Painting by Elaine Brown Folgar
Make a call. Pretend to yourself: you're only information gathering. Avoid commitment... in the beginning days.
Clench it like a seed in your gut. A little secret. A charm against the winds of the world.
Talk to your leftist coworkers. The ones who choke themselves on their own nihilism.
Say to yourselves: we are only going to see.
Wake up too early for a bunch of night owls and meet at a coffee shop called Rumors. Wax philosophical about class struggle. Quote Marx, probably. Pretend you know what you're doing. Have no clue.
Find excuses not to start. There are always good and logical reasons to put it off. The timing, the season, the weather, the stars. The threat of a multi-million-dollar, anti-worker crusade by a company laughing in the face of labor law and its measly protections.
The u word—don't say it, they'll hear you, they're totally hacking into the headsets. Smirk at each other. Imagine your store, no your district manager's face, if you had the gall to do it. Disbelieve each other. Wait to see if anyone else is as serious as you. Misunderstand the toll it will take. Underestimate the task you accepted. Realize only after it's too late: you can't go back to the way things were, the world where you couldn't afford your rent or your car or your kid, but at least a billion-dollar coffee corporation hadn't slapped a bullseye on your back.
Wonder if you are strong enough, smart enough. If there are still dreams worth having. If the twilight years of capitalism will force a remaking of the world order, or just spark off some new, more creative system of dominance and control.
Begin.
Hold clandestine meetings outside the store, in 24-hour diners, and car rides home. Say to your coworkers: if you could change one thing about this place, what would it be? Say: you are right to be afraid. It is frightening. Ask: what is there to lose that we haven't already lost? Power was never ours to start.
In the end, decide: sequester in the status quo, or take a chance there is more to life than barely scraping by, each of us alone. That whatever it is, whatever it looks like, it's worth fighting for.
Don't leave anyone behind. Even the ones who think they want to stay and labor in this dying landscape of inflation hell. Crack open a door so they can come when they're ready. The boss always tells on himself in the end.
Gather in a Thai restaurant or some such hole in the wall on the night before you go public with the petition. Look around at the circle of faces in the dim light. The room is hushed, the only sound your voices, raised in anticipation. None of you know what tomorrow will bring. You can only talk and plan, and in the planning, reaffirm your commitment to each other. So, a union is born in the seeds of trepidation. An answer to fear.
Announce your campaign to the company. The hardest thing you will ever do is walk into work on the first day. It will feel like you broke the world. Which you did, of course. That was the point.
Forfeit the safety of being invisible. Mr CEO is the type of guy who lobbied for the laws to not apply to him and his little minions, too. Some of you get the carrot, others the stick. Sometimes a little of both, for everyone. Your bosses follow you to the parking lot or trap you in the break room. They don't speak plain but insinuate. Your jobs and lives are on the line. They don't say it in so many words. They don't have to.
Be warned: even if you win the election, the company will never bargain. You won't see a contract in your lifetime. Why would a billion-dollar corporation with an army of lawyers capitulate to a couple of baristas? Your boss draws the battle lines for a war they insist in corporate doublespeak isn't happening. We're on your side. We just want you to be informed.
Lay awake at night and wonder if you made the wrong choice. If your motivations are suspect. Was it selfish, asking your coworkers to take the risk? If they're punished, who's to blame? It's so easy, placing blame. The company points in every direction but itself: the union is divisive. Toxic. Everything was fine before. Now it's a mess. Worse than the threat of losing your job is the fear you made a mistake. That you let people down, put them in danger, and for what? A starry-eyed promise of change? On one side is the company, and on the other your coworkers, watching. Waiting to see if you're right. If it's true that together, we have any power at all. And you're not sure, either. You're not sure yet. But you owe it to them. That's why you stay. You owe it to them to see it through to the end.
There's something else. Inside of you is a child who was asleep for so long, while you grew jaded and cynical. You lost your way for a little while, but it's okay. She's still there. She still believes it's possible to change the world. Not that you can turn back the clock on harm already done. But that justice is worth fighting for. That the mistake of challenging unequal power structures is one worth making. Whatever they can do to you isn't worse than what they've already done. It'll never happen, they say, but what if it could? To her, you owe the answer.
