13 May 22
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ALSO SEE: Senators Collins and Murkowski Hatch Their Own Plan
to Protect Roe v. Wade
Standing in their way as a sort of last line of defense are the Democrats. That’s the theory anyway. However the Democrats unsurprisingly seem better at expressing outrage than doing anything about the source of the injustice. In trying to understand what the Democrats will or won’t do it is important to remember what the Supreme Court’s overthrow of Roe means for not just for American women but for the Democratic party itself. The demise of Roe may be bad for the country but for the foreseeable future it’s good for the Democratic party.
NPR recently reported “Democrats hope abortion will jolt young voters to action in the midterms.” It almost certainly will jolt young voters, women voters and swing voters as well. The Daily Beast followed the money saying, “Dems Flooded With Cash After Roe Leak—and Fear It Won’t Last.” It begs the question, what might make the flood of cash stop?
At the risk of overdoing the cynicism it bears noting that if the Democrats succeed in passing legislation that protects women’s reproductive rights in a manner consistent with the original Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 it is quite possible, even probable that public outrage may die down. The newly energized democratic base and donors might very well go back to sleep. An apathetic Democratic base would almost certainly guarantee Republican control of the House and a strong shot at gaining a majority in the Senate. The Democrats want and need the power of the majority not voter apathy.
Manchin, Collins and Murkowski and Sinema (Maybe)
To get an Abortion rights bill passed, any abortion rights bill the Democrats will have to find a way to circumnavigate the filibuster. There are a few ways to do that, but by far the most practical and most likely to succeed is so-called “carve-out” in the filibuster to allow an exception for single piece of legislation to pass. A carve-out only requires a simple majority.
Joe Manchin has already said, to no one’s surprise, that he will not vote for a carve-out to allow abortion rights legislation to pass. That coupled with his long-time opposition to abortion rights in general puts him squarely in the Republican camp, a place in which he is very comfortable.
The ever unpredictable Kyrsten Sinema bears mentioning as well. Her most recent position is in lockstep with Manchin. Business Insider reports, “Sen. Kyrsten Sinema stands by her support of the Senate filibuster, dooming Democratic plans to codify federal abortion protections.” Which doesn’t mean Democratic attempts to pass abortion protection legislation are in fact doomed, it just means that it will require help from at least two Republicans.
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, both Republicans are the wild cards. Notorious for saying all the right things and voting for all the wrong things Murkowski and Collins now find themselves in a tight spot. Both have long touted their support for women’s reproductive rights. Both where key votes in approving the hard-right justices that now stand poised — despite their personal assurances to Murkowski and Collins — to do the very thing they said they would not do, overturn Roe v. Wade.
Murkowski and Collins were so put-off by what they view as betrayals by Supreme Court nominees they cast key votes to approve that they were moved to write their own abortion rights protection bill. Their decision to craft legislation of their own would strongly indicate a desire on their part to get it passed and presumably vote for a filibuster carve-out to get it done. They were promptly met by scorn and ridicule from the Democrats, a conspicuously unconstructive response.
The Democratic complaint is that Murkowski-Collins bill doesn’t go far enough. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut the main sponsor of the Women’s Health Protection Act put it this way: “They're too many gaps and loopholes that would easily enable TRAP laws, that impose requirements, for example, that mandate width of hallways, admitting privileges, but also permit six week bans, eight week bans. I think our legislation really fully and admirably protects reproductive rights in ways that draft doesn't.” But not if the Democratic version of the bill dies on the Senate floor and it has already failed once.
In the hypothetical, assuming that Blumenthal and the Democrats have a valid point, why does that preclude collaboration to craft mutually acceptable legislation? The Democrats are not embracing and encouraging Murkowski and Collins they are driving them off. Democratic voters and donors need to demand more.
Do the Democrats want to protect women’s reproductive rights or take advantage of public outrage to maintain their majorities? Are they really willing to put the best interests of the country first? Murkowski and Collins are making an effort, however imperfect. The Democrats in good faith need to try to embrace their effort and build on it. The voters and, donors need to demand it and pay close attention to the details, closer than they have been up until now.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Dead bodies are put into a mass grave on the outskirts of Mariupol, Ukraine. (photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)
Source: Skhemy with reference to satellite images of Planet Labs
Details: The satellite recorded that in May the mass burials of Mariupol residents in the village of Staryi Krym and the village of Vynohradne increased in size.
