05 April 22
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In international law, genocide has nothing explicitly to do with the enormity of criminal acts but, rather, of criminal intent.
Genocide, the word and the idea, is colloquially understood to describe an effort to exterminate members of a definable identity group through targeted killings. Because the best-known cases involve staggering death tolls—the extirpation of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada, of Armenians under the Ottomans, of European Jews in the Holocaust, of Rwandan Tutsis at the hands of Hutu Power in 1994—genocide is often assumed to mean mass slaughter, and to have drastic demographic consequences. But, in international law, genocide has nothing explicitly to do with the enormity of criminal acts. Rather, according to the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, it is defined by the enormity of criminal intent:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
By this standard, Putin’s war of obliteration comes readily into focus as genocidal, if not—to date, anyway—as comprehensive genocide. His apparent objective is to extinguish Ukraine as an independent nation, and to subsume it and its surviving population into Russia, where he claims it naturally belongs. As he prepared to attack, massing his forces on Ukraine’s borders, and pretending to engage in diplomatic brinkmanship, he seemed to imagine that the threat of overwhelming force might inspire Ukraine’s leaders to capitulate and surrender preëmptively to his diktat. In early February, after President Emmanuel Macron, of France, flew to Moscow to try to reason with him, they held a joint press conference in which Putin said, as if addressing Ukraine directly, “Like it or not, take it, my beauty.” The line was immediately recognized as a reference to a luridly menacing song about necrophiliac rape by the punk band Red Mold. The Kremlin and its press organs airbrushed the taunt out of the official transcripts. But Putin had made himself clear: he viewed Ukraine as a corpse, and would have his way with it.
In announcing the start of the war, Putin spoke dismissively of Ukraine as a historical fiction, denying its sovereign existence, and portrayed his invasion, absurdly, as a sort of humanitarian mission to “de-Nazify” the place, to protect its people from humiliation and genocide at the hands of their own popularly elected leaders, and to bring those leaders to trial. Putin’s world-upside-down framing treated questions of genocide and war crimes, as well as of democracy and accountability, as make-believe, and therefore ridiculous; and it gave off a strong whiff of the propaganda tactic known as “accusation in a mirror,” in which a speaker accuses his prospective victims of plotting to do to him what he is plotting to do them. As Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, recently tweeted, “Russia has a track record of accusing the West of the very violations that Russia itself is perpetrating.” Zelensky put it more succinctly: “If you want to know what Russia is planning, look at what Russia is accusing others of planning.”
Putin evidently anticipated that his military juggernaut would meet little resistance, swiftly take Kyiv, and replace Zelensky’s government with an obliging puppet regime. On the third day of the war, even as his forces began to show their weakness, and Ukraine’s began to show their strength, an essay prematurely hailing Putin’s victory in Kyiv, and the dawn of a new world order, appeared on a Kremlin-controlled news platform. It was promptly taken down, but not before being preserved, and, while it cannot be regarded as direct evidence of Putin’s intent, its rhetoric, which reads in parts as if it were repurposed from the archives of the Third Reich, suggests the attitude among his propagandists:
Vladimir Putin has assumed, without a drop of exaggeration, a historic responsibility by deciding not to leave the solution of the Ukranian question to future generations. After all, the need to solve it would always remain the main problem for Russia. . . . Now this problem is gone—Ukraine has returned to Russia. . . . Russia has not only challenged the West, it has shown that the era of Western global domination can be considered completely and finally over.
Meanwhile, in reality, the prospect of Russian glory looks as diminished as the exchange rate of the ruble. That increases the risk of genocidal atrocities. Putin has no apparent exit strategy; and the worse the war has gone for him, the worse he has made it for Ukraine, raining hellfire on its civilian infrastructure, in what appears to be a determination to reduce it, as his forces previously did in parts of Chechnya and Syria, to lifeless rubble. By his own account, Putin’s fight is, above all, against humiliation, and that is a fight he’s losing badly. The war is only in its third week, and he has repeatedly signalled that he is prepared to use his nuclear arsenal, a threat so grave from a man so given to the use of annihilating force that it would be a folly to assume that he’s bluffing.
Zelensky has spent his days under attack convincingly presenting himself and Ukraine to the rest of the world as standing the ground for the collective interests and future of sovereign self-determination against despotism. He has been received with an immediate and extraordinary unanimity of solidarity and commitment: arms, intelligence-sharing, aid, and crushing economic sanctions against Russia. But that has not been enough to spare the Ukrainians, and Zelensky has now taken to using his Kyiv bunker as a bully pulpit to try and shame the world into joining his fight by imposing a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Russia, he says, is alone to blame for the war and its horrors, but he insists that the rest of the world—and here, he singles out the NATO powers—shares responsibility.
“If the world stands aloof, it will lose itself. Forever,” Zelensky said, on Tuesday. “Because there are unconditional values. The same for everyone. First of all, this is life. The right to life for everyone.” Then, on Wednesday, after Russia bombed a maternity hospital in Mariupol, he asked, “How much longer will the world be an accomplice ignoring terror? Close the sky right now!” Last week, the mayor of Kharkiv and deputy mayor of Mariupol also described Putin’s campaign as genocide, and Zelensky said that the hospital attack was “the final proof—proof that genocide of Ukrainians is taking place.” He called out Europeans collectively, and said: “You saw. You know.”
It is true that we are all aware of what’s happening: the systematic assault on civilians, on hospitals, on refugee-evacuation routes, on holy places and libraries and Holocaust memorials, and the shrugs and denial from the Kremlin, whose only public acknowledgment of the horror has been to make it a crime punishable by fifteen years in prison to speak of what’s happening as “war” or “invasion.” Many of the NATO countries that Zelensky is seeking to draw into the war have ignored genocides and other mass atrocities in the past, and a few had a hand in them. But none of the countries that Zelensky is appealing to now fails to recognize the enormity of either Putin’s actions or his intent, or sees any advantage in aiding or abetting them. Rather, it is Zelensky, in this instance, who is not acknowledging the larger reality: that the world has never before been confronted by a genocidal war waged by a man brandishing nuclear weapons.