Build an election campaign. Pass out pins and t-shirts to your coworkers, host meetings and game nights, help them believe. Listen to their stories, their lives and their dreams. Eat a lot of late-night Mexican food and play a lot of board games. Meet their families and learn the names of their pets. Miss the moment when they stop being strangers. One day, look up and find they all expect you to know what you're doing. Fake it, and hope the knowing will come. Don't make promises. There are no promises. Only transformation. Dangle from the cliff of who you used to be. Above, the mists of ego and self-doubt. Below, nothing you can see. Drop.
Be caught by arms that already recognize their own smallness. Organizers who've been doing the work of liberation longer than you've been alive. The hard, gritty, boots on the ground kind of work. Befriend old hats who know all the rules of the game. The ones willing to do the really crazy shit. They grab your hand and pull you in and say: look, you, too, belong. Be freed by the fact of your own insignificance. See the door was always open for you to arrive.
Gather outside your workplace on a humid morning in July. The pavement steams, the sun over the strip mall hazy. The store is closed, the cameras blacked out. One by one, file in and cast your ballots. Emerge. Find them all waiting for you.
Go to the vote count. Lock arms. Each ballot is drawn from the folder and counted with painstaking, bureaucratic care, by the government agent overseeing the election. She reads each one aloud. The yeses pile up. A solitary no. Your district manager makes that face you've all been fantasizing about. Then she's forgotten, and you squeeze each other tight and walk out into the blazing summer afternoon.
Discover you've been engaged in a preliminary skirmish, and now you've entered the war. It wasn't enough to win the election. Now you have to be a union and fight. Face lawyers being paid to patronize you and waste your time. Watch labor law get scratched away in courts. Still, always, the threat of retaliation looming above your heads—of hour cuts and benefits withheld and promotions denied.
You have to learn a different kind of power. The company has money and time, but you have your bodies and voices, and there's more of you than them. Learn how to leverage that. Talk about going on strike with the dead seriousness of people with everything to lose. Don't let them divide you, because they'll try. Strip you down to your individual parts. Pluck you like a fiddle. Look after numero uno, they'll say. Fight some other day.
Be the union you want to be. You're all so young. You don't really know what you're doing. Maybe that's better. There's no template, no preconceived notion. It gets to be what you make it. Sit on the patio outside the store while cars whiz by, at dusk in the plaza of the strip mall, bogged down by the smell of fast food and garbage. Look at the circle of faces in the dark. Listen to the sounds of your own voices. There is no going back. Speak in turns, trading ideas of what this could be. It could be something real, if you wanted it to. You could make it real. If you don't, then it's just a game. Your lives aren't games.
Decide. It has to be together or not at all.
Strike.
They come. All the promised people. Political and labor activists, your coworkers in union swag, standing in the frigid morning air. Managers peek out from the store windows. Someone puts a megaphone in your hands and says: speak. Find, to your surprise, you know how to tell this story. Look out at these people you didn't used to know, though you worked beside them every day. You can't return to being strangers and safe. The truth is there's no safety in self-interest, only isolation and meanness and fear. This is something else, entirely. Aren't you tired of being alone? Your voice breaks and spills over. Arms come around you. At that moment, the managers inside are doing your jobs to keep the profit gears turning. The day is clear. It's cold and crisp. All you had to do was shut up and keep your head down and do what you were told. You chose this instead. This hard, impossible thing.
Go back to work. What do you do with workers who aren't afraid anymore? The company capitulates on small issues, bread crumbs to make you hungry for more. Now you are starting to see. If we can win this, what else is possible? There is something that happens when you cross the threshold of discomfort and fear. You are still afraid and still uncomfortable. But you know you can survive it. They can't hurt you anymore. Oh, they'll try, in insidious, shifty ways to scare you off and neutralize your power. Sow division, burn you out, play nice so you forget what you were fighting in the first place. And you'd rather they didn't. But they can't make you small ever again. Can't convince you there's wisdom in doing nothing. That safety is the same as strength. You've stood on the picket line. You've heard the chants echoing with the ghosts of workers down the years, who risked far more than you could ever dream. You're a link in a chain encircling the whole world. You were never alone.
