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How far is the Russian strongman willing to go—and what weapons is he prepared to use—if his fortunes wane?
Former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill, who knows as much about Putin as anyone, says unequivocally: Of course he would. In an interview she gave to Politico shortly after the war started, she reminded us that Putin already has used chemical weapons. She explained:
The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects. Russian operatives poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man visited. He died a horrible death as a result.
The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok. They’ve used it possibly several times, but for certain twice. Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who actually didn’t die; but the nerve agent contaminated the city of Salisbury, and anybody else who came into contact with it got sickened. Novichok killed a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, because the assassins stored it in a perfume bottle which was discarded into a charity donation box where it was found by Sturgess and her partner. There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. The second time was in Alexander Navalny’s underpants.
So if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, “No, he wouldn’t, would he?” Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.
It’s partly just dumb luck that he didn’t kill thousands of people in the city that is, incidentally, at the heart of the U.K.’s military establishment—you have perhaps heard of the Salisbury Plain, where the Ministry of Defence conducts exercises. I’ll trust Hill on this.
Here’s a second reason to worry. The Kremlin has been making noise about the possibility of Ukraine using chemical weapons against Russian soldiers. I wrote about this last week, and the way Tucker Carlson and others were just shocked, shocked to learn that bio labs exist in Ukraine—labs that are the residue of Cold War politics, have never been kept secret, and exist for the purpose of containing the spread of dangerous weapons and pathogens.
Why is that reason to worry? Because this may be Putin’s version of working the refs. That is, having laid this propaganda groundwork, he could turn around and use chemical weapons and blame it on Ukraine. “See? What did I tell you? We have established that they have these weapons. And, of course, they are a bunch of neo-Nazis, so why would this surprise anyone?”
As national security adviser Jake Sullivan recently said: “It’s a tell that they themselves may be preparing to do so, and then trying to pin the blame on someone else.” And this recent comment from President Biden was other than reassuring: “I’m not going to speak about the intelligence, but Russia will pay a severe price if they use chemicals.” Bear in mind that U.S. intelligence, famous for its past blunders and paranoid misreadings, has largely gotten things right with respect to this war.
This kind of false-flag operation is what most concerns Gregory Koblentz, director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University. He recently told CNN that he doesn’t necessarily think Putin would use chemical weapons (and by the way, Russia is a signatory to all the treaties that ban such weapons, but most experts still believe that it maintains some kind of supply of them).
Koblentz thinks a chemical attack is unlikely for three reasons: It’s a massive escalation; the international blowback would be ferocious; the military value of such an attack would be questionable. He does, however, fear the scenario laid out above
where they stage an attack that is either completely fake, or they use a limited amount of a chemical agent in territory they control and then blame it on Ukraine or the United States as a way of trying to justify the invasion to date, and maybe they justify some kind of escalation.
At some point, Russia is kind of running out of their conventional military power. They might have to call in the reserves, they might have to do other things that would be very unpopular domestically, so they might need to gin up more of a justification for what they’ve done.
Koblentz makes a key point about domestic unpopularity. How are Russians experiencing this war? We don’t really know. We do know that earlier this month, Putin signed a law that makes spreading “false information” about the war illegal and punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
TV Rain, one of the country’s leading independent news outlets, suspended operation in early March. I was fortunate enough to visit the offices of TV Rain in 2016, where I was interviewed by one of their anchors. At the time, she described to me a situation that was difficult but manageable. Things are obviously quite different now.
Still—reality must be breaking through. It’s a basic truth of the information age that you can’t really block information. People will find out. Whether they have the capacity to act is another matter, but they will know the truth, or enough of it. And that’s scary, too, because if Putin feels cornered, who knows what he’ll do to win the war and maintain his hold on power. Recent signs, like his unhinged and, essentially, fascist speeches from last week, are other than encouraging.
We thought we had outlived the era of nation-state wars, at least in Europe. It’s a viciously bloody history that we thought we had left behind. But one man has plunged the world back into that darkness. We hope he’s rational enough not to use nuclear weapons and start World War III. But a false-flag chemical “accident”—using the kinds of weapons that even Adolf Hitler considered beyond the pale—is entirely possible. What would the world do then?
A young boy arrives at Przemysl train station in Poland from Ukraine. (photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
The embassy said:
Kyiv has accused Moscow of illegally deporting children from Mariupol amid reports that Russian troops were directing civilians towards the Russian-controlled breakaway eastern regions of Donbas.
In a statement on Monday, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said Russian forces had forcibly deported 2,389 children from Donetsk and Luhansk, and called the move “a gross violation of international law”.
From Iryna Venediktova, Ukraine’s prosecutor general:
Betsy DeVos during a White House press briefing at the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C., 2020. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
As Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos aided predatory for-profit colleges. You’d expect no less of such an enthusiastic education privatizer — but why is Joe Biden now defending those same predatory colleges?
During the Trump years, one of the most consequential of DeVos’s many gifts to the for-profit college industry was the repeal of an Obama-era rule that required schools that wanted to participate in federal student loan programs to prove that their graduates could find good enough jobs to pay off their student debt.
The Obama administration rule was designed to crack down on predatory career and certificate programs, about a third of which are for-profit institutions, that often leave students with high debt and poor job prospects.
Under the rule, these institutions had to disclose information about how much their graduates typically earned versus how much debt they held upon graduation. If schools did not prove that their students could find “gainful employment” upon graduation adequate to pay off their debt, the institutions could be cut off from the federal student loan program — which for-profit schools rely on to survive.
After DeVos repealed the rule in 2019, the American Federation of Teachers and the California Federation of Teachers sued, along with two teachers who are members of both unions, arguing that the repeal was illegal. (The unions have been removed from the lawsuit, so now only the individuals are listed as plaintiffs.)
When Biden took office, the lawsuit was ongoing. Last fall, his Education Department moved to defend DeVos’s repeal of the rule against the suit.
Ahead of a hearing in the case next month, the Biden administration argued in a recent brief that reverting to the Obama rule would be “disruptive” to the Education Department, students, and vocational programs.
