New paper studies emergence of identity-based labor organizing

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In the post-COVID-19 era, worker unionization campaigns have increasingly been organized by groups who feel stung by virtue signaling from corporations espousing progressive values, especially those pertaining to LGBTQIA+ issues.

A new study from a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign labor relations scholar explores how union activists practiced “intersectional organizing” at work by drawing on their experiences as marginalized individuals in order to advance organizing campaigns.

Union activists practiced intersectional organizing at work by uniting around shared social identities such as sexual orientation, race and disability rather than strictly bread-and-butter issues such as better pay and working conditions, said John Kallas, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois and author of the paper.

Drawing on interviews with 53 union activists and representatives from the labor group Starbucks Workers United, Kallas found that many union activists collectively organized not only as co-workers but as individuals with marginalized social identities.

“In the study, I’m exploring what explains the emergence of intersectional labor organizing at work,” Kallas said. “I found that union activists developed values-based assumptions about Starbucks and its management because of the company’s purported image and reputation on social issues as being progressive.”

When workers felt that managers betrayed progressive values, union activists used their experiences as marginalized individuals to resist employer opposition through unionization campaigns and strikes around intersecting identity- and material-based grievances, according to the paper.

“Starbucks attracted all these very progressive workers and then the workers’ perception was that the company didn’t live up to their end of the bargain and uphold those values that they virtue signaled,” said Kallas, who also serves as project director of the Labor Action Tracker, a publicly accessible, comprehensive database of strike activity. “So now they have these employees who are angry, disillusioned and ready to take action against their employer. In a way, Starbucks almost hired themselves into this problem, so to speak.”

The coffee chain “very much attracted workers who didn’t feel safe to work anywhere else, especially in more socially conservative regions of the U.S.,” Kallas said.

So when Starbucks failed to live up to its progressive identity with some changes that were perceived by employees as out of step with the company’s values, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, “that’s when workers started to organize and force the issue,” he said.

“The workers organized not solely around their shared class identity or interests, but on their shared social identities as marginalized individuals,” Kallas said. “In this case, many union activists shared a LGBTQIA+ identity. And I think that challenges some conceptions we have about labor organizing, which makes it a really important case.”

Although most organized labor action revolves around money, there is historical precedent for organizing based on nonmonetary issues, Kallas said.

“Some union activists don’t clearly distinguish between pocketbook issues and identity issues. They see those issues as intersecting or intertwined,” he said. “For example, there were Latino janitor strikes in the 1980s and ’90s, and Black assembly line workers striking at automobile plants in the 1970s. That sort of labor organizing is having a resurgence. I think that the popular narrative has tended to overlook identity-based resistance at work and how workers organize not just as workers, but as Black workers, as Latino workers, as queer workers.”

The reality is that while Starbucks workers have been quite successful around organizing, after five years, they still don’t have a first contract, Kallas said.

“The bigger question is, how does this sort of identity-based activism sustain itself over time in  low-wage, high-turnover work environments?” he said. “It’s hard for workers to stay put when the wages are so low.”

It’s also a problem because there’s nothing in U.S. labor law that’s going to compel the employer to agree to a contract, Kallas said.

“A company as well-resourced as Starbucks can delay, delay, delay,” he said. “There are very little, if any, financial repercussions to them committing unfair labor practices or failing to negotiate a contract. If they get a ruling from the National Labor Relations Board that favors a union, they can appeal it through the court system.”

According to Kallas, there’s nothing in U.S. labor law that allows for a third-party, such as an arbitrator, to mandate a contract if both sides fail to come to an agreement, “though that could change with the Faster Labor Contracts Act, which just passed the U.S. House of Representatives in a rare example of bipartisan legislation,” he said.

The bill’s passage by the U.S. Senate is far from guaranteed, and when you have very powerful corporations who are able to withstand strikes and other pressure tactics, bringing them to the table is “extremely hard,” Kallas noted.

“If workers from 700 stores go out on strike, there’s 9,000 more stores in the company that are still open,” he said. “A monolith like Starbucks can survive that kind of labor stoppage, even if workers go on strike for multiple days. So far, it’s been difficult for workers to bring management to the table in any sort of meaningful way.”

The paper was published by the journal ILR Review.