If we compare satellite images of the cemetery in Staryi Krym from 24 April to 8 May, the total length of the trench increased from 200 metres in April to 340 metres in May.
The number of trenches in Staryi Krym has increased.
In Vynohradne, the number of trenches in the photo from 6 May has significantly increased compared to 21 April.
Mariupol Mayor Vadym Boichenko’s quote: "Now the Russian occupiers are trying to do everything to hide their war crimes. They are burying bodies in mass graves and using mobile crematoriums. That is, we understand that they need to hide more than 20,000 killed Mariupol residents.
But we continue to document these mass graves in order not to allow these crimes against Mariupol residents to be concealed."
Details: The mayor said that the Russian occupiers hurried to remove the corpses of the dead from the city centre until 9 May to show a "picture" for propaganda.
Local authorities have information that the Russian occupiers are forcing [people] to work on the territories of mass graves for "food, drinking water and medicine", which are catastrophically lacking in the city.
In addition, on 6 May, journalists noticed Russian military equipment on satellite images of the cemetery in Vynohradne. Experts said it looked like artillery.
Background:
- Maxar Technologies satellites recorded that trenches 300 metres long appeared in late March in a field near Manhush, where the occupiers took the bodies of killed Mariupol residents.
- The Mariupol City Council estimates that up to 9,000 people can be buried in such trenches.
- A similar mass grave of satellites was recorded in the village of Vynohradne near Mariupol.
In late April, satellites revealed the appearance of a mass grave in the cemetery of Staryi Krym in the northwestern suburbs of Mariupol.
A person drops off a mail-in ballot at an election ballot return box in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, Oct. 25, 2021. (photo: Matt Rourke/AP)
A local operative admitted to having mail-in ballots delivered to a P.O. box he controlled. Republicans affiliated with his PAC he ran have now been booted from their positions with the party
But as is proving to be the case across the nation, in Pennsylvania it’s Republicans who seem to be the ones trying to game the system to their advantage. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported last week that Billy Lanzilotti, a 23-year-old GOP operative and chairman of South Philadelphia’s Republican Registration Coalition, was signing voters up to receive mail-in ballots, but having the ballots sent not to the homes of the voters, but to the PAC’s P.O. box. Republican leaders voted on Saturday to remove him from his post as the leader of Philadelphia’s 39th ward, and the Inquirer reported on Wednesday that two state party staffers were fired because of their affiliation with Lanzilotti’s PAC.
The terminations of 27-year-old Shamus O’Donnell and 24-year-old C.J. Parker were the result of last week’s report, four party sources familiar with the matter told the Inquirer. The report detailed how dozens of mail-in ballots were being delivered to the P.O. box instead of to the voters. Lanzilotti admitted that he indeed filled in ballot forms with the address of the P.O. box. “I didn’t do anything that to my understanding was against the law,” Lanzilotti told the Inquirer, adding he was acting out of “convenience to the voter.”
Lanzilotti claimed that he was going to deliver the ballots himself, as the voters would trust him more. “There’s been a number of problems with the post office lately,” he told the paper. ”Checks are being stolen out of the mail. They like it this way because I’m someone they trust.”
However, when the Inquirer spoke to some of the voters whose ballot applications listed Lanzilotti’s P.O. box, several of them said they didn’t even remember signing up to vote by mail. Only two of them who did said they were aware that the P.O. box is where their ballots would be sent. Only one of them actually received their ballot. “I can only do this in my spare time,” Lanzilotti reasoned. “I have a full-time job.”
The legality of Lanzilotti’s actions is unclear, but they have certainty raised concerns. “If the circumstance is, it’s mail delivered at a retirement home, and some kindly ward person gets them from the mailroom and hands them out, that’s one thing,” elections lawyer Matt Haverstick told the Inquirer. “Going to a P.O. box at the address for a PAC? I have to think about that one. It’s certainly one that would give me pause under the election code.”