On a visit to Poland on Thursday, Vice-President Kamala Harris called for an investigation of “atrocities” by Russian forces, but stopped short of calling them either war crimes or genocide. The Polish President, Andrzej Duda, speaking beside her, did not hesitate. He said that Russia’s invasion is “bearing the features of a genocide—it aims at eliminating and destroying a nation.” Neither leader responded directly to Zelensky’s plea for a no-fly zone, and, on Friday, President Biden effectively rejected the idea, saying, “We will not fight the third World War in Ukraine.” There is, after all, more than one way for the world, as Zelensky put it, to lose itself forever.
Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces attending military exercises. (photo: Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
The letter is signed by members of the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, and Armed Services Committees as well as the bipartisan Ukraine Caucus. The letter outlines the specific needs of the Ukrainian military and Territorial Defense Forces that were relayed to the members following substantial interactions with Ukrainian officials and U.S. national security experts.
“As the war in Ukraine continues, members of Congress hear repeatedly from Ukrainian representatives about their specific military needs,” said Rep. Meijer. “While we’ve taken many decisive actions to counter Vladimir Putin’s illegal war, more can and must be done. The U.S. is positioned to help the Ukrainian military remain aggressive by air, land, and sea. The Biden Administration must act now to bolster Ukraine’s efforts to combat Putin and his military.”
“There is an opportunity here to make a huge impact in helping the Ukrainian people defend themselves against Putin’s invasion. Ukrainian leadership is asking the world to help them, and we feel the United States needs to act,” said Rep. Kim. “This bipartisan group understands that security comes from strong diplomacy and a country’s ability to defend itself. We’re urging President Biden to listen to Ukrainian leaders and provide the support that they and the Ukrainian people are asking the world to provide.
“Ukraine’s fight for freedom and democracy is a fight they must win. The Ukrainians can win, but they will need more support in the months ahead,” said Rep. Crow. “That’s why I’m leading my colleagues to ask for increased military support for our Ukrainian brothers and sisters. This is a watershed moment in the battle for democracy, and we must win.”
The letter urges President Biden and the Pentagon to provide additional military aid to Ukraine, affording them the opportunity to push back against Russian invaders. The revelations of war crimes in Bucha this weekend underscore the moral imperative for the United States and our allies to provide military aid to prevent further and future atrocities.
The full text of the letter is available here and below:
Dear President Biden,
As members of the House Armed Services, Intelligence, and Foreign Affairs Committees, as well as members of the bipartisan Ukraine Caucus, we have had substantial interactions with Ukrainian representatives and U.S. national security professionals regarding the situation on the ground in Ukraine and the specific needs for the Ukrainian military and Territorial Defense Forces. We recognize that the United States and its allies and partners have already provided substantial military aid, in response to the Russian invasion, including a portion of the $13.6 billion in emergency funds through the FY 22 Omnibus Appropriations bill. However, Ukrainians are clear that more needs to be done for Ukraine to win this war.
Based on our engagements, oversight, and specific requests by Ukrainian officials, we believe there are three critical areas where further U.S. assistance is necessary:
Defend the Skies Over Ukraine
- Increase resupply of Stinger missiles and other air defense systems that have already been provided to defend Ukraine. The Ukrainian military, due to low stocks, is pacing themselves and cannot engage in the full measure of resistance.
- Provide Long-Range Surface-to-Air Missile (SAM) Systems. Currently, the Ukrainians are unable to intercept high-altitude targets. There is an urgent need for long-range SAM systems to protect against the rockets coming from Russian military units and ships.
- Equip the Ukrainian Air Force with aircraft that can fight air to air, and air to ground. Ukrainian forces are skillfully using their fighter aircraft, but they are running low and need to be resupplied as damage to the existing aircraft is diminishing Ukraine’s air capabilities. Ukraine has more than enough pilots trained to fly additional aircraft if supplied. Additional aircraft would also allow Ukrainian forces to provide a more adequate defense of urban areas like Kharkiv and Mariupol, where numerous civilian casualties have occurred following Russian attacks.
- Provide a greater range of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) capabilities. Providing Ukraine more advanced UAS capable of longer ranges (e.g. Bayraktar TB-2), will allow them to better disrupt Russian supply lines and counter Russian siege tactics, especially in Eastern Ukraine. Providing additional offensive strike capabilities (e.g. Switchblade 300) and UAS to conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions (e.g. Fly-Eye 3.0, WARMITE 3.0) is necessary to counter Russian UAS and inform Ukrainian military decisions.
- Provide additional tactical radar and counter-fire systems. Providing both tactical radar systems (e.g. LSTAR, SRC V2/V3, Squire, AN/MPQ-64) and counter-fire radar systems (e.g AN/TPQ-36, AN/TPQ-37, AN/TPQ-49, and AN/TPQ-50) will expand early-warning capabilities and allow Ukraine to use their counter-battery fire systems more effectively
- Provide electronic warfare (EW) systems. Providing EW systems to counter Russian drones and jam communication lines would severely degrade Russian military operations.
Counter Russian Naval Attacks
- Provide anti-ship missiles. Russian naval vessels are currently launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians and being used to resupply ground forces. In addition to missile defense capabilities to counter these strikes, Ukraine could use anti-ship missiles to target the Russian fleet, and the U.S. should provide these weapons to Ukraine.
