Starbucks Union

I started at Starbucks because I needed a job. After working there for about 6 months, I realized that it was better than any other job I had in the past, so I decided I wanted to continue on and move up. I just recently got promoted and plan to stick with Starbucks and move up while I go to college and work on my degrees.

What will you do when you don’t finish that degree? What will you do ten years ten years form now when you are still working the Wal-Mart’s, Starbucks, and Borders? Perhaps then you will think that Organizing with your fellow workers when you were young, when you could take some risks, would have been a good idea in order to ensure an income that could feed your familys doing the work that you could get.

Not everyone is on their way to a better life. For many of us, this is the hand we are dealt.

Why should we be satisfied with working under benevolent slave master for more succulent crumbs. Just because they are better crumbs don’t make them anything more than crumbs.

Even in the Ghetto the inmates who manned the ovens were fed well for a while before they were burned in turn. Is that the most you can offer? A justification for servitude, inhumanity and tyranny?

We aren’t just organizing for a better wage; we are organizing for the abolition of the wage slave system.

Too bad this thread really had nothing to do with your pro-union bullshit.

These are the words of someone who would rather drink away their family income than provide even a cent to protect the means of their future lively hood.

That is worse than cutting off you nose to spite your face. That is domestic negligence as well.

Protect my future lively hood? You mean like when my uncle was unemployeed and recieved a whopping $76 a week from the union? Yeah, that sounds like a future lively hood.

How much would he have had if he hadn’t been a member of a Union?

Hypothetically, he would have been more motivated to look for another job had he not recieved any money from a union.

Also, I don't think he meant he was going to pisspot his money away literally, he was just saying that given the option to give it to a union, or toss it around like he owned the world, he would avoid the union because there is no benefit to it. At least pretending to own the world, he could see where his money was going and enjoy it's loss.

Money isn't magic faery dust; sprinkling a little here and a little there doesn't solve anything.

Which is why changing jobs when you don’t get paid enough is no substitute for Organizing with fellow workers to increase your bargaining power.

Well, I started working at SB's because it was a good job. Even jobs without unions aren't all the same. SB's is one of the only companies to give healthcare to part-time workers, and I needed to work part-time, and have healthcare, so there you go.

But, please don't read this as some pro-Starbucks bullshit, because the management and the owners of starbucks would rather give us healthcare than face the collective barganing rights of all their workers. It is a divide-and-conquer tactic that goes back before the rise of labor in the thrities, "give them the crumbs, we can take the cake."

Working at starbucks is better than my previous job, as a bike messenger with no healthcare, no rights (as an "independent contractor") and getting paid $6.25 an hour, but that is not discount the need for a union, or the class struggle. A union at starbucks would raise ALL workers standards, not just those working at Starbucks.

What we need to look at is the crisis in the labor movement as a whole, and their retreat from the class struggle to a (horrible) plan of "partnership" with management.

He wouldn't have made any, but who can actually live on $76 a week? Maybe a teenager with no responsibilities. That $76 a week must have felt like a tease. "We're gonna give you money to keep you interested in the union (notice I left the u in lower case, union isn't a proper noun unless it's part of a name), but only enough to make you think we're really doing something." If I'm setting money aside for a rainy day, it better get me through this so called rainy day, not just buy my lunch and keep me hungry for dinner.