Voters are supposed to complete their applications themselves, unless they’re ill or sign an authorization for help. Of the 39 applications that have been publicly reported, none indicated that any help was provided. In addition, one voter told the Inquirer that he gave his filled out application back to Lanzilotti, who had offered to deliver it for him. This would violate state law, unless that voter was disabled and had authorized someone to help. Lanzilotti said this voter was mistaken, and that he merely dropped off the ballot at his home.
The potential ballot harvesting scheme is only the latest example of Republicans playing fast and loose with election law. Elderly residents of a Miami housing project earlier this year claimed Republican canvassers duped them into changing their party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, prompting calls for an investigation. A few hundred miles away in The Villages, a MAGA-happy retirement community, several residents who have expressed support for Trump were busted for voter fraud after voting twice. Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff who was at the center of the administration’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, is currently under investigation for voter fraud after registering in multiple states. He was kicked off the voter rolls in his home state of North Carolina last month.
Three Louisiana State Police troopers have been charged with simple battery, accused of beating a Black motorist after a chase. (photo: AP)
Three Louisiana State Police troopers have been charged with simple battery, accused of beating a Black motorist after a chase
The misdemeanor simple battery charges in the 2020 arrest of Antonio Harris come amid mounting scrutiny of the state’s premier law enforcement agency over allegations of excessive force — particularly against Black people — and an institutional instinct to cover it up.
Jacob Brown, Dakota DeMoss and George “Kam” Harper, who are white, were seen on body-camera video piling onto Harris following a high-speed chase that ended next to a cornfield in rural Franklin Parish, kneeing, slapping and punching him even though he had surrendered face down with his arms and legs splayed.
The troopers' attorneys declined to comment Thursday. State police spokesperson Lt. Melissa Matey said the troopers' actions "are inexcusable and have no place in professional public safety services.”
State police had arrested the troopers in February 2021 on felony charges of malfeasance in office, but local prosecutors elected not to bring that count last week when filing a bill of information in Franklin Parish. Misdemeanor simple battery in Louisiana carries up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.
“Obviously we would have liked stronger charges but we’re still hopeful the Department of Justice will bring a case,” said Harris’ attorney, Michael Sterling.
A federal grand jury in Lafayette has been hearing testimony in the case following a months-long investigation into whether the troopers used excessive force. But it remains unclear whether the U.S. Justice Department intends to move forward with a civil rights case.
A similar uncertainty hangs over the federal investigation into the deadly 2019 arrest of Ronald Greene, another Black motorist beaten by state police. A federal grand jury also has been hearing testimony in that case, in which troopers stunned, punched and dragged Greene before he died on a rural roadside in Union Parish, outside Monroe. The Associated Press reported this week that the Justice Department is increasingly skeptical it can bring a successful case against the troopers.
State lawmakers, meanwhile, are probing allegations of a cover-up in Greene's death and voted Wednesday to hold the former head of the state police in contempt for defying a subpoena and refusing to turn over the handwritten journals he kept while leading the agency. Former Col. Kevin Reeves was separately held in contempt Thursday for not complying with a subpoena from the commission that oversees discipline of state troopers. Reeves’ attorney, Lewis Unglesby, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the Harris beating, an internal investigation found the troopers filed “wholly untrue” reports claiming the man kept trying to flee, refused to obey commands and fought with troopers before they began to pummel him with what Brown called “tactical strikes.”
“They kept saying ‘Stop resisting’ but I was never resisting,” Harris told investigators. “As soon as they got to me, one of them kneed me in my face. One of them was squeezing my eyes.”
The troopers also later exchanged 14 text messages peppered with “lol” and “haha” responses in which they boasted about the beating and mocked Harris, who spit up blood and suffered from sore ribs and stomach pain for days after the arrest.
“He gonna be sore tomorrow for sure,” Brown wrote in one of the texts. “Warms my heart knowing we could educate that young man.”
Brown, Harper and DeMoss, who were part of a notoriously violent division of troopers patrolling the northeastern part of the state, were arrested in the case last year. DeMoss and Harper were fired and Brown, who in October pleaded not guilty in a separate federal case accusing him of pummeling another Black motorist 18 times with a flashlight, resigned.
DeMoss has also come under investigation for his role in Greene's death, which authorities initially blamed on a car crash at the end of a chase before the AP last year published troopers' long-withheld body-camera video showing a violent arrest.