Increase Ukrainian Ground Combat Capabilities
- Similar to the request for Stinger missiles, Ukraine is requesting increased flow of Javelin missiles and other anti-tank assets. We should fulfill this request and ensure we have sufficient production levels of Javelins and Stingers to provide supplies to Ukraine and to backfill stocks of allies.
- Provide additional missile, rocket, and artillery systems (e.g. Buk-M1, Tochka-U, MLRS, and M109 Paladin) to increase Ukraine’s offensive strike capability.
- Supply additional armored vehicles. Ukraine is involved in fierce urban combat where additional armored vehicles would allow them to better defend these areas and conduct a greater number of medical evacuations.
- Supply advanced weapons optics, spotting equipment, and personal night vision devices (e.g. TSR-1X Red Dot Sight, AO-4465 thermal sight, and PVS-14/PVS-31) to expand the operational capability of Ukrainian warfighters.
- Provide Role I and Role II capable mobile hospitals to rapidly provide additional medical support to military personnel and Role III field hospital center capabilities across the border in Poland.
Thank you very much for your time and attention to our requests. Ukraine has provided a list of seventeen urgent needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in priority order to Congress and the administration. We hope to work with you to provide Ukraine with as much equipment as possible from this list in a timely manner. If you are unable to fulfill any of the requests, we respectfully request your reasoning as to why certain items cannot be provided. This is the time to reaffirm our commitment to defending democracy abroad, and we offer you our assistance in the defense of Ukraine in cooperation with our allies. We look forward to working together to ensure a free and independent Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin. (photo: Mikhail Klimentyev/TASS/Getty Images)
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Richard Moore, the head of MI6, said in a tweet that "we knew" organized mass killing formed part of "Putin's invasion plans."
The comments appear to tie Putin directly to the atrocities that Ukraine has alleged in the cities of Bucha and elsewhere.
Ukraine and international observers have accused Russia of genocide and war crimes in Bucha, which is about 20 miles northwest of Kyiv.
Imagery showed several civilians lying dead on the streets as well as mass graves. Local residents said the victims were killed by Russian soldiers without provocation.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an advisor to Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said that some victims were shot in the head with their hands tied behind their back and that women were raped before they were killed. Children are among those killed, he said.
After the attack, Zelenskyy in a speech said: "Concentrated evil has come to our land. Murderers, torturers, rapists, looters, who call themselves the army and who deserve only death after what they did."
As the allegations emerged, Moore wrote on Twitter: "We knew Putin's invasion plans included summary executions by his military and intelligence services.
"The reports of execution-style killings of civilians emerging from liberated areas are horrifying and chilling."
High-ranking intelligence officials from the UK, US, and other Western countries have been unusually public in their commentary on what they say are Russia's invasion plans.
The strategy, which began with predicting Russia's invasion of Ukraine as it built up more than 100,000 troops near the country's borders, is said to be designed to preempt attempts by Russia to disguise its intentions or shift blame.
On Thursday, Sir Jeremy Fleming, head of the intelligence at the cyber agency GCHQ, made an extraordinary intervention about what he called Putin's "personal war" in Ukraine.
Speaking from Australia, he branded the invasion a "strategic miscalculation" and said: "Even though we believe Putin's advisors are afraid to tell him the truth, what's going on and the extent of these misjudgments must be crystal clear to the regime."
Events in Bucha prompted condemnation from British politicians, with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss reiterating the UK's support for the International Criminal Court as it investigates and prosecutes war crimes.
She said: "We will not rest until those responsible for atrocities, including military commanders and individuals in the Putin regime, have faced justice."
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: "Russia's despicable attacks against innocent civilians in Irpin and Bucha are yet more evidence that Putin and his army are committing war crimes in Ukraine."
He vowed to "do everything in my power to starve Putin's war machine," with the promise of further sanctions and military support as well as humanitarian aid.
Truss was due to meet her Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, the minister of foreign affairs, in Warsaw, Poland, on Monday evening, and her Polish counterpart Zbigniew Rau in the Polish capital on Tuesday.
"Putin is yet to show he is serious about diplomacy," she said ahead of her trip. "A tough approach from the UK and our allies is vital to strengthen Ukraine's hand in negotiations.
"We will continue to support those who are suffering as a result of Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine, including the victims of sexual violence and those in need of humanitarian support."
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg speaks during a joint press with Sweden and Finland's Foreign ministers after their meeting at the NATO headquarters in Brussels. (photo: John Thys/AFP/Getty Images)
The country's politicians and NATO itself have both pointed to the possibility of Finland joining soon, and a recent survey showed a majority of the country in support of membership in light of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Sanna Marin, Finland's prime minister, said on Saturday the decision on whether or not to join should happen "this spring," the Financial Times reported.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on March 31 that while the decision to join the bloc was one for Finland to make, he expected that NATO would allow the country to join quickly.
"If they apply, I expect that they will be very welcomed and that we'll find a way to quickly agree the accession protocol and follow up on a membership of Finland," he said.
Finland's National Coalition party, the government's main opposition, also supports NATO membership.
Petteri Orpo, the party's leader, said, according to the FT: "In order to improve our security and guarantee our independence, we should join NATO. We still have a powerful and aggressive neighbor."
Finland shares a long border with Russia.
Russia has threatened Finland should it decide to pursue membership.
In March, a Russian foreign ministry official warned of "serious military and political consequences" if Finland or Sweden, Finland's neighbor, tried to join.
Russian President Vladimir Putin used the possibility of NATO expanding further eastward as a reason for his invasion of Ukraine. He framed Russia's invasion as an act of self-defense against the alliance's growth.
There also appears to be increased public support in Finland for joining the alliance.
A survey conducted by the Finnish Business and Policy Forum Eva think tank in March, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, found that 60% of people supported Finland joining NATO — a massive jump from previous years.