Instead of reinstating the Obama rule, which had gone through a lengthy rulemaking process and survived multiple legal challenges, the Biden Education Department has pushed to leave the DeVos repeal in place while crafting an entirely new rule. That rulemaking process has been slow, so a new rule wouldn’t come into effect until July 2023 at the earliest, and more likely not until the following year.
“In the meantime, you have cohorts and cohorts of students going through these programs and getting stuck in the situation that the rule says is unacceptable: way too much debt, way too little earnings,” said Eileen Connor, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, who co-filed an amicus brief in the case calling upon the Education Department to abandon the DeVos rule.
Her amicus brief cited Education Department data which shows that hundreds of thousands of students will likely go through for-profit programs that don’t meet the gainful employment standards set out in the Obama rule, taking out billions of dollars of federal loans, while a new rule is being written.
An Education Department spokesperson defended the agency’s current approach, saying, “The regulatory process will produce the best, most durable rule to protect students.”
“Apathetic Autopilot”
As for-profit schools continue to drive the student debt crisis, the Biden administration has dragged its feet on implementing rules that could protect students against predatory institutions. More than a year into Biden’s presidency, his Education Department is still defending the move by DeVos to repeal the Obama administration’s “gainful employment” rule.
Higher education institutions must meet basic standards in order to be eligible for federal student loans. Those standards are spelled out in the Higher Education Act, and include the stipulation that such institutions must “prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation.”
Until 2014, the term “gainful employment” had not been defined, making it impossible to withhold student loans from career and certificate programs whose graduates were failing to secure suitable jobs to pay off their loans.
That year, the Obama administration finalized a gainful employment rule requiring institutions where the average student’s debt was more than 8 percent of their earnings or more then 20 percent of their disposable income to make changes to their programs if they wanted to continue receiving federal student aid.
The rule was criticized by consumer advocates for only looking at students who had graduated from the institutions, and not those who had dropped out. But it was effective enough that for-profit colleges challenged it in court, leading to the rule being upheld by two separate federal district courts and a circuit court.
In 2017, the first and only set of gainful employment data was published by the Education Department, showing that nearly 10 percent of career and certificate programs failed to meet the acceptable debt-to-earnings ratio — about eight hundred schools out of nearly nine thousand analyzed. More than 98 percent of schools that didn’t meet that ratio were for-profit colleges. An additional 1,200 schools were designated to be on the verge of failing and at risk of losing federal student aid.
When Trump came into office, the Education Department largely stopped enforcing the rule, before fully repealing the measure in 2019.
While Biden’s Education Department had said in legal filings that it was working to issue its own gainful employment rule, the department did not publish a proposal until last month.
This week, rulemaking sessions allowing stakeholders to give input on the proposal will continue at the agency. Based on rulemaking timelines, the earliest the new policy could come into effect is July 2023.
That means if Republicans win majorities in Congress in 2022, as they are expected to do, they would be able to overturn the administration’s new gainful employment rule using the Congressional Review Act.
In a brief filed in the teachers union lawsuit last fall, Biden’s Education Department said that reinstating the Obama rule in the interim would be too burdensome and that “the Department’s resources are better spent on the rulemaking process itself.”
Now, the Education Department is arguing that vacating the DeVos rule would be disruptive to students and for-profit schools. In a brief filed on February 18, Justice Department lawyers argued that issuing a new rule would be “disruptive both to the Department and to those impacted by the Department’s regulations, as the Department has previously explained.”
“We are committed to restoring a strong gainful employment rule as quickly as possible and, to that end, have outlined our vision for negotiators,” said a department spokesperson. “Our proposal would strengthen the standards for career training programs and require that program graduates earn more than had they never attended college, a move that we believe would ensure students get value for their tuition dollars.”
Biden administration officials have indicated that tackling the student debt crisis is a priority. For nearly a year, the Education Department has publicly indicated it is reviewing its authority to cancel student debt and considering changes to how it handles student debt bankruptcy cases. But so far, the department has not yet taken action on either issue, and has also declined to use its authority to hold executives at for-profit colleges accountable for fraud.
Officials have taken some actions around the margins to help students, including forgiving $16 billion of student loans for disabled borrowers, public servants, and people who attended for-profit schools that were later shuttered. But that’s only a small fraction of the $1.7 trillion in outstanding debt.
“The Departments of Justice and Education together seem to be operating on a kind of apathetic autopilot, unwilling to divest from Trump-era positions and invest the energy needed to protect students’ interests,” said Hannah Story Brown, a researcher at the Revolving Door Project, an executive branch watchdog.
As Story Brown previously wrote for the American Prospect, the lead Justice Department lawyer on the gainful employment lawsuit has close ties to the for-profit college industry. Brian Boynton, Biden’s appointee to oversee the Justice Department’s Civil Division, previously counted for-profit schools as clients. He also wrote a memo while working at the corporate law firm WilmerHale arguing that the Obama Education Department didn’t have the authority to write a gainful employment rule.
“A Terrible Policy Outcome”
Ahead of a hearing in the gainful employment rule lawsuit on April 21, Justice Department lawyers have continued to make the case that the DeVos rule should be left in place while a new one is being written.
But advocates say that move could cause problems for hundreds of thousands of students in the interim period, which could last for years.
“ The government is effectively arguing that Betsy DeVos’ illegal repeal should remain in place for the first three and a half years of Biden’s presidency — potentially, almost all of it,” said Story Brown. “That’s a terrible policy outcome for students, and for what it’s worth, a terrible political message for Democrats to send.”
The plaintiffs are asking for what is known as a “remand with vacatur,” meaning they want the rule remanded to the Education Department in order for it to be redone, and for the DeVos repeal to be abandoned in the meantime.
Biden’s Education Department is not fighting against the remand — it wants to write its own rule anyways — but it is challenging the demand that the DeVos rule be vacated in the meantime.
“The harm caused to student borrowers if the repeal rule is left in place is far from hypothetical,” wrote Connor of the Project on Predatory Student Lending in her amicus brief. “The department’s collected data illustrates with stunning clarity how many students have been, and will continue to be, harmed by failing education programs without the [gainful employment] rule’s protections.”