Greene and Harris’ arrests were among at least 12 cases over the past decade in which an AP investigation found troopers or their bosses ignored or concealed evidence of beatings, deflected blame and impeded efforts to root out misconduct. Dozens of current and former troopers told the AP the beatings were countenanced by a culture of impunity, nepotism and, in some cases, outright racism.
Harris’ case began after Brown pulled him over for a minor traffic violation on Interstate 20. The trooper conducted a criminal history check and discovered Harris had a suspended driver’s license and outstanding warrants.
Harris sped away from the traffic stop in a Hyundai Sonata, leading troopers on a 29-mile (47- kilometer) chase that reached speeds of 150 miles (241 kph) before it was finally stopped with the help of a tire-puncturing spike strip.
Even though Harris had already surrendered, DeMoss, the first arriving trooper, “delivered a knee strike” and slapped him in the face with an open palm before powering off his body-worn camera, court records show.
Harper, meanwhile, punched Harris in the head several times with a fist “reinforced” by a flashlight and threatened to “punish” Harris, while Brown pulled the man’s hair, an internal investigation concluded. DeMoss can later be seen on the footage lifting Harris to his feet by his braids.
Investigators determined Brown never informed state prosecutors that any body-worn camera video of the arrest existed.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-CA, joined at right by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-OH, on July 27, 2021. The House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has issued subpoenas for both lawmakers, as well as other House Republicans. (photo: Scott Applewhite/AP)
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), who chairs the select committee, said that the panel subpoenaed McCarthy and Reps. Mo Brooks (Ala.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Scott Perry (Pa.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio).
Starbucks baristas and supporters protest outside a Manhattan Starbucks. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty)
The return of the company’s longtime CEO hasn’t slowed the workers, who are inspiring activists at Amazon and showing the extent of labor’s new power.
Schultz has always linked Starbucks closely to his own sense of right and wrong, and this speech was no different. As a screen behind him displayed photos of smiling employees, he emphasized his determination that the company provide better jobs than his blue-collar dad ever had. This would be a new beginning, he vowed, but also a return to form. He listed the employee perks he’d established that set Starbucks apart from its peers, including stock grants and free tuition for online courses at Arizona State University. “It’s a return to the celebration of coffee, something that, for whatever reason, has kind of been dissipated over the last few years,” he said. “It’s a return to kindness.” Then he turned to the remarkable trend of the past several months: Starbucks employees (the company calls them “partners”) unionizing at a rate that would have been unimaginable a year ago.
Yes, he acknowledged, Starbucks had erred by privileging stock buybacks over investing in the business, and turnover was high. He’d recently learned that most baristas had been with the company for less than a year. But collective bargaining, he suggested, wasn’t the answer. “We can’t ignore what is happening in the country as it relates to companies throughout the country being assaulted, in many ways, by the threat of unionization,” he told the baristas. After declaring that he wasn’t anti-union, just pro-Starbucks, he added: “We didn’t get here by having a union.”
Until December, none of Starbucks’ roughly 9,000 corporate-run US coffee shops were unionized—owing in part to the company’s aggressive resistance to organizing, but also to the relatively strong pay and benefits that give Schultz so much pride. (By August, all US employees will be guaranteed a minimum wage of $15 an hour.) Now workers at more than 60 locations in 17 states have voted to join Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, following the lead and advice of first-mover baristas in Buffalo. Employees at about 175 more Starbucks have petitioned the federal government for votes of their own.
Although this hardly represents the majority of the company’s stores, and none of the workers have negotiated a contract yet, the steady drip has transformed the idea of winning a union vote at a Starbucks from seemingly impossible to almost inevitable. As of May 10, only eight stores have called an election and then voted to reject the union. Successful votes have taken place from coast to coast, including in deep-red states as well as at a flagship megacafe in Seattle. Employees attempting to organize at Amazon, Apple, Verizon, and elsewhere cite these successes as an inspiration. “We’re going to spread just like the Starbucks movement,” Christian Smalls, a fired Amazon.com Inc. worker who led the successful union vote at his old workplace in New York City, said on CNBC the same day as Schultz’s speech in April. The baristas’ rebellion is acting as a beacon for workers and a warning for executives: If it can happen at the Starbucks on the corner, it can happen anywhere.