Joining NATO could also bring its own security risks for Finland, particularly if Russia sees it as an act of aggression.
Finnish President Sauli Niinistö said last month that applying for NATO membership would come with the "major risk" of escalation in Europe.
Finland was once part of the Russian Empire. After it gained independence, it was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939, but it successfully fought back.
A U.S. Marine recruiter speaks to a high school student in New Jersey. (photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)
The military uses the student debt crisis to steer young adults toward enlistment. After serving, many find the guarantee of free college is shakier than promised. Student debt forgiveness can keep recruiters at bay and help veterans move on with their lives.
The average of $30,000 of debt per borrower — with a national total of $1.61 trillion dollars in student debt — is causing prospective students to think hard about avoiding university debt, and the military itself actively utilizes the debt crisis to steer young adults toward enlistment. Advertising all but promises of a full ride in exchange for enlistment, ignoring problems and details that often prevent this promise of actually being fulfilled. The military’s focus on enlisting people facing the student debt crisis is coercive, especially considering misleading marketing about the benefits of Veteran Affairs (VA) education assistance and recruitment strategies that target especially vulnerable student populations.
Education Not Guaranteed
In a 2019 Pentagon report, army recruiting command leader Major General Frank Muth stated, “You can get out [of the army] after four years, 100 percent paid for state college anywhere in the United States.” This free-college guarantee is found frequently in recruiter strategies, yet it glosses over common complications and important disclaimers about the reality of education benefits.
A student veteran’s first hurdle in securing aid is the system’s sheer complexity. Several aid packages exist; aid amounts can vary by branch, education history, and university of choice; and students must coordinate with both the VA and their university during a paperwork-heavy benefits application process. Additionally, it takes time for applications to be processed by the VA. A student is responsible for covering any costs that arise while the application is still under review, even if the application is ultimately approved.
Shockingly, 60 percent of veterans surveyed by Syracuse University in 2017 reported that VA complexity made it difficult to stay in school. For students who do finally secure education benefits, the assistance still may not meet expectations. A Department of Education study on 2015–16 undergraduate students found that military students received, on average, $15,000 in veterans’ education benefits compared to the $19,500 average cost of college at that time. The $4,500 gap left by insufficient VA benefits would have to be covered by another form of scholarship — or patched with student loans.
Student loans among veterans are more common than one may expect. The Department of Education found that 64 percent of veterans who graduated with a bachelor’s in 2016 had taken out student loans at an average amount of $27,100. This is just $400 less than the average amount taken out by nonveterans in the same year. Furthermore, 10 percent more veterans than nonveterans reported difficulty in paying off student debts.
Considering that the army, navy, and air force all made attempts to cut back education benefits in 2019, the future of veteran student benefits is uncertain. In fact, mass student loan forgiveness is the best action President Joe Biden could take for people struggling to move their lives forward because of the weight of student debt — including veterans who were recruited on a guarantee that turned out to be much shakier than promised.
Economic Conscription
During the Vietnam War, concerns arose about a pattern of enlistment among specifically lower-income citizens who often found themselves on the front lines. Although recent recruitment has trended toward more middle-class enlistees, the practice of recruiters targeting economically vulnerable people has not disappeared. This trend is often referred to as economic conscription, or the “poverty draft.”
A 2015 study by the RAND Corporation looked at the relationship between lower-income schools and the high school military program Junior ROTC. JROTC was found to be more present at Tier 1 schools — schools with a higher percentage of low-income students. The report also notes that all four services in the military cite Title 1 eligibility as “desirable” in recruiting strategy, especially the army. A breakdown of 2011–12 army recruitment activity in Connecticut high schools gives further evidence that recruiters target economic vulnerability: recruiters visited a high school with a significant population of low-income students ten times more than a high school with only a few low-income student.
Enticing would-be debtors into the armed forces with the promise of free education has the same core promise of upward mobility as the Vietnam-era poverty draft. Income statistics do not immediately represent familial wealth or economic safety, especially as student debt skyrockets. The military’s intentional utilization of the student debt crisis is its own form of financial draft. And due to the intersections between class and race, these tactics often target non-white students in particular — black students, for example, often take on the highest amounts of debt and tend to have the least generational wealth to fall back on.
As the movement to cancel student debt grows and places greater pressure on Biden to take executive action to cancel student debt, there will likely be opposition from pro-war figures who prey on young people’s financial insecurity for recruitment. The experiences of veterans who were lured into the military by promises of education highlight the outright lie that military service offers opportunity for historically impoverished communities throughout the United States.
Opposition to war and sympathy for exploited veterans are two good reasons to add to the ever-growing list of why the president should cancel student debt.
Starbucks employees and supporters react as votes are read during a viewing of their union election on December. 9, 2021, in Buffalo, New York. The vote to unionize was a first for the 50-year-old coffee retailer in the U.S., and the latest sign that the labor movement is stirring after decades of decline. (photo: Joshua Bessex/AP)
Inside Starbucks’s successful 21st-century union drive.
Since the first corporate Starbucks location voted to unionize late last year, 10 others have voted. Only one store has voted against unionizing. The latest and largest Starbucks to unionize is the company’s flagship store in Manhattan, which voted 46-36 on Friday to unionize. One of just three Starbucks roasteries in the country, this location is an important milestone for the Starbucks union since it has many more employees than a typical Starbucks (nearly 100) and shows that the Starbucks union can be successful in the company’s manufacturing arm as well. Even more notable, they’ve voted yes in the notoriously difficult-to-unionize food services industry, where high rates of turnover and a more easily replaceable workforce make union organizing extremely difficult.
Starbucks employees around the country say they’re seeing successful union votes at other locations and thinking they could improve conditions at their own stores by doing the same. Some 160 other locations in 28 states are slated to vote in the coming weeks and months.
