“Our Movement Is Growing”: How Starbucks Workers in Buffalo Fought Company’s Union Busting and Won

We look at the historic workers’ victory at the Elmwood Starbucks store in Buffalo, New York, where workers successfully voted to unionize last week, making them the first to do so among the coffee chain’s 9,000 locations in the United States, and sparking new efforts at stores across the country.

We speak to one of the 19 employees who voted in favor of forming a union about confronting the company and overcoming the challenges. Starbucks “hired the most notorious union-busting law firm in the country and literally ran not even a textbook anti-union campaign but almost an unprecedented union campaign,” says Jaz Brisack, a barista at the Starbucks located in Buffalo.

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