As with Smalls at Amazon, the Starbucks organizers have succeeded mainly by mentoring one another. “It’s the ultimate group project,” says Michelle Eisen, a Starbucks barista in Buffalo who’s coached baristas at other stores from Kentucky to Hawaii. “Everybody has to pull their weight.” Baristas from Boston, Buffalo, and Seattle have trained more than 80 co-workers across the US on how to mentor colleagues at other stores. Richard Bensinger, a Workers United organizer, is helping to steer the campaign at the national level but says he generally keeps his mouth shut in those trainings, if he’s even there. “They don’t need to hear from me,” he says.
Why Starbucks? Dozens of baristas across eight states say the reality of the green apron falls short of the picture Schultz paints, and short of US workers’ rising expectations. Fifteen dollars an hour is decent money in some parts of the country, but it’s still less than half what it costs to support one adult and one child in a city such as Seattle, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Even before the pandemic, Starbucks stores were understaffed. Covid-19 exacerbated that and added major health risks, as corporate failed to account for staff shortages, provide employees with high-quality masks, or reinstitute its mask mandate once a new variant came along. The newly unionized employees are demanding stronger job protections, deeper staffing, and higher pay that also accounts for inflation. If staffing issues mean one of them has to do double the work for a shift, they say, that person should get paid double, too.
“Few companies stepped up during Covid like we did,” Starbucks spokesperson Reggie Borges said in an email, citing a period during spring 2020 when the company’s shops allowed only drive-through customers and some workers stayed home with pay. “We will build a better experience working side by side than by sitting across a negotiating table.” The company has said it strongly recommends that customers wear masks and requires them where legally mandated. Borges said union efforts have been cropping up recently at all sorts of companies, and Starbucks was targeted during the pandemic by activists who applied for jobs there so they could start a campaign. “Workers United is a business,” he said. “This business is not a cause, a movement.” The company has said repeatedly that it complies with labor laws and has strenuously denied allegations that it’s attempting to squelch the union illegally by targeting activists or threatening retribution. It did, however, create a website telling workers that under a union contract “some things you value now might go away.”
Starbucks is right that the union campaign there is in part a symptom of broader labor unrest, with workers taking chances and making demands they never would have before. If the Amazon victory was stunning in part because of how powerless its workers had seemed, the Starbucks union wave is remarkable in part because of how content its staff was often thought to be. The Starbucks activists don’t dispute that it’s a better place to work than many of its peers. But they want more than that—more pay and more backup, sure, but also more say in how the company is run, in their work, and therefore in their life. Incredibly, they might get it.
Shayla Swain, a barista in Pennington, N.J., says her manager warned her that Starbucks staff already have the equivalent of a venti cup of pay and benefits and that the cup can hold only so much. Swain says the analogy isn’t worthy of Starbucks. “If a drink doesn’t fit in a venti cup,” she says, “you put it in a trenta cup.”
Schultz isn’t exactly the master of the punchy slogan. Before his first-day-back speech in April, he published an open letter pledging to “engage in design sessions with partners of all levels across the organization to co-create a future of mutual thriving in a multi-stakeholder era.” But he has a justifiably healthy confidence in his ability to win over people.
He grew up in public housing in Brooklyn, N.Y., with that blue-collar dad (the old man drove a truck) and joined Starbucks at age 29 in 1982, when the chain’s stores numbered in the single digits. Schultz turned 40 the year after Starbucks’s initial public offering, and by the end of his first run as CEO, in 2000, the company was a ubiquitous piece of US culture that sold Americans on drinking much better coffee than they were used to—and paying much more for it. He took the reins again from 2008 to 2017, by which point Starbucks’s share price had exceeded its IPO level by 21,000%. Today the company operates more US locations than any other fast-food chain (it avoids franchising) and generates more revenue than any peer besides McDonald’s Corp., according to QSR magazine, which analyzes the quick-service restaurant industry.