They’re hoping to use collective bargaining to get a number of improvements, including higher pay, more hours, and better safety protections, a more necessary change since the erstwhile latte makers became front-line workers during the pandemic. They want more say in what their working lives are like, and they want to hold a company that talks of progressive values accountable.
As Liepe, an 18-year-old barista in Ithaca, New York, put it, “We want to be able to sit down with Starbucks, with the higher-up executives, and make a plan so that we, as employees, feel as valued as they say that we are.”
Starbucks said in a statement, “We are listening and learning from the partners in these stores as we always do across the country.”
While the unionizing Starbucks stores so far only represent a small portion of the chain’s roughly 9,000 company-run locations, its number belies its importance. It’s a spark of optimism in a union movement that has been in decline for decades. And as unions have become less prevalent in the American workforce, so have the worker benefits and protections unions afforded, including health care, pensions, and paid time off. Along with several other high-profile union efforts at a range of companies, including Amazon, John Deere, and the New York Times, Starbucks workers could help stanch or even reverse that decline.
Ileen DeVault, professor of Labor History at Cornell University, said it’s unprecedented for a national chain of small food and beverage stores to unionize, and that Starbucks’s efforts could have knock-on effects.
“It’s pretty amazing that a company that large and that present in American consciousness — everybody knows what Starbucks is — is unionizing,” DeVault told Recode.
While unionization is popular and gaining a lot of attention, it’s still incredibly difficult. That means high-profile failures as well. Just last week, an Amazon warehouse in Alabama voted against unionizing. This was union organizers’ second try — the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said the e-commerce giant had violated labor law by giving the impression it was monitoring which workers voted, so ordered a re-vote. But workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island just became part of the first Amazon union in the country — and they did so with a worker-led union much like the one at Starbucks.
For now, the actions at Starbucks provide a case study for how other Americans might try to organize and where the union movement might go from here.
“The scale, the energy, the pace,” said Richard Minter, vice president of the Workers United union. “There’s nothing like it in labor history.”
What it takes to unionize a Starbucks
Workers at the Genesee Street Starbucks in Buffalo were murmuring about starting a union back in 2019. But it wasn’t until the spring of 2021, after the pandemic had laid bare the treacherous situation of food service workers and the Great Resignation had given employees more leverage, that they started getting serious. They reached out to the local chapter of Workers United, a union affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), for guidance and formed a committee of workers from area Buffalo stores.
Feeling that they had strong support among their colleagues and fearing that corporate had gotten wind of their plan, Starbucks workers at three Buffalo stores went public with their plan to organize in August and filed a petition with the NLRB to unionize under Starbucks Workers United. The company immediately pushed back, flooding the stores with support managers who tried to convince the workers they’d be better off without a union. Despite Starbucks’s efforts to stop it, the NLRB approved the union’s request to be able to organize on a store-by-store basis. Since it’s easier to maintain support among smaller groups of people who know one another, this approach was much more feasible than trying to win a regional or national campaign.
On December 9, the Elmwood Buffalo location became the first company-run Starbucks store to form a union, winning the vote 19 to 8. It was quickly followed by the Genesee location, while a third location voted against unionizing. The Elmwood bargaining committee, which includes workers from subsequent Starbucks unions around the country, began negotiations at the end of January, and they’re still ongoing. So far, they’ve presented Starbucks with several proposals, including instituting a “just cause” clause so that management would have to have a fair reason to fire someone, and allowing employees to collect credit card tips (there’s no option to tip by credit card now). They plan to ask for better pay and benefits as well.
As each additional store organizes, it inspires more to do so. Most of the workers we spoke to mentioned getting inbound inquiries from workers at other locations near and far after they went public with their intent to unionize.
“It seems like every time we win another one, we get tremendous outreach from markets all across the country,” Minter said. He added that after the first Starbucks in Washington, the company’s home state, voted to unionize, Workers United received 30 new contacts from other stores that night.
Each store’s organizing effort is an asset to the next. From these other stores, new organizers learn what works and what doesn’t, not to mention what to expect from corporate and how to respond. They know the company might make misleading claims about the price of unions. They also know the company will hold meetings during their shifts to convince them not to join the union. These are called captive audience meetings, which many workers find intimidating.
“When you connect with [other workers across the country] you get to share your experiences with them and they get to share theirs and guide you through the process,” said Caro Gonzalez, a Starbucks shift supervisor in Austin who’s majoring in advertising at the University of Texas. “That support is really huge.”
Communicating with other stores made employees realize that they have more similarities than differences. It has built an immense feeling of solidarity, so that these small shops, each with roughly 20-30 workers, feel like they’re part of something much bigger.
“Before winning in Buffalo, we didn’t know if it was possible,” Michelle Eisen, 39, a barista at that first unionized Starbucks, told Recode. “I think these stores have that kind of optimism to know that it can be done.”
But that doesn’t mean their route will be easier. Eisen added, “These newer stores that are coming on board almost need more courage than we did because they know what they’re about to get involved in, they know what the company is capable of, and they’re still choosing to do this.”
Why unionizing is working at Starbucks
What’s made the Starbucks efforts so successful is what Rebecca Givan, associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, calls a “perfect storm” of circumstances, in addition to strategic decisions like organizing by store and communicating with other stores. Those particulars can help guide what will and won’t work elsewhere.
To begin with, Starbucks is a company that espouses progressive values, from single-origin coffee beans to LGBTQ rights. But when those values come up short — claiming that Black Lives Matter while calling the cops on Black customers, offering gender-affirming medical treatment that’s hard to access in practice, and advertising fertility treatment that can cost more than people’s paychecks — it can work against the company.