In just one school year, hundreds of thousands of students could be harmed by the absence of a rule, Connor explained. “For the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years in California alone, 56,129 students were enrolled at failing programs or programs close to failing,” she wrote. “Those 56,129 students borrowed well over $934 million to attend failing or near-failing programs — and because that money may never be paid back, the cost will fall on the shoulders of taxpayers instead.”
Across the country, that adds up to billions of dollars: “That is just one state,” noted Connor. “In the U.S. as a whole, the number was 354,002 students at over $7.4 billion.”
During the Obama years, for-profit schools were decimated by economic factors and regulatory scrutiny, leading to dwindling enrollment. Some schools closed their poorly performing programs or froze tuition in response to the 2014 gainful employment rule, the Washington Post reported.
But these programs experienced a resurgence during the Trump administration, as DeVos slashed and burned regulations designed to protect students, and the COVID-19 pandemic made online and flexible options more appealing to students.
Data show these schools are responsible for a disproportionate share of the student debt crisis. For-profit schools enroll 10 percent of students, but account for 70 percent of defaults on student debt. And students at for-profit schools on average have more debt and take out more loans than students at public schools, while earning less money upon graduation.
Connor and other consumer advocates also fear that leaving the DeVos repeal in place heightens the risk that legal challenges will leave students without protections.
“If the industry challenges the Biden administration’s forthcoming rule, and they win, you’re going to go back to the status quote ante — which will either be the DeVos rule or the Obama rule,” said Connor. “And it seems better for it to be the Obama rule.”
Stacey Abrams is running against the incumbent governor, Brian Kemp. (photo: Robin Rayne/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock)
A dispute over whether Abrams can be declared the nominee has prevented her from legally raising funds
Abrams is requesting to take advantage of a new kind of fundraising committee created by Georgia lawmakers last year, which her opponent, the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, has already been able to make use of. Called a leadership committee, it allows certain people and groups to accept unlimited contributions. Giving to direct candidate committees, on the other hand, is limited to $7,600 apiece for the primary and general elections and $4,500 for any runoff election.
Under the law, the committees can be formed by the governor and lieutenant governor, opposing major party nominees, and both party caucuses in the state house and senate. The committees can coordinate with candidate campaigns, unlike most other political action committees.
Although Georgia has not yet officially approved Abrams as the Democratic party nominee, Abrams argues that because no one filed to run against her in the 24 May Democratic primary and because write-in votes are not allowed, she became the nominee when qualifying closed.
“Ms Abrams – the sole qualified and declared Democratic candidate for Governor of Georgia – and her campaign committee will be unable to operate, control, chair, or otherwise use One Georgia, a leadership committee … to support her campaign without credible and justified threat and fear of legal proceedings being instituted against Plaintiffs,” the lawsuit said.
“As a direct consequence, Plaintiffs will suffer ongoing and irreparable injury to their ability to use political speech to advocate for Ms Abrams’s campaign, especially compared to her chief opponent, sitting Governor Brian P Kemp.”
Georgia has not yet approved Abrams’s leadership due to disputes over whether she qualified as a nominee before the primary, even though the state’s Democratic party chair, representative Nikema Williams, has recognized her candidacy and recognized Abrams as the sole nominee.
In an affidavit, Williams wrote, “The only candidate who qualified with DPG [Democratic Party of Georgia] to run for the office of Governor of the State of Georgia prior to the end of the 2022 candidate qualifying period on March 11, 2022 is Stacey Y Abrams.”
Abrams said in court pleadings that when a lawyer for her contacted the state ethics commission to confirm that her leadership committee could begin raising and spending money before 24 May, a commission lawyer said Adams’s legal team first needed to seek legal advice from Georgia’s attorney general, Chris Carr, and secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, as to whether state law considers Abrams the nominee. In the absence of any further clarification since, Abrams’s team filed the lawsuit seeking a temporary order to be allowed to raise money right away.
Meanwhile, Kemp created the Georgians First leadership committee after signing the law and had raised $2.3m through January.
Lauren Groh-Wargo, Abrams’s campaign manager, said that Kemp’s early fundraising advantage causes “severe harm” to the fairness of the election.
“Early fundraising supports later fundraising by demonstrating a candidate’s political viability and widespread appeal, particularly in a high-dollar statewide election in a swing state like Governor of Georgia,” she wrote.
Former Starbucks workers rally outside their former workplace February 26. (photo: Andrea Morales/In These Times)
Workers at more than 100 Starbucks stores in 27 states have filed union petitions for elections. In response, the company has launched a relentless anti-union effort.
“If a union is involved, your coworkers have the power to go to bat for you.”
In Memphis, Tenn., Nikki Taylor, at age 32, is one of the oldest Starbucks baristas at the busy corner of Poplar Avenue and S. Highland Street. She says she feels like a mother figure to a “close-knit, regular barbecue-type family.” When she started as a shift supervisor two years ago, working in the café was a dream job — but this soon changed.
During the pandemic her store has faced chronic staffing shortages and baristas have been tasked with the work of three or four people. “You’re getting hundreds of drink orders, making them all yourself, still having to give that ultimate customer service,” Taylor says.
So workers began to talk. “When you’re working alongside people going through the same thing every day, you guys bond so much,” Taylor says.
One concern was pay. The starting wage at the store is about $12, and some workers take multiple jobs to make ends meet, Taylor says. According to MIT’s living wage calculator, the living wage in Memphis is $13.26 for a single adult, $18.02 for a family of four.
Another issue was Covid-19 policy. Vaccinated workers who were exposed to Covid-19 but had no symptoms were expected to work their shifts. During the highly contagious Omicron wave of the virus this winter, workers say they’d see people with known exposures come in for work, only to develop symptoms while on the clock.
Asked for comment, “Anthony D.,” a corporate Starbucks representative, told In These Times in an emailed statement, “Throughout the pandemic, we have met and exceeded the latest direction from the CDC. … Over and above that, all leaders are empowered to make any changes make sense [sic] for their neighborhood, which includes shortening store hours or moving to 100 percent take-out only.”
