Most weekend mornings, Jaz Brisack gets up around 5, flies his semi-conscious body in a Toyota Prius, and climbs through Buffalo to Starbucks on Elmwood Avenue. After a supervisor opens the door, he makes the clock, checks for Covid symptoms, and helps prepare the store for customers.
“I’m almost always at the bar if I open,” said Ms. Brisack, who has a second-hand store aesthetic and long reddish-brown hair separating in the middle. “I like steaming milk, pouring coffee with milk.”
The Starbucks door isn’t the only one open. As a senior at the University of Mississippi in 2018, Ms. Brisack was one of 32 Americans to win Rhodes scholarships, which fund studies in Oxford, England.
Many students are looking for a scholarship because it can pave the way for a career in the top ranks of law, academia, government, or business. They are motivated by a mixture of ambition and idealism.
Mrs. Brisack became a bartender for similar reasons: she believed it was simply the most urgent claim of her time and her many talents.
When it joined Starbucks in late 2020, none of the company’s 9,000 locations in the United States had a union. Ms. Brisack hoped to change that by helping to unionize her stores in Buffalo.
She and her co-workers are unlikely to have far exceeded their goal. Since December, when its store became the only corporate-owned Starbucks in the United States with a certified union, more than 150 more stores have voted to unionize, and more than 275 have filed for election. His actions come amid rising public support for unions, which last year peaked in the mid-1960s, and a growing consensus among center-left experts that union affiliation could move millions of workers to the middle class.
Mrs. Brisack’s weekend shift represents all of these trends, as well as one more: a shift in the views of the most privileged Americans. According to Gallup, union approval among college graduates grew from 55 percent in the late 1990s to 70 percent last year.
I have seen it first hand in more than seven years reporting on unions, as a growing interest among white-collar workers has coincided with a wider enthusiasm for the labor movement.
Speaking to Mrs. Brisack and her fellow Rhodes scholars, it became clear that change had even reached that rarefied group. The American scholars in Rhodes I met from a previous generation used to say that while they were in Oxford, they had been the kind of media who believed in a modest role for government. They didn’t spend much time thinking about unions as students, and what they did think was likely to be skeptical.
“I was a child of the ’80s and’ 90s, steeped in the centrist politics of the time,” wrote Jake Sullivan, a 1998 Rhodes scholar who is President Biden’s national security adviser and a great aide to Hillary Clinton.
By contrast, many of Ms Brisack’s Rhodes classmates express reservations about the market-oriented policies of the 1980s and 1990s and strong support for unions. Several told me they were excited about Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who made the revival of the labor movement a priority in their 2020 presidential campaigns.
Even more than other indicators, this change could predict a return of unions, whose membership in the United States is at its lowest percentage in about a century. This is because the types of people who earn prestigious scholarships are the ones who then hold positions of power, who make decisions about whether to fight unions or negotiate with them, about whether the law should facilitate or hinder the organization of workers.
As recent union campaigns by companies such as Starbucks, Amazon and Apple show, the terms of the struggle are still largely set by business leaders. If these people are increasingly sympathetic to work, some of the key barriers for unions may be dismantled.
Again, Jaz Brisack is not waiting to find out.
The fight in Buffalo
Ms. Brisack moved to Buffalo after Oxford for another job, as an organizer with Workers United, where she also worked for a mentor she had met at university. Once there, he decided to do a second concert at Starbucks.
“His philosophy was to get to work and get organized. I wanted to learn the industry, “said Gary Bonadonna Jr., a senior United Workers official in New York State.” I said, ‘OK.’
In its rejection of the campaign, Starbucks has often blamed “external union forces” for its intent to harm the company, as its chief executive, Howard Schultz, suggested in April. The company has identified Ms. Brisack as one of those intruders, and noted that she receives a salary from Workers United. (Mr. Bonadonna said she was the only Starbucks employee on the union payroll.)
But the impression given by Mrs. Brisack and her fellow organizers is fond of the company. Although they point out flaws (lack of staff, insufficient training, low seniority, all of whom want to improve), they adopt Starbucks and its distinctive culture.
