How new models of worker organizing look beyond the workplace

Starbucks baristas leap in the air, hugging and crying with relief. Chris Smalls, clad in red Amazon Labor Union attire, pops a champagne bottle. Academic workers flood University of California sidewalks in the largest labor action by campus workers in history. These are popular images from a surge in organizing that also includes teachers in West Virginia, writers at The New Yorker, architects at a major firm, Google employees, and Uber drivers around the globe, rail workers in the Midwest and beyond, museum employees in Philadelphia, and coal miners in Alabama.



In every sector of the economy, every part of the supply chain, cities and small towns, people are in solidarity with one another.



At the heart of these efforts are demands for basic safety and well-being. People are facing a startling combination of economic, social, and cultural pressures that come to bear during their shifts. The pandemic disproportionately impacted working class people, many of whom stayed at work in order to provide the rest of the population with basic necessities during the shutdown.



Meanwhile, use of electronic productivity monitoring and surveillance technology has risen dramatically over the past few years, specifically impacting Amazon warehouse workers and others in the logistics and delivery sector. And, in a context of increasing racist, homophobic, and white nationalist actions, many workers of color are left unprotected from dangerous customers during their work hours.



We saw this in Atlanta, where a mass shooter targeted spa workers of Asian descent. We heard from Starbucks baristas like Aleah Bacetti, who experienced outright hostility and racist slurs shouted at her from customers in her Bel Air, Maryland store.



As workers have faced these compounding threats, they’ve organized in ways that center community stability, safety, mutual aid, and care. This approach built strong, resilient communities that have withstood moments of difficulty and has the capacity to seed new organizations that can last into the future. In this network building, care-based approach, we have a hint of what the future of labor organizing could (and should) look like and a guide for the way institutional labor could provide support moving forward.



We’ve seen this kind of support show up specifically among Starbucks organizers. The first win by employees in Buffalo, New York set off a wave of organizing, with workers voting to join Starbucks Workers United in more than 275 stores. In response, Starbucks has fired more than 130 workers in retaliation for their organizing efforts (including Bacetti, the worker who faced down racist threats), flagrantly violating the National Labor Relations Act. Workers have reported that senior level employees were flown to stores all over the country to intimidate workers, and that their managers targeted and socially isolated workers who are involved in organizing.



This pressure has led workers to form peer-support groups and foster close relationships that enable them to endure the psychological exhaustion and mental health burden of organizing. Em Worrell, one of seven fired employees in Tennessee who came to be known as the Memphis 7, said “I cried in my car a little bit . . . I just felt really confused because I knew I was a good employee.”



Worrell, along with Nikki Taylor, Nabretta Hardin, and others in the Memphis 7, were a source of support for one another and extended that support to other workers who were fired across the country, organizing stores even as their reinstatement was litigated by the National Labor Relations Board (they won).



Many of these workers have also partnered with a new project from Coworker, the organization I cofounded, called the Coworker Solidarity Fund. Through the Solidarity Fund, a committee of workers raises money from the public and supportive donors to issue $2,500 stipends to workers who are engaged in organizing. This has included covering back rent or debts incurred when they lost their job or had their hours cut. Car repairs for workers who are traveling store to store. Food for organizing meetings and money for printing flyers.



All of these are seemingly small things that can make or break a person’s ability to organize. These informal networks create a locus for people to seek out support from one another. They recognize that organizing is more than strategy documents and lists of names. We have to take care of one another in order to organize. And when we do, we model what’s possible in an economy that treats all of us like we matter.



These kinds of care-and-community-based organizing models also lead to an array of innovative solutions that enable worker well-being. Los Deliveristas Unidos, an organization based in New York City representing 65,000 app-based delivery workers, is one example. Established in the wake of the pandemic shutdown of Spring 2020, Los Deliveristas Unidos began advocating for a series of policies that would ensure workers were protected in the largely unregulated app-based environment, where murky algorithms governed the workdays of people providing essential delivery services to the city.



As a result of their advocacy, the New York City Council passed a series of regulations ensuring access to bathrooms at restaurants, minimum pay, tip transparency, regulated pay schedules, and the ability to restrict delivery areas. Los Deliveristas also worked with the city to establish hubs throughout the city that provide a space for rest, refueling, and shelter from the elements for the city’s tens of thousands of delivery workers.



Meanwhile, a group of longtime labor organizers and trade unionists established Bargaining for the Common Good, which assists unions in using contract negotiations to address community-wide issues. Through this work, union members act as community advocates, using their organization to address structural issues like racism, climate change, and Wall Street malfeasance. Florida Public Services Union (SEIU local 8) demanded that city and state entities stop providing subsidies to fossil fuel companies, while in Minnesota SEIU janitors’ local 26 included a “ban the box” clause, removing questions pertaining to former incarceration from application questions.



These innovative models of organizing and bargaining indicate how worker organizations can be civic institutions through which people are able to advocate for community-wide safety and well-being. Each of these efforts operate according to core principles of community responsibility over narrow gains of a single workplace or group of workers.



They also use the structure of their own organizing to demonstrate what a care-based economy could look like by ensuring their own institutions adhere to principles of collective wellness. We also know, from the incredible actions of the past few years, that these workers have the passion and vision they need to win real change.



What they require in the form of support is an approach that nurtures their leadership, ensures their health and stability, and provides for the basic necessities that need to be in place in order to address these issues. When we support and invest in these new approaches to organizing, we not only improve the lives of workers today but establish infrastructure that can benefit future generations of workers.







Michelle Miller is a co-founder at co-worker.org



How Healthy Is the Future of Work? is an essay series featuring people working at the cutting edge of their fields, sharing how emerging trends will affect the health of our country’s workers and workplaces in the future.



The series is curated by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The authors’ views are their own.