Taylor says the store’s policies still presented a dilemma: “[Do] I not get paid and be at home and try to be safe — and then not be paying my bills? Or go to work and continue to be exposed?”
In January, Taylor contracted the virus soon after working alongside someone with a known exposure. At home, Taylor exposed her fiancé and 8‑year-old daughter, who developed a 102-degree fever days later. The previous month, a location in Buffalo, N.Y., had become the first unionized Starbucks café in the country. (Some smaller Starbucks “kiosks,” such as those inside grocery stores and airports, do run under union contracts with the larger venue.)
When Taylor heard that, she thought her Memphis store might have a real shot at a union, too. She contacted Starbucks Workers United, the Buffalo-based campaign assisted by Workers United, itself an independent affiliate of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
When they replied, Taylor says, she jumped and cried with excitement.
The Starbucks union drive went public in Memphis on January 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day — a deeply personal event for many of the Memphis workers.
“We have [workers] here that were born and raised in Memphis, whose grandparents were in those same rallies and walks that Martin Luther King Jr. did,” says Beto Sanchez, 25, an R&B and jazz musician who began working at the Memphis café after the pandemic decimated the music industry. “We are practically 10 minutes away from Lorraine Motel [where King was assassinated]. Whether it was the Kellogg’s strike, whether it was the sanitation workers, there’s a lot of union history in this city.”
But immediately, workers say, they felt like they were under surveillance, with high-level managers frequenting the store, loitering in the café and watching the counter.
On February 8, Taylor, Sanchez and five other union supporters were fired without warning. The company cited minor policy violations that workers and a former store manager, Amy Holden, say were never enforced nor taught in training.
“One of the employees literally walked in, signed her union card, took a sip of a drink and left — and she was fired,” Taylor says.
Starbucks rep Anthony D. claims the workers “violated several safety and security policies and protocols, including opening the store after hours, allowing unauthorized personnel inside, leaving the doors unlocked and opening the safe without permission.” Workers reply that, on the night being referenced, they did let a local news crew film in their lobby, all within 10 minutes of the store closing, which they say is company policy — but then they talked about the union campaign on camera.
“How we got fired is not why we got fired,” Sanchez tells In These Times. He notes he was the one fired for opening the safe while off-shift, though he generally had that authority as a shift supervisor. He also points out an irony: “Starbucks decided to tweet about Martin Luther King Jr. and then … decided to fire Black workers here in Memphis for unionizing.” Two of the seven fired workers, including Taylor, are Black.
“It’s union-busting, completely,” Taylor says. “We were loud, we were bold and the company tried to use us as examples. … That scare tactic wildly backfired.”
News of the firings spread rapidly, and the workers became known as “the Memphis 7.” Workers and community members gather outside the Poplar and Highland store early each morning to picket in solidarity. Within a week, rallies demanding their reinstatement sprang up in Boston, Chicago and on the doorstep of Starbucks headquarters in Seattle. Starbucks responded to the Memphis pickets by drastically reducing store hours in the name of “worker safety.” Sanchez says this shows they’re hitting the company “where it hurts … in the wallet.”
Since the first Starbucks union campaign succeeded in Buffalo, N.Y., in December 2021, more than 110 Starbucks stores in 27 states have filed union petitions for elections. That effort encompasses more than 2,000 workers, from Miami-Dade to Seattle.
Common goals include a living wage, access to benefits, adequate staffing, consistent scheduling, more hours, improved health and safety conditions, proper training — and for “partners,” the corporate lingo Starbucks uses to refer to employees, to actually be treated like “partners.”
For Ky Fireside, 31, who works at a Starbucks in Eugene, Ore., one driving force is a living wage. After nearly seven years at the store, Fireside makes $14.70 an hour. According to MIT’s living wage calculator, the living wage in Eugene is $15.58 for a single adult, $22.10 for a family of four.
“In my store, we’ve got three partners who have been with the company for over 15 years,” Fireside says. “These aren’t people working temporary jobs, these are people that are trying to support their family on this income. I’m in my 30s, this is my career. And we’re watching the prices of everything go up, including the coffee that we serve.”
Starbucks has touted itself as an industry leader in wages and benefits, pledging to raise wages nationwide to a range of $15 to $23 by this summer. Benefits include paid parental leave, healthcare plans that cover gender-affirming procedures, and tuition for an online degree at Arizona State University.
According to Fireside, however, less than half of the 30 workers at the Eugene location are scheduled enough hours to be eligible for benefits.
“I’m on state healthcare,” Fireside says. “Starbucks doesn’t pay me enough to buy health insurance and does not work me enough hours to qualify for Starbucks insurance.” Starbucks requires its workers to average 24 hours a week to qualify for the health insurance benefit, which, on the recommended plan, still costs workers a minimum of $84 each month.
Brick Zurek, 25, a Starbucks worker in downtown Chicago, says their store organized after management’s dismal response to workers receiving death threats in December 2021. When a customer threatened to shoot up the store one night, Zurek says, management refused to allow the store to close early. “Starbucks really laid the foundations [for organizing] themselves, on accident,” Zurek says. “When we were so understaffed, when we were threatened, and when we were scared — we were taking care of each other. … We were forming those bonds and connections.”
Meanwhile, as these small union campaigns await their election dates from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), they are facing a multimillion-dollar anti-union effort considered to be one of the most intense in decades.
In These Times spoke with more than a dozen Starbucks workers trying to unionize their shops. They say, within weeks of their filing for an election, corporate broke out the union-busting playbook. Common tactics include disciplining workers for infractions that were never a concern previously (such as wearing buttons on their aprons or even how they tie their aprons), hiring new workers en masse to dilute the union vote at the store, tense meetings with workers, and surveillance on the floor.
During Buffalo’s campaign, organizers from Workers United say corporate flew in more than 100 “support managers’’ from across the country, including such high-ranking corporate officials as former CEO Howard Schultz, to cafés throughout the district. They began hosting mandatory “listening sessions” between managers and workers. The sessions run under a pretext of addressing grievances, but management uses them to disseminate “facts” about unions.
