. The Great Depression was in full swing. Working 
conditions were terrible, turnover was high. In the winter of 1933, all that 
would start to change. The Minneapolis Teamsters Local 574, numbering only 75 
members, successfully organized a strike of coal drivers during the coldest 
months of the year. The strike victory set the stage for organizing across the 
entire trucking industry.

Workers from non-union shops began pouring into the union. On May 16, 1934, the 
Union shut down the entire trucking industry in the city by sending cars full of 
strikers to stop any trucks that tried to make deliveries. The workers depended 
on their power to stop production to win the strike, rather than using the weak 
provisions of the newly-inked National Industrial Recovery Act.
By May 25, the employers conceded recognition of the union and reinstatement for 
all strikers. But it was a qualified victory. The bosses refused to include the 
warehouse workers in the bargaining unit.

Not willing to allow employer divide-and-conquer tactics to succeed, the workers 
went back on strike on July 17. After a brutal struggle involving police attacks 
on unarmed picketers, the workers were finally victorious. The bosses’ 
opposition was broken, and Minneapolis became a union town.

Solidarity Forever
In an era of scarce union victories, the story of 1934 can remind us of the 
power workers have, when we choose to use it. This lesson was on our minds as we 
marched into the Mall of America on Saturday. We brought the Starbucks baristas 
a cake, but they brought us something much sweeter: proof that solidarity 
unionism lives on, even at Starbucks, even in the Mall of America.

Get in touch with the Twin Cities Starbucks Workers Union/Industrial Workers of 
the World: email us at tcsbuxunion@gmail.com [1], visit us on the web at 
http://starbucksunion.org [2] or http://iww.org [3], or call us at 612-245-4871.
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* An antiauthoritarian anticapitalist syndicate
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