“Starbucks is quote-unquote ‘progressive,’ ‘woke,’ whatever. They give us decent benefits,” Fagan, a 22-year-old shift supervisor in Rochester, said. “But we’re literally selling our lives and time and bodies to this corporation. Tell me why I don’t deserve a living wage.”
Fagan, who has worked at Starbucks for five years, makes $22 an hour but, like many employees, said she’s had her hours cut back, making the $20-$50 cab ride (she doesn’t drive) to and from work for a six-hour shift unsustainable. Ahead of the first Buffalo union vote, Starbucks announced it would be raising its average wage to nearly $17 an hour by this summer.
But while that pay is much higher than the industry average of about $12 an hour, many of the workers we talked to said it wasn’t enough, especially as they said their hours have been cut back. These cutbacks could jeopardize employees’ access to Starbucks’s health insurance — a rarity in the food service world — since employees need to work at least 20 hours a week to be eligible for those benefits. Others see the cuts in hours as a way to drive out existing employees in order to tamp down union organizing.
Starbucks denied that it’s cutting back hours.
“We always schedule to what we believe the store needs based on customer behaviors,” spokesperson Reggie Borges told Recode. “That may mean a change in the hours available, but to say we are cutting hours wouldn’t be accurate.” The company added that eligibility to health care was measured just twice a year by average hours worked, rather than on a weekly basis, so a short-term cut in hours wouldn’t affect health care eligibility.
In any case, Starbucks’s perceived progressive values often attract young workers who share those values. Many of the Starbucks workers trying to unionize are in their early 20s. They’ve become adults amid huge social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too. They are comfortable with empathy and technology, making them star candidates for a resurgent union movement. In addition to talking to other Starbucks workers across the country on Zoom and social media, they hash out their store strategies over Discord while sharing viral videos about unions on TikTok. On a press call following her Mesa, Arizona, store’s vote to unionize in March, barista Haley Smith called Twitter “the rising star of our campaign.”
Whether on video calls, chat rooms, or social media, these workers seem to land on a common theme: They’re all facing the same inequalities in work and life. The immense unfairness of the world we live in was top of mind for the young people who spoke to Recode. They’ve come into adulthood at a time of heightened inequality in everything from access to broadband to income.
“We’ve been forced into this world where we can’t afford anything, where we can’t afford to live,” said Mercado, 22, who works at a Starbucks in Brooklyn while pursuing a master’s degree in environmental science. “It’s not a difference between generations, it’s just a difference between what you’ve been given and the tools that we can use to make the change.”
For many Starbucks workers and others, the shine has worn off their companies.
“We realized during the pandemic that they didn’t care about us,” said a former Starbucks employee in Rochester who worked for the company for five years and was a main union organizer at his store. He was recently fired for clocking in four minutes before a coworker, meaning he was in the store by himself — an offense he said would have never resulted in firing prior to the union effort. The employee asked to remain anonymous lest this firing jeopardize future employment. (Recode contacted Starbucks about why this was a fireable offense, but the company did not respond in time for publication.)
Working through the pandemic made the situation and worker safety especially acute.
“They’ll call me a partner all they want, but corporate will allow me to die on the floor if it made them money,” said Brandi Alduk, a 22-year-old employee at a Queens Starbucks store, noting that she was exaggerating but with some truth. She said company executives rolled back Covid-19 restrictions “a little too soon and a little too brazenly, considering they were still working at home when they started loosening some of the restrictions.”
One positive aspect of working during the pandemic, many Starbucks employees said, is that they became incredibly close with their coworkers. That’s partly to do with the physical locations Starbucks occupies. Starbucks stores are tight spaces, where workers bump into and talk to each other constantly — valuable circumstances when trying to unionize. (Situations like this are also less likely at workplaces like giant Amazon warehouses.)
In general, the Starbucks union efforts have been very grassroots, driven by the front-line workers themselves. Starbucks employees at unionized locations are the ones bargaining for a contract with company lawyers — not a union rep. While union members typically work with their representatives to decide what they want in their contract, the negotiations themselves are usually left to the union and their lawyers.
“There’s nobody top-down making a decision about which stores should organize or go public. It depends on the workers in each store,” Givan, the Rutgers professor, said. “I think that’s crucial.”
This grassroots movement has even drawn support from Starbucks’s shareholders. Recently, investors representing $3.4 trillion in assets under management asked the company to remain neutral and “swiftly reach fair and timely collective bargains,” should more Starbucks stores vote to unionize.
The challenges ahead
Unionizing in America today is not easy — that’s part of what makes the Starbucks workers’ success so impressive. But experts aren’t sure the extent to which that success could be replicated at other food and beverage chains or in other industries. Despite organizing in new industries like food service and digital media in recent years, union membership overall is still in decline.
Givan said the easiest way forward for the labor movement might be through other progressive brands — especially ones where workers feel the company hasn’t lived up to that progressive ethos. For example, workers at a Manhattan REI store, an outdoor equipment retailer that puts “purpose before profits,” voted to unionize in March, saying the company failed to prioritize their safety. REI employees accused the company of union busting, by spreading misinformation about the unions, holding captive audience meetings, and withholding promotions.
The road might be tougher at more iron-fisted companies like Amazon. Ahead of the first union vote at an Alabama warehouse, the company had mailboxes installed on its grounds, giving workers the impression that the company was monitoring its union votes. In Staten Island, the company fired a warehouse supervisor named Chris Smalls the same day he participated in a protest about unsafe conditions during the pandemic. (Smalls went on to create the Amazon Labor Union which led the successful union drive at the Staten Island warehouse.)