In his 1997 memoir, Pour Your Heart Into It, Schultz includes a passage recounting how he correctly predicted Starbucks’s few unionized stores would vote to end their union affiliation after he became CEO, because they believed in him. “If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union,” he wrote. Organizing efforts over subsequent decades fizzled, in part because of what US labor board prosecutors and judges repeatedly deemed illegal retaliation by the company. (Starbucks, which denied retaliating, appealed some of those cases and settled others.) And some baristas still trust Schultz to look out for them better than a union contract would. Taylor Shaw, an employee in the Buffalo area who’s applying for management, says the CEO’s push for strong benefits is more than just talk. “My job is the only reason that I can pay for my medical. I’m going to go to college for free,” Shaw says. “So I just feel appreciated.” The pandemic, she adds, brought challenges that demanded a certain amount of patience.
But growing numbers of baristas are saying the company’s Covid policies have radicalized them, even if other chains’ conditions may be similar or worse. Both before and during the pandemic, they say, Starbucks consistently prioritized cost-cutting over their basic needs. The company rolled out $3-per-hour hazard pay in March 2020—but rolled it back after two months. Workers say that Starbucks refused to pay them during self-isolation following exposures if they hadn’t tested positive and that it didn’t do anything to help them secure tests. Twenty people who’ve worked at Starbucks during the pandemic say understaffing has gotten severe enough that it’s sometimes been a struggle to make it to the bathroom. Two of them say they’ve soiled themselves at work because they had no backup.
“Understaffing was an issue that many retailers struggled with,” Borges, the Starbucks spokesperson, said in an email. “We gave our local leaders the autonomy to make the best decisions for their partners so that no one had to choose between their health and their job.”
Last summer, baristas in Buffalo decided they’d had enough. After weeks of confidential conversations in homes and rival coffee shops, they announced their union campaign and petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to hold votes at three stores in the area. One of the campaign’s architects was Jaz Brisack, a Rhodes scholar who’d spent a summer working with Bensinger as an organizer. She’d seen a Starbucks worker get fired after talking about organizing and decided to go work there herself in 2020 in the hope of taking things further. (Federal filings show Brisack was also being paid by Workers United last year while employed by Starbucks; she says a lot of baristas there have second jobs.) Another was Eisen, who’d worked at Starbucks for 10 years and says the company’s refusal to prioritize safety during the pandemic showed how badly its workers need a voice. “I don’t know that I could fully grasp how completely undemocratic the corporation is until that moment,” Eisen says. “I just don’t know how you continue to be the company they say they are and do what they’re doing.”
Starbucks responded by trying to convince the NLRB that baristas had no right to vote on unionization on a store-by-store basis. It sent executives and extra store managers to Buffalo to discourage organizing. Then the company called in Schultz, who was at that point still retired from the company, for a pinch-hit speech. On a Saturday night in November, Buffalo stores closed early so workers could go hear him at a local hotel. “I think it’s really incumbent upon me to spend some time sharing with you and, in a sense, educating you on where this all has come from,” he said. He talked about the company’s great benefits and sense of belonging, as well as his childhood and his dad. “I wanted to do something that was so significantly different than the abuse that my father had, in being the kind of person that was not respected and dignified and did not have any value.”
Employees’ best interests were already on Starbucks executives’ minds, Schultz said. The company’s board of directors places two empty chairs at each meeting to represent the perspectives of its customers and its employees. “Those two empty chairs is not some metaphor,” he said. “It’s real.” Then he stumbled into an awkward Holocaust metaphor that would make international news. Concentration camp inmates chose to share their blankets with others who didn’t have them, he said, and “what we have tried to do at Starbucks is share our blanket.” He didn’t take questions.
A week after Schultz’s Buffalo speech, a barista in Mesa, Ariz., named Michelle Hejduk called up the union and was soon talking to Eisen. Starbucks had recently forced out her manager for leaking info about an anti-union meeting, leaving employees mad enough to quit and therefore more willing to fight, according to Hejduk. (Starbucks wrote that the manager resigned voluntarily and wasn’t retaliated against.) “We were all terrified,” Hejduk says. “We were like, ‘All right, we’re just going to jump and see where we land.’ ”
Eisen was terrified, too, though she didn’t tell Hejduk that. “I remember thinking, ‘Yikes,’ ” she says.
