The IWW Against Starbucks

[Omaha Steve]

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20081219203348813

Sunday, December 21 2008 @ 03:07 PM CST

The IWW Against Starbucks
Friday, December 19 2008 @ 09:57 PM CST
Contributed by: WorkerFreedom

If you drive down the highway outside of any major city in the U.S., you will pass countless glowing signs for corporate food and retail chains. From coast to coast, McDonald’s follows Starbucks, follows Burger King, follows Taco Bell, on and on, ad nauseum. Lost in a forest of fluorescent consumerism, social revolution is probably the furthest thing from your mind. Indeed, many activists are dismissive not only of the corporations that monopolize our landscape, but of the radical potential of those who toil inside the big boxes and fast food chains as well. This dismissiveness results in a problematic conclusion : surely, the revolution won’t start at a Starbucks.

As members of the Starbucks Workers Union, we believe that the need for workplace organizing is greater than ever before ; behind each shiny logo lies a potential struggle. Since the mid-1970s bosses have been on the offensive : battering workers with inflation, union busting, outsourcing, industrial restructuring, and the destruction of the last shreds of the social safety net. The result of these shifts can be summed up as the rise of "precarity" as the defining fact of life for an ever-growing section of the working class.

The Precariat : An Impossible Class

More than anything, precarity describes the everyday life experience of workers in the corporate chains. It is simply impossible to make a life for yourself working one of these jobs. Because of the lack of union organization in these industries, we are almost all legally classified as "At Will" employees. This means that under U.S. labor law, we can be fired for no reason. The threat of firing, however, is only the least subtle of many mechanisms used by management to control us.

At Starbucks, many workers have difficulty budgeting or planning ahead because our work hours fluctuate wildly from week to week. The company uses a computer system to determine staffing levels for the stores based on past sales. Starbucks’ "Automated Labor Scheduling" software displaces almost all of the risk of the vagaries of the market onto individual workers. Bosses order "labor" exactly like they order coffee beans or other inputs. When workers challenge the arbitrary authority of their boss they often face punitive measures, such as cuts in hours. But we are not coffee beans, we are human beings ! By organizing, we assert our humanity in a system founded on our commodification.

The corporate chains have proven almost as difficult to organize as they are hellish to work in. In fact, many industries were restructured with the explicit goal of reducing workers’ power. Workers are broken into small groups at numerous, networked production sites, which are all monitored closely for signs of subversion. There are very few "chokehold" points where industrial action can shut down a corporate chain. But it rarely even gets that far ; union busting is now fully integrated into the day-to-day operations of "Human Resources" departments in the corporate chains. Rather than fight a union drive once it has been initiated, corporations create "union avoidance" programs to prevent workers from being able to organize in the first place.


FULL story at link.

[Name removed]

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