This VC believes in unions. Can he convince the rest of corporate America to join him?

In the fall of 2021, Jaz Brisack was working as a Starbucks barista in Buffalo, New York, when an email from a total stranger named Roy Bahat popped into Brisack’s inbox. At the time, Brisack was embroiled in a historic, ugly fight to form what would ultimately become the first union in all of Starbucks’ roughly 10,000 company-owned North American locations. Bahat thought he might be able to help.



Bahat was no labor organizer. Quite the opposite. He had spent years as a tech executive and was now an investor running Bloomberg Beta, an early stage venture firm backed by Michael Bloomberg, who had his own checkered record on unions as mayor of New York City. But what Bahat had to offer Brisack was an insider’s understanding of how the business world worked and a growing belief that business leaders have a responsibility to work with labor movements, not against them.



It was an unusual approach, but Brisack took Bahat at his word, and that email turned into a phone call, during which Brisack says Bahat offered valuable advice on how Starbucks organizers could appeal to different power centers within the corporate giant. No company is as monolithic as it seems, Brisack remembers him explaining. They’re all made up of different moving parts with their own tangible interests.



“I remember getting off the phone call and just being like, ‘Wow this is an incredibly rare perspective,’” Brisack says. Since then, Bahat has served as a key ally through the Buffalo organizers’ tumultuous victory and in other organizing efforts Brisack has been part of as organizing director for Workers United Upstate New York and Vermont. “Being able to bounce ideas off Roy and talk to Roy has been invaluable,” Brisack says.



At a time when, as the White House recently noted, “organized labor appears to be having a moment,” Bahat is trying to build a bridge between labor movements and the corporate leaders whose first instinct has long been to crush them.



While union membership is still nowhere near what it was at its 1950s peak, last year, unions added 273,000 wage and salary workers to their ranks. Beyond Buffalo, hundreds of Starbucks stores all across the country have voted to unionize, as have Trader Joe’s employees, YouTube Music workers, and more. In 2022, the National Labor Relations Board reported a 53% increase in union representation petitions compared to 2021, and that growth has continued through 2023. And yet, even as support for unions has grown (it’s now the highest it’s been since 1965, according to Gallup), the battles between unions and the corporations their members work for are as acrimonious as ever. Look no further than the brutal ongoing writers and actors strike bringing Hollywood to a screeching halt.



It doesn’t have to be this way, Bahat says. “Business has had this somewhat ignorant, extremely unified opposition to any form of worker-organized worker power,” he says. But that reflexive opposition, he argues, doesn’t do anyone any good and misses a key point about what’s driving worker organizing today. “The current wave of labor organizing is not, at least as I see it, some anti-corporate, pitchfork-wielding march,” Bahat says. “It’s people who actually genuinely say that they care about the values of the company, and they just want it to live up to those values.”



Over the past few years, Bahat has invested in technology that helps labor groups raise money, created and taught a novel business school course on leading an organized workforce at U.C. Berkeley, and recently formed a roundtable for labor-curious CEOs and executives focused on “reinventing corporate America’s relationship with organized labor.” Along the way, he’s written extensively about why business leaders should embrace the upside of labor movements and has forged close relationships with some of the most visible leaders of those movements, ushering them into rooms they might not otherwise enter.



“In order for labor to expand in this country we have to get into different spaces,” says Chris Smalls, president of Amazon Labor Union, who organized a 2020 walkout from a Staten Island warehouse in the early days of the pandemic and later led the successful fight to unionize that location (Disclosure: I’m married to an Amazon employee). Bahat interviewed Smalls on stage at an event for Fortune last year, an invitation Smalls says he might not have accepted if it hadn’t been for Bahat’s urging. “I’m skimming through these Fortune 500 companies, and I’m like, does this make sense for me to even go and waste my time talking to these people?” Smalls says. “But Roy was definitely convincing. Like, ‘No this needs to happen. We do this for that purpose: to pretty much agitate them to have these types of conversations, because it’s necessary.’”



“I think he’s really trying to create space for people to come together and have honest conversations about what will be required of all of us to get to the place of support for unions in this economy,” says Ai-jen Poo, president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.



Bahat’s own labor awakening began a few years back, when he was working on a massive report for Bloomberg and the think tank New America on the future of work and how technology was poised to disrupt it. That research only served to convince Bahat that the biggest issues workers will face in the future—rising inequality, the growth of contingent work, an aging workforce—are already here. But the things the private sector was doing to address those issues by, say, pouring money into job training programs, weren’t making a dent. “I basically realized one easy solution after another wasn’t going to be enough,” Bahat says.