Over the following weeks, Eisen and Hejduk kept talking. Both thought of themselves as the “store mom”—levelheaded, no-nonsense, long-tenured, and on the older side. Both are millennials working largely with Gen Z colleagues. Among Eisen’s tips for organizing: Anticipate the company’s arguments against unionization, and prepare co-workers to expect them. Be welcoming and positive to new hires. Don’t do anything that could give management an excuse to fire you. In anti-union meetings, keep your cool and ask uncomfortable questions.
When the ballots from Eisen and Brisack’s store were counted in December, they’d won, 19 to 8. Hejduk’s store started voting in January; when those votes were counted in February, she’d prevailed 25 to 3. The next day, Hejduk was on a Zoom call with Starbucks employees in Virginia, sharing her own pointers. “It was really, really good to hear someone who’s made it to the other side,” says Kat Wiggers, a barista there. “She was like, ‘Yeah, I see you. I went through the exact same thing, and look where we’re at now.’ ”
Eisen and Hejduk’s buddy system has now gone national. In a web of Zoom calls and Slack messages, baristas are sharing the strategies that seem to work. In Seattle, barista Sydney Durkin asks colleagues what they’d love to do if they weren’t so exhausted after work or were paid a little better. In New York City, an employee recorded their manager warning about the dangers of unionizing and shared it with organizers elsewhere as a blueprint of the company’s talking points. In Florida, North Carolina, and Texas, employees prepared for anti-union pressure from managers by role-playing with Buffalo area barista Will Westlake, who says he was once called into an anti-union meeting with six managers. The company had excluded him from a larger anti-union gathering with his co-workers, claiming that if he attended, there wouldn’t be enough macaroons for everyone.
“Our meetings are not mandatory, and we always lead with our mission and values,” Borges, the Starbucks spokesperson, wrote in an email. “Claims of anti-union tactics are categorically false.”
Contract talks are now under way at a couple of stores including Eisen and Brisack’s, albeit slowly and awkwardly, even by the standards of a Zoom call. At the first session, when the workers suggested each participant start by sharing what excited them about the process, the company didn’t respond. When Starbucks lawyer Alan Model remarked regarding scheduling future sessions that he knew no one there wanted to give up their Saturdays, the baristas accustomed to working weekends marveled at the gulf between them and the company.
More recently, Model questioned the workers about their European-style proposal to make Starbucks put a worker representative on its board. “You don’t want to be there,” he said, asking if they understood how boring board meetings can be. The workers asked why, if Starbucks was so opposed to their participation, Schultz and others kept boasting about the empty chair. Model answered with another question: “Haven’t you ever heard of a metaphor?”
Initial collective bargaining agreements usually take more than a year to negotiate, and Starbucks has every reason to drag out the Buffalo talks for as long as possible, because a worthwhile deal would encourage more workers to organize. The Buffalo baristas say they expect that to get an agreement in place, the company will need to face a whole lot more pressure from investors, lawmakers, customers, regulators, and more workers demanding a voice.
In the meantime, the union campaign has also suffered setbacks, and some baristas have paid a price. Starbucks Workers United has filed labor board allegations claiming the company illegally fired 20 employees across the country in retaliation for organizing. In February, Starbucks fired seven workers in Memphis, saying they broke numerous safety rules when they let a local TV station interview them in the store after hours. The fired workers deny behaving unsafely, and the NLRB recently sued seeking a court injunction to reinstate them. “We were loud, we were bold, and the company tried to use us as examples,” said Nikki Taylor, one of the fired Memphis leaders, while being interviewed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in February. Starbucks wrote that it’s never retaliated against employees for organizing.
The Memphis workers included five of the six members of their store’s organizing committee. “If something does happen to me, I’m really worried that’s going to be the end of it,” says Reaghan Hall, No. 6. So far, though, outrage over the purge has fueled more support for a union, she says.
The numbers seem to bear that out. Unionization petitions and votes have continued to increase around the country in the three months since the Memphis firings, and Schultz’s return as CEO hasn’t slowed the pace, either. An additional 50 stores filed for votes in his first three weeks back. On May 3, Starbucks said it would roll out 5% raises for nonunion employees who’ve been with the company for at least two years. “We do not have the same freedom to make these improvements at locations that have a union,” Schultz said on an earnings call.