They talk about their sense of companionship and community (many have regular customers among their friends) and are delighted with their coffee experience. On mornings when Mrs. Brisack’s store is not busy, employees usually do tastings.
A Starbucks spokesman said Mr. Schultz believes employees don’t need a union if they trust him and his motives, and the company has said salary increases based on seniority will go into effect this summer.
On a Friday in late February, Ms. Brisack and another bartender, Casey Moore, met at the two-bedroom rental that Ms. Brisack shares with three cats, to talk about union strategy over breakfast. Naturally, the conversation turned into coffee.
“Jaz has a very barista drink,” Ms. Moore said.
Mrs. Brisack explained: “It’s four shots of a blond restraint, this is a lighter espresso with oat milk. It’s basically an iced latte with oat milk. it is no longer, it is usually clear “.
That afternoon, Mrs. Brisack made a Zoom call from her living room with a group of Starbucks employees who were interested in unionizing. It’s an exercise she and other Buffalo organizers have repeated hundreds of times since last fall as workers across the country tried to follow suit. But in almost every case, Starbucks workers outside of Buffalo have contacted the organizers, not the other way around.
Updated
June 17, 2022, 4:50 p.m. ET
This particular group of workers, in Mrs. Brisack’s college town in Oxford, Mississippi, seemed to require even less of a sale than most. When Mrs. Brisack said she had also attended the University of Mississippi, one of the workers diverted her, as if her celebrity had preceded her. “Oh yeah, we know Jaz,” the worker said.
Hours later, Ms. Brisack, Ms. Moore, and Ms. Michore Eisen, a Starbucks employee who was also involved in the organization, met with two union attorneys at the union’s office in a former car factory. The National Labor Relations Board was counting the ballots for an election at a Starbucks in Mesa, Arizona, the first real test of whether the campaign was taking root nationally and not just in a union stronghold like New York. The room was tense when the first results arrived.
“Do you feel my heart beating?” Mrs. Moore asked her colleagues.
After a few minutes, however, it became clear that the union would win in a defeat: the final tally was 25 to 3. Everyone became slightly stingy, as if they had suddenly entered a dream world where unions were much more popular than them. he had never imagined. One of the lawyers dropped an insult before reflecting: “Who organized down there …”
Mrs. Brisack seemed to be in a mood when she read a text from a co-worker in the group: “I’m so glad I’m crying and eating a week’s ice cream cake.”
A black T-shirt against the formal act
Mrs. Brisack once seemed to be on a different path. As a child, she idolized Lyndon Johnson and imagined running for office. At the University of Mississippi, she was elected president of the Democratic University.
He had developed an interest in work history as a teenager, when money was sometimes scarce, but it was largely an academic interest. “I had read Eugene Debs,” said Tim Dolan, the university’s national scholarship advisor at the time. “It was like,‘ Oh, my God. Vaja ‘”.
When Richard Bensinger, a former organizing director of the AFL-CIO and the United Automobile Workers, came to speak on campus, he realized that union organization was more than a historical curiosity. She spoke for an internship in a union campaign with which she participated in a nearby Nissan plant. It didn’t go well. The union accused the company of campaigning for racial division, and Ms Brisack was disappointed with the loss.
“Nissan never paid a consequence for what it did,” he said. (In response to allegations of “scare tactics,” the company said at the time that it had tried to provide information to workers and clarify misperceptions).
Mr. Dolan realized he was tired of dominant politics. “There were times between her second and first year that I was guiding her into something and she was saying, ‘Oh, they’re too conservative.’ “.
In England, where she arrived at the age of 22 in the fall of 2019, Mrs. Brisack was a regular at a “solidarity” film club that screened films about labor struggles around the world and wore a sweatshirt that showed a shot at the head of Karl Marx. He liberally reinterpreted the term “black tie” at an annual Rhodes dinner, wearing a black coat over a black T-shirt.
“I went and got dresses and everything, I wanted to fit in,” said a friend and fellow Rhodes scholar Leah Crowder. “I always …