Starbucks has also been aggressively fighting the union. The company’s resistance is very apparent to its workers who are organizing. A number of workers told us that they’d been fired or had their hours severely cut back over their association with the union. Workers United has filed nearly 70 unfair labor practices against Starbucks. The NLRB recently dinged the company over more aggressive tactics like illegally penalizing organizers, by suspending an employee and denying another’s scheduling preferences, over their union support. Starbucks fired seven unionizing workers in Memphis after hosting a TV interview about them organizing at the store, but said they were let go for reasons outside the union. Starbucks called any allegations of union busting or firing people over unionizing “categorically false.”
“From the beginning, we’ve been clear in our belief that we are better together as partners, without a union between us, and that conviction has not changed,” Starbucks said in a statement to Recode.
Union organizing is also difficult for reasons beyond pushback from management, including a long and arduous process and labor policy that doesn’t favor workers. And faced with those hurdles, plenty of workers decide to advocate for themselves in other ways, without formally organizing, according to Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, authors of The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century. According to Smiley and Gupta, there’s also been an increase in so-called worker standards boards, in which groups of workers take part in decisions and rule-making alongside politicians and employers in a non-union setting. State and local governments have formed standards boards in the past few years to guide everything from compensation to safety.
Fight for $15 and a Union, which is a broader advocacy movement rather than a union, has helped gain benefits and raise the minimum wage for millions of workers in cities and states around the country. Angelica Hernandez, a McDonald’s worker in California who has been working with Fight for $15, went on strike early in March 2020 to protest the unsafe working conditions at her job. She’s not part of a union, but simply walked off the job with a couple of colleagues, and it worked. Thanks to this walkout, she got PPE, sanitizer, and temperature checks at work for her and her colleagues.
Going on strike is risky, and many people can’t afford to lose that pay. That’s why Hernandez is hoping California passes AB 257. The first-of-its-kind bill would standardize wages, hours, and conditions for all fast food workers and cover half a million employees at places like Starbucks and McDonald’s, not just unionized ones.
“We’re all suffering across the board with things like sexual abuse and labor abuse,” Hernandez told Recode through a Fight for $15 translator. “That’s why it’s important for us that it’s not just one or two restaurants, but that all fast food workers have protections.”
The increased propensity for workers to quit and find new jobs in the current tight labor market is another way employees are improving their situation outside unions. Smiley considers the Great Resignation to be a form of worker action, like a strike. “You can’t deny the implications it’s had on the labor force and on labor economics,” she said, referring to how, among other benefits, increased rates of quitting have driven up wages, especially in the lowest-paying sectors.
On a national level, Democrats have put forth a labor bill known as the PRO Act that would make it easier for workers to organize, but it has stalled in the Senate. Perhaps a more promising route is through the NLRB. Jennifer Abruzzo, who was confirmed by the senate as the NLRB’s general counsel last year, told More Perfect Union that she wants to make it harder for employers to intimidate workers who want to unionize. She’s asking the organization to reconsider the Joy Silk Doctrine, which would mean that employers would have to recognize a union based on simple majority support.
All things considered, it’s remarkable that a growing number of Starbucks workers are unionizing right now. And because more locations start their own drives after each new union victory, it’s not hard to imagine as many as 50 unionized Starbucks stores by this summer.
The neighborhood of Wilmington grew up around a refinery. (photo: Rick Loomis/LA Times)
Hundreds of people have been shot and killed in the industrial corridors of Wilmington, California.
He spent the day at his aunt’s home in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Wilmington, California. His parents, Sonia Banales and Roberto Delgado, and his large extended family remember laughing, grilling ribs, and setting off fireworks.
Shortly after midnight, as the celebration died down, Delgado left the house to drive a few friends home. He never made it back.
At about 2 a.m., Delgado was shot and killed in the only place he ever called home, a small corner of Los Angeles tucked between the largest port in North America and the largest oil refinery in California. He was one of at least 160 people in the U.S. who lost their lives to gun violence that weekend. The exceptional deadliness of Independence Day weekend is one of the few American norms that the pandemic did not disrupt.
In the 20 months since Delgado’s death, his family has found little solace and fewer answers as they grapple with what happened that night. They’ve expressed disillusionment at the social support available to them; the police have not discovered a motive or firmly identified a suspect.
“We know that he didn’t deserve to die like this,” said Banales, Delgado’s mother. “It hurts so badly.”
“Every time I call [the police] they say, ‘I’m working on another case. I haven’t had time to work on Daniel’s case,’” she added.
Banales claims that the Los Angeles Police Department, or LAPD, has suggested to her that Delgado’s case has suffered due to “budget cuts” spurred by the historic protests against police violence the summer Delgado died. (While the LAPD’s budget was cut by $150 million in 2020, it then grew by $213 million in 2021, making it the city’s largest police budget in history.) LAPD representatives did not respond to requests for comment in time for the publication of this article.
Wilmington community members are no stranger to early death and the social inequality that drives it. The neighborhood is located in the Los Angeles city council district home to the most federal public housing projects and federally regulated toxic sites of all the city’s 15 districts.
The port in its backyard contributes to 1,200 premature deaths annually, and the air pollution from the refineries on its soil and trucks on its streets contributes to 4,100 premature deaths across Southern California. A lack of green spaces, jobs, and safe housing helps make its five most populous census tracts less healthy than 93 percent of the state, according to the California Healthy Places Index.
As structural and environmental damages have piled up, interpersonal violence has followed.
According to a Grist and Guardian analysis of California’s Department of Public Health reports and the Los Angeles Times’ homicide tracking database, at least 189 people have been shot and killed (10 of them by police) in the community of 55,000 since the year 2000. That amounts to nearly 2.5 times as many fatal shootings as the Los Angeles County per capita average and four times as many as those experienced in the cities that border Wilmington — San Pedro, Rancho Palos Verdes, and Palos Verdes Estates — over the same time period.