Workers at other stores with unionizing efforts say the listening sessions, once unheard of, are now routine. While it’s illegal for management to threaten to take away benefits in response to a union campaign, In These Times spoke with Starbucks workers who say managers imply their current benefits won’t be guaranteed with a union, claim that union dues are expensive and suggest that a “third party” (i.e., the union) “will get between” workers and management.
Fireside says listening sessions are a daily occurrence in Eugene and workers in a district-wide group chat alert each other when management is en route, so they can prepare. Fireside adds that, in addition to pulling workers off the floor during busy shifts, the sessions cause stress in other ways, like the anxiety that comes with being cornered. “They say things like, ‘You never know what’s going to happen in a contract: You could lose your benefits, and then where would you be? Where would your kids be?’”
After some sessions, Fireside says, workers leave the floor to cry privately.
Starbucks Workers United has filed an NLRB complaint of unfair labor practices, alleging that the company waged a campaign of interference, intimidation and coercion during the Eugene union drive.
As of March 1, all eight Eugene cafés had filed for a union election.
“You wouldn’t expect us to be the first store, after Buffalo, to unionize — but we did,” says Tyler Ralston proudly. Ralston works at a small, “hole-in-the-wall” Starbucks “connected to a Smashburger” in Mesa, Ariz., a conservative community in a state not known for its union support.
Workers felt compelled to unionize, Ralston says, when manager Brittany Harrison was fired after leaking a video she recorded of Starbucks corporate coaches warning Arizona managers against union organizing. Harrison shared the video with Starbucks Workers United and the New York Times, and “[corporate] started calling me, asking if I was the ‘whistleblower,’” Harrison says in an interview with More Perfect Union. Harrison put in her notice to quit, but was fired instead.
In response, workers in Mesa filed for a union election Nov. 18, 2021. As one of the earliest stores to file, they have been subject to corporate’s full arsenal of anti-union tactics. Within weeks, three new managers were hired to oversee the store — who, according to workers, spent most of their days just sitting in the lobby on laptops or watching employees at the counter.
Starbucks began holding “captive audience meetings,” meetings in which management tries to dissuade workers from unionizing. (These types of meetings would be banned under the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, a pro-labor bill currently stalled in Congress.) Workers who had been outspoken about the union were taken to a meeting at an offsite hotel, while everyone else talked at the store.
Ralston was outraged at what he says were “intimidation tactics,” and printed out a 12-page document detailing workers’ allegations of mistreatment, passing it around at a captive audience meeting in December 2021.
“I thought it was time for [management] to feel intimidated,” Ralston says.
Ralston was then called into a meeting with two managers. “We sat down at a table and they called me a bully to my face,” Ralston says. “They said I needed to apologize [to the store managers] because of the union and everything that [the union] has done to them.”
Ralston, of course, did not.
Then, in advance of the February election, management began mass-hiring new workers, a tactic the union alleges is used to dilute the vote; staffing went from 25 to 40. According to Ralston, the in flux of hires caused chaos, at times doubling the number of workers necessary, reducing hours and diluting tips.
Starbucks has also contracted legal services from Littler Mendelson, one of the largest and most notorious union-busting law firms in the country, with hourly rates reportedly as high as $600 to $700. The firm worked with McDonald’s and Uber during two of the largest labor battles of the last decade: the national fight for a $15 minimum wage, and the corporate campaign to pass California’s Proposition 22, which classified app-based gig workers as contractors rather than employees.
Starbucks is not required to disclose how much they’re paying Littler Mendelson, though in a February review of NLRB filings, HuffPost found at least 30 Littler lawyers attached to Starbucks cases.
Starbucks does seem concerned that the company’s anti-union efforts are hurting its image as a forward-thinking corporate citizen, writing in a February 1 report to the SEC that “our responses to any union organizing efforts could negatively impact how our brand is perceived and have adverse effects on our business.”
Starbucks’ “Anthony D.” tells In These Times, “From the beginning, we have been clear in our belief that we are better together as partners, without a union between us, and that conviction has not changed. Our position since the beginning is all of our partners in a market or district deserve the right to vote.”
But Workers United organizer Richard Bensinger, 71, former national organizing director of the AFL-CIO, sees no sign of Starbucks letting up on its anti-union efforts. “This has to be the most intense [anti-union] campaign in modern U.S. history, and there’s really nothing in second place,” Bensinger says.
On February 16, for example — the day the Mesa store’s votes were scheduled to be counted — corporate Starbucks lawyers appealed to the NLRB to delay the vote count, arguing that stores should vote district-wide rather than one by one. Organizers allege the goal of this tactic is to dilute the vote. Starbucks lost the appeal.
“They’ve lost this case [for district-wide votes] [four] times now, and they’re going to lose it 100 times,” says Bensinger, who works with the Buffalo union campaigns. “This is 50 years of legal precedent.”
Starbucks also lost the union vote — with a landslide 25 – 3 win for the workers of the Mesa café, which became the third unionized Starbucks in the United States.
But for every successful union drive, Bensinger notes, countless stores silently buckle under immense corporate pressure before filing. Bensinger describes one failed effort at a store in Buffalo where 80 percent of workers signed union cards; Starbucks simply closed the store and converted it into a training center, relocating the workers to stores that were miles away. Most of them quit.
This store reopened after publishing and won their union election — by one vote — on March 9.
“We’ve passed 100 [organized] stores,” Bensinger says. “That’s great. But that’s in spite of what [corporate] is doing.”
Previously, the only union to try to organize Starbucks nationwide was the Industrial Workers of the World, with a campaign that started in 2004. They never won a union election, and the campaign was hindered by relentless corporate anti-union efforts and high worker turnover (often due to firings the union said were retaliatory); the effort died out by 2017. But by garnering free media attention, organizers did pressure image-conscious Starbucks into regional wage increases, fairer scheduling and one additional paid holiday — Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
When Workers United began organizing cafés in Buffalo in 2019, Starbucks was not a consideration.
While on the picket with striking Rainforest Cafe workers in Niagara Falls, Canada, Bensinger was approached by workers from SPoT Coffee, a Buffalo-based chain. Those initial organizers were fired in short order, but SPoT workers won a union that year.