Around that time, worker movements inside major tech companies were also stirring. In 2018, Google employees loudly protested the company’s contract with the Pentagon to develop AI detection technology for potential use in drone strikes. (While Google opted not to renew that contract, it did land another lucrative Pentagon cloud computing contract late last year.) The following year, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice launched with an open letter encouraging Jeff Bezos to do more to address the climate crisis.



Bahat viewed these efforts as a direct response to the fact that the tech industry has, for so many years, sold employees on the idea that they are working in service of some greater set of values. “They bought that,” Bahat says, “and then once they saw companies deviating from what they thought of as their values, then they took matters into their own hands to try to guide those companies in the right direction.”



This growing movement inspired Bahat to get involved in labor organizing himself. But rather than quit his day job, he says, “The advice I got from labor leaders was: Sweep your side of the street.”



The most obvious way for a venture capitalist to do that, of course, is to invest in companies building tools for labor organizers. One such company Bloomberg Beta has invested in is Open Collective, which helps grassroots groups of all types raise and manage money. For Pia Mancini, Open Collective’s cofounder and CEO, it was crucial for the company to find a financial backer who had fully bought into the company’s mission of supporting labor organizers. “These groups have a lot of mistrust, obviously,” Mancini says, but with Bloomberg Beta as its biggest funder, “We can very proudly talk about who’s investing in Open Collective, because they are aligned with the values that we hold for ourselves.”



Beyond these investments, Bahat is also trying to better educate current and future business leaders on why they should view labor movements not as obstacles to be removed, but as assets to be utilized and nurtured. In the U.C. Berkeley course he taught last semester, Bahat’s syllabus included lessons on what workers want and the many forms that worker movements can take beyond unions. The course also featured guest lectures by labor organizers, including Brisack, and critical discussions about the sort of tactics businesses use to undermine unions — from top-loading the company with managers who are prohibited from joining unions to using small violations as ground to fire organizers.



For Afraz Khan, one of Bahat’s students, getting access to these kinds of perspectives in a business school setting was refreshing. Before taking the class, Khan had been on strike himself, joining tens of thousands of graduate student workers across the University of California who formed the largest higher education strike in U.S. history last year. During that time, Khan had found it nearly impossible to drum up interest in the strike among his fellow MBA classmates. “There just really wasn’t a culture of that being discussed, nor were most of my classmates ever a part of a union or saw the value in it,” recalls Khan.



Bahat’s course felt like a unique opportunity for a group of students who will likely slide easily into managerial roles after graduation to develop some understanding and empathy for the needs of workers. “My hope is this will help open the door for people who maybe hadn’t had exposure to unions,” Khan says.



Bahat has a similar hope for his recently launched roundtable at the Aspen Institute. While the group’s membership is private, Bahat says it includes a cross section of companies, from construction to retailers to quick-serve restaurants to tech companies. The goal is to provide a space for leaders who are open to labor movements to have honest discussions about the challenges they’re facing and how to move past them in productive ways. “It’s a lot of practical questions, like, ‘The union is organizing, and I’m worried that the person who they’ve picked to represent workers doesn’t actually represent workers. What do I do?’ Or, ‘I voluntarily recognized the union, and as soon as I did that, productivity in that group fell off dramatically. What do I do?’” says Bahat.



Bahat knows lots of people in labor movements will inevitably be skeptical that he really has workers’ best interests at heart. “There are plenty of people for whom the fact that I have the word ‘capitalist’ in my job title means they’d rather not have dialogue with me,” he says. The same goes for business leaders who have, over time, developed a sort of calcified disdain for labor unions.



While he insists he’s no double agent—the labor leaders he works with and students he’s taught all attest to that fact—he acknowledges he isn’t trying to teach business leaders “how to be pushovers and just accept whatever the union wants.” He wants, instead, to teach them how to work with and have a productive relationship with a new generation of organized workers. He points to examples like the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas, a collaboration between the Culinary Workers Union, the Bartenders Union, and dozens of commercial partners as evidence of how businesses can benefit from the kind of support and investments that unions make in their workers. Of course, even these useful alliances can’t totally eliminate conflict. In early August, thousands of Culinary Workers Union members rallied on the Las Vegas strip as part of their push for a new contract.



Bahat is not Pollyannaish about just how difficult it will be to change minds in the C-Suite or how hard it may sometimes be for corporations and labor unions to find common ground. “There are definitely cases where a labor organization and management, if they’re in conflict with one another, can be paralyzing,” Bahat says.



But his goal is to show that it isn’t always that way — worker movements can be mutually beneficial and their leaders may, in fact, be their most engaged and passionate employees. “The very same relationships that have a lot of conflict also can have a lot of collaboration, because you have two parties that have power and that are peers in dialogue with one another,” Bahat says. “One of the major issues I see in our American economy is that the power went out of balance. It needs to go back into balance.”