The vast majority of those shootings have taken place in the city’s industrial corridors, which are the West Coast’s main arteries for oil production, trucking, and logistics. They are home to more than 200 oil drilling sites, five fossil fuel refineries, three railways, and dozens of truckyards and scrapyards.
Delgado’s killing fits the trend: He was killed on the corner of Drumm Avenue and East Pacific Coast Highway, two streets flanked by shipping container overflow yards and metal scrapyards.
According to Southern California’s air pollution regulator, Wilmington is home to nearly 400 polluting sites, but their locations aren’t equally distributed. In 13 of the city’s 29 census blocks, where roughly 40 percent of the zip code’s residents live, there are just eight industrial sites. In the other 16 census tracts, there are nearly 370 industrial sites. Every single one of the community’s fatal shootings since 2000 has taken place in those industrialized tracts.
These inequities can be traced to America’s history of racist housing policies, including the practice of redlining. In the mid-20th century, the federal government considered roughly half of Wilmington’s residential area to be “hazardous,” which cemented its industrial character by maintaining low homeownership rates and paltry government support. The legacy of pollution and disinvestment persists, and it is also connected to the area’s rate of violence: Formerly redlined communities have significantly higher rates of gun violence than non-redlined neighborhoods.
Academic research on the relationship between pollution, land use, and violence has not definitively established a physiological relationship between pollution, access to green space, and violence and aggression. But it is known that air pollutants act as stressors, eliciting endocrine stress responses in our brains that lead to irrational decisions and violent tendencies and also disturb the physical, cognitive, and emotional health of people exposed to it at high levels. Meanwhile, research has shown a strong correlative relationship between violent crimes and air pollution levels — and that violence rises in communities that don’t have access to public green space.
In one study that combines environmental data with Los Angeles crime records between 2005 and 2013, researchers found that, even when controlled for many social, economic, and circumstantial variables (like weather), violent crime was 6.1 percent higher on days with dirty air than on days with clean air. In another study focused on Youngstown, Ohio, researchers found that turning vacant lots into community green spaces drastically decreased crime, including gun violence.
The research tends to support the “cues to care” theory — that if there is visible maintenance and care offered to shared spaces in communities, a feeling of security and social cohesion follows. The inclusion of natural landscapes, green spaces, and accessible outdoor community spaces helps mitigate the prevalence of violence, including gun violence, and pollution. Green spaces also help facilitate community interactions, which stifle interpersonal rifts.
Wilmington enjoys few such “cues to care,” especially compared to its neighbors to the south and southwest: Wilmington is home to three times less park space, relative to its size, than neighboring communities. Moreover, all but one of Wilmington’s green spaces are on land that is either a former industrial site or home to active and inactive oil wells, according to Los Angeles’ Zone Information and Map Access System. Since 2000, more than 100 times as many toxins — or 16 million more pounds — have been released into Wilmington’s air and water compared to its neighbors, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency.
“The slow violence that drives death [in Wilmington] — pollution — has become accepted and normalized,” said Julie Sze, a professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis, who studies the connection between violence and pollution. “Then the fast violence — gun violence — is seen as normal.”
Wilmington’s current violence prevention strategies place a heavy emphasis on policing. While 27 percent of Los Angeles’s record-setting $11.2 billion budget for 2021 was allocated to the LAPD, less than 11 percent was allocated for transit, emergency management, neighborhood empowerment, community investment, housing, and creating more climate-resilient infrastructure.
Despite the prevalence of policing as a violence prevention strategy, data suggests that Wilmington residents do not utilize the massive resource. According to data shared by LAPD after a public records request, the department received just one single call for service due to shots being fired in the neighborhood between January 2019 and January 2022. Nearly 30 people were shot and killed in Wilmington over that same period.
“I think [policing] needs a lot of improvement,” said Roberto Delgado, Daniel’s father. “Someone took our son from us. They took everything from us, but there has been nothing done about it.”
Wilmington shows that there is an opportunity to expand the scope of public health interventions for violence prevention beyond individuals and into the physical environment, according to Octavio Ramirez, a community organizer and director of community gardens at the Wilmington-based Strength Based Community Change. Ramirez was born and raised in Wilmington. He plans to die there, too, but before that he wants to see a change.
“Growing up, I’ve noticed how a lot of things relate to each other here,” Ramirez said. “How the community being poorer means there aren’t as many good jobs; and how it being home to more renters means there’s not enough room for people; and how there not being enough places for people to relax outside leaves people agitated — how all this leads to more violence, more shootings.”
To fill the gaps that Ramirez has noticed in his community — and to build on skills that his dad, a gardener, passed on to him — he has turned his activism toward community gardening. With the support of his community organization, the local city council member’s office, and grants from local refineries (which he admits is ironic given the industry’s impact on public health in his hometown), Ramirez hopes the “Heart of the Harbor” garden, which is located in one of Wilmington’s top five hot spots for gun violence, will open doors for a trapped community.
“At the bare minimum, this community garden provides a place for people to relax,” he said. “But what I really hope it does is provide a place for people to build community, learn how to grow their own food, and feel connected to each other and our home.”
The 1-acre garden, home to 66 raised beds which can be rented by community members for $10 per month, also includes a public kitchen stocked with a state-of-the-art grill and stovetop, as well as a worm farm used for composting. In the coming year, it’s expected to expand to include a “food forest” with 80 to 120 fruit trees.
It’s the first step in a community-centered movement to reframe Wilmington residents’ realities, their access to the environment around them, and how they relate to each other, Ramirez says. He’s already seen a difference. The garden, and programs like it, are meant to provide sustainable models for reducing violent interactions that are community-led and do not rely on burdening victims.
“In a way [the garden] can help turn a very hostile environment into something really cool,” Ramirez said.
“A lot of people just don’t see opportunity here,” he added, “but I still have faith in my community.”
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