Bensinger says that union election was a rallying cry for Buffalo’s labor and progressive community. After SPoT workers secured a strong contract (the median hourly pay rose $4), workers at the Starbucks across the street took notice. They soon reached out to Workers United.
“The partners really get the campaigns going,” Bensinger says. By 2021, Starbucks Workers United had formed an organizing committee with more than 100 workers from Starbucks across Buffalo, training them in union organizing.
“It’s all organic,” Bensinger says. “Any good organizing campaign is either run by the workers, or you lose.”
Workers United formed in 2009 (by splitting off from Unite Here) and operates as an “independent affiliate” of the SEIU. The Starbucks unionizing effort, however, bears little resemblance to the SEIU’s Fight for $15 campaign, which attempted to organize fast-food workers nationwide for “$15 and a union,” and for which the union hired dozens of organizers in 2011 and 2012, investing millions.
For starters, Fight for $15 was not focused on store-by-store organizing. Its primary strategies were to build momentum for a $15 minimum wage while pushing the NLRB to allow franchises (such as McDonald’s) to be unionized at the national level, rather than shop by shop. The SEIU lost its case under the Trump-era NLRB, then lost a final appeal in 2021.
Starbucks Workers United, however, is a worker-led campaign with support from Workers United. The union is primarily made up of volunteer organizers from around the country who continue to work at Starbucks and serve on their cafés’ organizing committees. Fewer than 20 paid organizers with Workers United nationwide help by facilitating communication between stores and filling support roles like printing and delivering union cards. The union is not planning new hires. Instead, at national trainings, workers at active campaigns learn to move other stores in their region through the process.
Casey Moore, 25, a Starbucks worker in Buffalo, runs communications for Starbucks Workers United as a volunteer. Moore had never been involved in a union campaign before joining her store’s organizing committee. Now, she helps new stores start organizing every day.
“I joke now that I don’t have a life; this is my life,” says Moore. “But I think it’s the coolest thing ever to be a part of.”
Workers interested in learning more about unionizing often email Starbucks Workers United or reach out via Twitter and Instagram, accounts run entirely by Starbucks workers. Since the Memphis 7 firings, Moore says, there’s been a surge in organizing.
“I’ve heard from a lot of partners that this just angered them and was the driving force telling them to message us,” Moore says.
“I’m on Zoom call after Zoom call, just listening,” Bensinger says. “On many of the calls, I never say a word — just marvel at it. It’s an honor just to listen to them. And everybody knows exactly what to do. The partners all are wired in through social media and they share everything. The second something new happened in a store, it’s all over social media. They’re wickedly, devastatingly funny and positive.”
Starbucks Workers United is also building a virtual network of organizers to share resources, answers to common questions, organizing strategies and updates on corporate tactics. If a new anti-union leaflet pops up in Seattle, for example, Moore says a worker in Knoxville or Cleveland can confirm they’ve seen identical material and share how they responded.
“A lot of the things that people are asking for,” Moore says, “are, ‘What can I share with my coworkers to dispel these lies that Starbucks is telling to scare people?’ And answering questions like, ‘What is a union? What do we fight for with the union? Why organize? What’s collective bargaining?’”
Labor historians are connecting the Starbucks Workers United momentum with the wave of labor militancy that began in 2018 when West Virginia public school teachers went on strike.
Importantly, “[the teachers] framed the strike as being about community, rather than about just being themselves,” says Erik Loomis, associate professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. “It’s about dignity. It’s about fairness.”
Christian Sweeney, deputy organizing director of the AFL-CIO, confirms the AFL-CIO has seen a significant increase in organizing interest since 2018. He notes, however, that larger labor unions have limited appetite for organizing a few dozen workers at a time, store by store, as the Starbucks campaign is doing. Though the campaign is growing rapidly, the number of stores that have organized for an election are a fraction of the 9,000 company-operated Starbucks in the United States. And across all sectors, U.S. union density has been on the decline for decades, bottoming out at about 10 percent within the past few years.
Instead, Sweeney says, unions have been looking for ways to work around a “terribly broken” NLRB process by putting resources into getting reform legislation, such as the PRO Act, passed.
The PRO Act, however, is likely stalled in the current Congress without filibuster reform. Sweeney sees in the Starbucks campaign one alternate way forward.
“Waves of labor movement growth [in the 1880s, 1910s, 1930s and 1950s] have been associated with different ways that workers figured out how to organize, reflective of both changes in the economy, but also changes in the ways that work is organized,” Sweeney says. “I think we’re on the verge of bigger things to come, and these Starbucks workers might just be the caffeine that we all need to figure out the next thing.”
“Maybe there are lessons to learn from this for established labor unions, that if you can get in the door, you can create this wave you’re seeing in Starbucks,” Loomis agrees. “There’s lots of other kinds of companies, both in fast food and other forms of service industries, that can easily build on this.” Loomis cautions that rebuilding a powerful labor movement will take decades, just as building one did.
On lunch breaks and after clocking out for the night, workers brush past management and head straight for the picket.
“It does give me hope every day knowing that people are starting to recognize the power that they have, as a collective force, as a workforce,” says Sanchez from the Memphis store. He adds that “there are always going to be more of us” and hopes the rest of the coffee industry will follow suit, “whether it’s the coffee farmers, whether it’s the suppliers, whether it’s the manufacturing area.” As of press time, two of the nation’s three flagship Starbucks roasteries have filed to hold union elections.
In the midst of a fierce corporate intimidation campaign, organizers say that public attention and community support are crucial. “Everybody’s rallied around the Starbucks workers, and that’s what it’s going to take to win, because you have to get [Starbucks] to stop their anti-unionism,” Bensinger says.
When captive audience meetings began at one of the first Starbucks to file for an election in Portland, Ore., members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the Teamsters and other union members occupied the café with a “solidarity sip-in” at a table adjacent to management. Management was eventually forced to conduct meetings outside.
When the first captive audience meeting hit the downtown Chicago store, a crowd of 50 from Workers United and the other two Chicago stores with unionizing efforts picketed directly outside.