A month earlier, Starbucks convened a hand-picked group of about 20 baristas from Southern California in a conference room in Long Beach for what sounds like one of history’s less fun three-hour pizza parties. Basically, it was a focus group. They spent the first hour watching Schultz’s speech from earlier that week. Then Schultz himself entered the room and took a seat in their circle of folding chairs. A moderator asked the employees to react to a list of potential grievances, such as “Our stores are short-staffed,” then use sticky notes to mark up the wall with ways the company could improve things.
The meeting got tense when one of the invited employees, a union activist named Madison Hall, asked Schultz to speak about the company’s retaliation against organizers. In response, the CEO accused the union of disrupting a recent memorial service for an employee (the union denies that), which he said reflects “the disrespect of an organization that doesn’t know who we are.” Then he returned to the themes of the speech the invitees had just watched: his childhood, his quest to do better, the good perks. Hall, sitting a few feet away, told Schultz that tuition-free college is great, but it doesn’t pay the rent.
“I’m sensing a lot of anger from you about Starbucks,” Schultz told Hall. “If you hate Starbucks so much, why don’t you work somewhere else?” (Starbucks wrote that Schultz “aimed to bring the focus of the meeting to the task at hand” after the activist “attempted to divert” it.)
Since that confrontation, Hall says, dozens of fellow baristas have contacted them online to ask for help calling votes of their own. “The only way to truly have a level playing field with somebody with that much power over you is to have a union contract,” they say. “We want a seat at the table.”
And Schultz doesn’t have to be seated there, Hall adds. Officially the CEO is back on an interim basis, with a more permanent announcement planned for the fall. Whatever happens, Hall says they plan to stick around: “I’ll be here after he leaves.” Three days after the Schultz confrontation, Hall’s store petitioned to unionize.
Analysis shows alarming level of benzene at fence-line of facilities in Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Indiana and U.S. Virgin Islands. (photo: AP)
Analysis shows alarming level of benzene at fence-line of facilities in Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Indiana and US Virgin Islands
Among the 12 refineries that emitted above the maximum level for benzene, five were in Texas, four in Louisiana, and one each in Pennsylvania, Indiana and the US Virgin Islands, a new analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project revealed on Thursday.
Benzene is a known carcinogen that is highly toxic and volatile when exposed to air. Much of the excess emissions come through leaks from valves, tanks, pumps and other means that are hard to detect.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates 6.1 million people in the US live within three miles of a refinery, with low-income people and people of color represented at rates nearly twice that of the general population.
Out of 129 operable oil refineries in 2021, 118 reported benzene concentration registered at or near the site, otherwise known as the fence-line.
Nearly half of these refineries released benzene levels above 3 micrograms per cubic meter, which the Environmental Integrity Project defines as a long-term potential health threat.
The EPA requires facilities to take action if they exceed an average 9 micrograms per cubic meter, or above “action level” emission of benzene.
“If [facilities] can’t get their benzene below the action level, year after year, we really need to see enforcement from the EPA,” said Eric Schaeffer, the executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, in a press conference. “You need to start paying penalties when your fence-line levels persist,” he added.
Lifetime exposure to benzene at levels as low as 0.13 microgram per cubic meter could cause a risk of up to one additional cancer case for every one million exposed, according to the EPA. The higher the level of benzene, the higher the health risk.
Marathon Petroleum’s Galveston Bay refinery in Texas City had the highest average net benzene levels in 2021, according to the analysis of the self-reported data. Roughly 37,000 people live within a three-mile radius of the refinery. Among them, 62% are people of color and 47% are low-income.
“This analysis provides important insight into why the Houston area is an industrial cancer hotspot,” said Leticia Gutierrez of advocacy group Air Alliance Houston, at the press conference.
“People living near these facilities have greater [exposure] to lifetime cancer risk than any other part of the state, yet the regulatory agencies responsible for protecting us continue to approve permits for these facilities,” Gutierrez said.
Environmental Integrity Project notes that its analysis did not measure concentrations of benzene within neighborhoods adjacent to refineries, and does not reflect the actual levels of benzene within the communities.
Marathon Petroleum and the EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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