Find yourself in spaces with organizers whose dreams are bigger than just one store. They are organizing on a massive scale—tens and hundreds of stores, thousands of workers. They say: you could do this, too. You've done it once already; now you can show the way. And you're not sure. You keep shouldering roles you didn't ask for, leader and organizer, because there was a vacuum needing filling and work needing doing. Stop knowing yourself. Who is this person, who at some point or other, must have rolled up their sleeves and plunged their hands in the dirt and started planting seeds? So other people pointed and said, Look, there is a gardener.
Now when workers want to organize their stores, their intakes come to you. When things get hard, you are the call they make. See yourself mirrored in them. Conviction mingled with fear, love with despair. The moment when bright-eyed idealism smashes into the reality of capitalist greed. It always comes, always—unexpected threats from a boss, fear and refusal from a trusted coworker, every aspect of our lives steeped in anti-worker propaganda. Your job is to be there when it does. To have a plan. To say: there is always a path through, if you can sit with the discomfort long enough to see it. Student becoming teacher, and all that. You wanted the answer, didn't you? There's a freedom with knowing you don't need to cure all the world's ills in your lifetime, that no one can. Plant seeds you will never see grow. Some of them will wither or not sprout at all, and you don't know which, you don't get to choose. Let the hopeless days pass. Pick yourself up tomorrow. Action is the enemy of despair. If you plant a seed, a tree might grow. And if you don't, then nothing will.
There comes a day when you are called into an emergency assembly of hundreds of workers. Watch the sea of faces shift as an announcement is made: the company concedes the point. They will negotiate in good faith for the coveted contract. The mic is passed around and people cry, and none of you have ever been alone. The company wanted you to believe in battle lines. They still do, they always will. That was your first mistake, letting them convince you there was ever anything but love. They will keep on waging war, and you will go on rejecting old paradigms of isolation and fear, building new structures to replace them, by which you mean, new ways of being in the world. The company fears love turned to action. They don't know that's what they fear. They don't understand it. But in every intake call with other workers, every time you ask them why they want to organize, the answer is the same: I can't stand to see my coworkers struggle anymore. And the privilege of your life is you get to say, over and over, Let me show you what we are making.
It's not done yet. It's mostly a bunch of scraggly sticks tied together with twine. The floor is dirt, it's drafty, but inside are all the best people you know, busily at work, patching leaks and making windows to let the light through, believing union means: to be in the world, and belong to each other.
You don't need a contract to claim the right to build it. Cherish the victory anyway. The work is not done, but for a moment, linger in the space between. For decades, the food service industry was considered unorganizable. It wasn't like a warehouse or a factory. These were thousands of stores, spaced out geographically, with no apparent relationships between workers. How do you organize that? The company knew it, too. They swore they would never recognize the union. They believed it was a waiting game, and all they had to do was redirect a couple million dollars to scare off some dewy-eyed, idealistic kids who needed a reality check. Fire a few organizers, close down a few stores. Not many, just enough. Victory was preordained. They had capital and time to spare. Yet here you are. A bunch of scrappy baristas who've scratched a line through the status quo and brought a billion-dollar corporation to its knees. Surely doubt will return another day, but for now you are a child again, believing impossible things.
Later, gather in your usual spot and talk long into the night about what comes next. It's not over, not by a long shot. But there you are, all together. Your little store. Some of the faces are new. Some have been there from the start. So huge and expansive, but actually so small. It was only ever this. Voices breaking the silence. All anyone really wants is to be seen. Hold space for them. Share a vision of what the world could be, in spite of what it is, and offer them the choice. There's nothing else. The rest will come. The rest is already here.