Members of the Memphis 7 say workers there have since formed a new organizing committee and are going harder than ever. On lunch breaks and after clocking out for the night, workers brush past management and head straight for the picket.
“Like I said, we’re a family,” Taylor says. “You hurt one family member, you hurt them all."
Enrique Tarrio in Miami on July 16. (photo: Eva Marie Uzcategui/AFP/Getty Images)
One person very interested in the document’s contents is Colin Clarke, a former professor at Carnegie Mellon and an expert in counterextremism. Over the phone, he told me “1776 Returns” offers one of the clearest records yet of what happened before the Capitol riot—and what really occurred on the ground that day. We spoke about what this document teaches us, how it compares to what he sees regularly when monitoring far-right communications, and what this means for pending trials. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Aymann Ismail: What is new in this document? What does it show?
Colin Clarke: It shows a lot of forethought, that it’s deliberate, that this wasn’t just, as a lot of people claimed, something spontaneous that just happened. For some of the Capitol stormers, I think they were swept up in the moment. But for many people, especially the leaders of groups like the Proud Boys, this was premeditated. This was a very deliberate decision to go there and to cause real upheaval. That was the point, to dredge up some instability. If all things worked well, they would be able to turn the election. Because it failed, I hear a lot of people dismissing it, but the intentions were real. These people legitimately wanted to overthrow the government and overturn the election. We can’t forget that that was the overarching objective here, by any means necessary, frankly, even if that meant killing lawmakers.
The document reportedly instructs Proud Boys members to blend in with the crowd and not “look tactical.” Is it common for groups like these to use protests to shield their activities?
They use that actual phrase. It’s smart. It’s surreptitious. Just like with any ambush or assault, you don’t want to necessarily announce your intentions. Now, certainly some people there were trying to intimidate the Capitol police and wanted to be a show of force, in some respects. But for others, especially the ones that aren’t making the most noise chirping on social media, they had a very deliberate plan for what they wanted to do. That includes being quiet about it up until you’re ready to spring your ambush.
Does this look like other planning materials you’ve seen for the Proud Boys and other far-right groups? Are documents like this common?
This is different because it’s not propaganda. This wasn’t something people were bragging about or trying to flex. This was actual instructions that certain people likely took quite seriously and were planning to act on, and did act on. This is something that should not be dismissed. I think it’s separate from a lot of the stuff that groups like the Proud Boys do. A lot of it is attention-grabbing and trying to simultaneously appeal to their own core group of members while also “owning the libs.” A lot of it is performance art or virtue signaling, where they do something and call attention to it to use it for propaganda value.
This is different. This is strategic. This was something far more insidious, in my opinion.
You used the word “smart.” Is it particularly sophisticated or advanced, from what you can tell?
I don’t know if I’d say particularly sophisticated. It’s pretty straightforward: Go and infiltrate these buildings with various supporters and hope that it causes change, hope that you catch the opposition off guard in a vulnerable moment and that you could actually move forward achieving some of the things that you sought to achieve here.
How significant is it that it’s coming to light?
It’s significant for people like us that have been tracking this fiasco from the beginning, because it shows deliberate intent. That’s one of the big things, when you’re talking about in court, what was the planning that went into this? Was this premeditated? And this points to more evidence that, absolutely, it was premeditated, that this was all part and parcel. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that everybody was on the same page. I think multiple groups in this broader network had their own plan, but there was a clear intent on the part of the Proud Boys, on the part of their supporters, to do something more than just protest. The plan was action-oriented, and it’s spelled out in this document.
Ultimately, it’s another log on the fire in terms of evidence pointing in the direction that this was a really big deal. You still have Republicans that want to deny the severity or downplay it, but this is obviously a pivotal moment, I think, in our country’s history. It shows, unfortunately, just how fragile the state of our democracy still is that you have these very illiberal elements in American society that think nothing of trying to overturn a free and fair election. We can’t just soft-pedal that and make this out to be a bunch of freedom-loving patriots who got caught up at the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s not what this is. This was a planned coup. It was an insurrection. It’s not surprising to me that documents like this were circulating and are now surfacing. I’m sure there’s others that we don’t know about. I’m positive of that.
The plan didn’t appear to show plans to enter the Capitol. What does that tell us?
The document was titled “1776 Returns.” These people are calling each other patriots. It just feeds into, I think, the overall spirit of what these people were trying to do. The document contained a detailed plan to surveil and storm government buildings around the Capitol on Jan. 6. That’s a big deal.
What should law enforcement have done if they’d seen this plan in advance? Should every document or plan like this be taken seriously?
I often am very skeptical of things like this. So, if this is deemed authentic, which it seems to be if the Times is reporting on it, this is in line with a lot of the other things we know about that day. I think there’s some weight to it. I don’t think random documents would necessarily make their way into a story like this. But it dovetails with showing that these leaders had a plan, the leaders of a lot of these groups had movements, and that the plan was quite, quite robust. This wasn’t something in its infancy. There was a lot of thought and strategy that was devoted to what would happen on Jan. 6.
Is the indictment of Enrique Tarrio, and also Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers militia, a big deal in security circles?
They are because they’re a deterrent, were this to happen again in the future. I think part of the reason we saw such a big turnout on Jan. 6 was we’ve lived with the double standard for so long that a bunch of white people know that protesting in favor of President Trump would be beyond the reach of the law. The indictments show that that’s not the case. I still think there’s something of a double standard, but at least this isn’t complete impunity for the people involved.
Have you seen chatter about these trials on right-wing message boards and the deep web? Will it have any effect?
It’s been all Ukraine. From the things that I’m looking at, that’s pretty much what we’re monitoring right now, is right-wing reaction to the Ukraine conflict. A lot of this stuff has been back-burnered for now.
How important do you think convictions are? Will they change that?
Well, it could very well be used as some kind of an attempt to squeeze the defendants to get more information about what the contours of the broader conspiracy looked like. I don’t know what form that takes, if it’s cutting a deal, shaving off years, etc. But I think that there’s clear leverage when you’re prosecuting somebody. One of the complaints that I’ve heard previously was that the government’s only going after low-hanging fruit, going after easy marks. By going after leaders like Rhodes, like Tarrio, they’re showing that no, it’s not true, that there is going to be accountability for the leadership, that these people aren’t beyond reproach.
As the demand for oil used for energy decreases, petrochemical companies, like these facilities seen here in Houston, Texas, are ramping up their plastic production which will increase the demand for green plastic waste disposal solutions. (photo: Louis Vest/Flickr/Mongabay)
With over 240 million metric tons of new plastics generated every year, a growing global mountain of plastic waste now threatens to destabilize Earth’s operating system, potentially closing the habitable window of climate and biogeochemical conditions that human civilizations have relied upon for survival over the past 12,000 years.
The United States is one of the world’s top plastic producers, but less than 9% of what it makes is currently recycled, mostly through the established process of mechanical sorting and shredding. Plastic industry representatives claim that so-called cutting edge ‘chemical recycling’ or ‘advanced recycling’ technologies, which use heat or solvents to convert waste plastic into fuels or chemical feedstocks, are the best recycling solution. But environmental groups, including NRDC, have raised concerns over the greenhouse gas emissions and toxic pollution generated by these processes.
Chemical recycling creating pollution?
The NRDC investigation collated publicly available data in the summer of 2021 from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) databases and state environmental permits for chemical recycling facilities across the United States. They identified eight sites that were either already operating or expected to become operational in the near future.
EPA records revealed that several of these recycling facilities were disposing of large amounts of hazardous waste, containing chemicals such as benzene — a known carcinogen — as well as lead, cadmium and chromium. State-level environmental permits for six facilities allow for the release of hazardous air pollutants, including chemicals that can cause cancer or birth defects.
“The facilities were releasing or permitted to release a variety of hazardous air pollutants,” said NRDC Senior Scientist and report author Veena Singla. “That’s certainly of concern for the communities in direct proximity.” Those communities, the report found, were disproportionally low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. About 380,000 people live within 3 miles of the eight facilities and may be impacted by their toxic emissions.
Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, a not-for-profit project based at Bennington College in Vermont, and a former EPA regional administrator, described NRDC’s investigation as “invaluable,” adding that, “every elected official who’s thinking about supporting [chemical recycling] facilities should read the report first.”
However, Plastics Industry Association Vice President of Government Affairs Matt Seaholm, accused the NRDC report of utilizing “cherry-picked examples, incomplete data, and unsubstantiated claims.” He said that “Attacks on advanced recycling technologies tend to follow the same pattern: ignoring the advancements and investments from many different companies, making unrealistic calls to end plastics production, and ignoring industry positions on waste-to-fuel recovery. NRDC’s report is no different.”
Singla invited the industry to provide substantiation for Seaholm’s claims: ”If they are aware of additional data on more facilities, or for these facilities, we’d be very happy to look and do an updated analysis.” She noted that the investigation included all publicly accessible data available at the time of analysis.
The American Chemical Council and the World Plastics Council did not respond to Mongabay’s request for comment.
Plastic-to-fuel conversion: Greenwashing incineration?
Chemical recycling is being marketed as an alternative to mechanical recycling that can meet the growing demand for recycled plastic and reduce the volume of waste being incinerated or ending up in landfills. However, chemical plastic-to-plastic recycling projects have been besieged by problems as they attempt to scale-up from promising laboratory studies into commercially viable enterprises, and five out of eight facilities identified in the NRDC report were instead converting waste plastics into combustible fuel.
“Producing fuel from plastic is not a circular process,” said NRDC’s Singla. Based on the data their investigation obtained, “this is not a solution for a circular, non-toxic materials cycle for plastic.”
Technologies such as pyrolysis and gasification degrade plastics in high-temperature chambers, often in low-oxygen conditions, to produce a liquid or gas that can be further processed into fuel or chemicals. Although the industry claims these processes can be used to generate new plastic, the NRDC report found no evidence that this is happening in practice. And since the low-grade fuels and chemical waste produced are ultimately burned, critics argue these techniques are simply multi-step incineration processes, generating greenhouse gas emissions and hazardous waste without alleviating consumer demand for virgin plastics.
Despite these concerns, pressure is mounting on politicians and policymakers to classify chemical recycling — including plastic-to-fuel processes — as a manufacturing technology and not solid-waste incineration. Sixteen U.S. states have already passed recycling legislation that redefines chemical recycling facilities as manufacturers, exempting them from stricter reporting requirements imposed on solid waste recyclers, and similar bills have been advanced in other states including New York.
“That’s really concerning,” commented Singla. “There’s already a lack of transparency and reclassifying [of chemical recycling facilities] would narrow that further,” she said.
The EPA is currently evaluating how to regulate pyrolysis and gasification technologies under the Clean Air Act, with industry lobbyists fiercely campaigning to prevent these high-temperature degradation techniques from being classed as incineration.
Could chemical recycling hurt global efforts to curb plastic pollution?
Chemical recycling is coming under the global spotlight just as the world comes together to acknowledge and address the plastic crisis. In early March, 175 countries agreed on a UN framework to fight global plastic pollution from cradle-to-grave, reigniting optimism among campaigners. However, environmentalists warn that flexibility in the framework over how individual nations meet recycling targets could leave the door open for exploitation by industry lobbyists seeking policy incentives and regulatory exemptions for plastic-to-fuel techniques.
Some experts say that chemical recycling, and particularly technologies that generate combustible fuel rather than new plastics, are not the plastic-waste solutions the world is so desperately seeking. “I was really disappointed with what we found [in our report], because the plastic waste crisis is so visible and so imminent and I wanted there to be some additional solutions. Unfortunately this isn’t it,” Singla concluded.
Chemical recycling is “a public relations attempt used by the petrochemical industry to try to hold back actual solutions to the growing plastic pollution problem,” said Enck. She encouraged state lawmakers in the U.S. to introduce legislation prohibiting chemical recycling facilities, extending producer responsibility to discourage unnecessary plastic packaging, and incentivizing plastic bottle return programs.
Citation:
Singla (2022) Recycling Lies: “Chemical Recycling” of Plastic Is Just Greenwashing Incineration (Issue Brief).
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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