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UC Law Journal

Abstract

Almost ten thousand baristas have unionized since 2022 in cafes across the country. Their effort breaks with recent history in several respects. For example, baristas have used a novel “worker-to-worker organizing” model in which workers themselves—rather than union staff and leadership—design and manage campaigns. Also, while scholars and unionists have argued for decades that the National Labor Relations Board’s secret ballot elections process is a dead end, baristas have used that process quite effectively, winning over 85% of their elections against the major company involved. Through their organizing efforts, baristas have centered the issues and voices of LGBTQ+ workers and younger workers. This campaign therefore raises important questions about law’s role in contemporary worker organizing. To shed light on those questions, my research assistants and I carried out a set of IRB-approved interviews with worker-leaders in 2023 and 2024. This Article reports out our initial findings.

The Article argues that baristas’ self-education in law was critical to the campaign’s success. Our interviewees reported learning key labor law doctrines before organizing, refining their legal knowledge over time, and exercising legal rights in the workplace without extensive assistance from professional organizers or legal counsel. At the same time, interviewees reported feeling that our labor laws did not adequately protect them against employer retaliation. These findings have implications for perennial debates over labor law reform, and for scholarship on the role of law in social movements more broadly.

In my experience with organizing, one of the biggest things is [that people are] not always aware of their rights. They’re not always aware of the law. And one of your primary jobs as an organizer is to have eternal vigilance about this . . . it’s this eternal diligence to just make sure that people know their rights [and] know the law.

It’s a very queer workspace. It’s known for being a queer workspace. And I think that a lot of times, whether you like it or not, if you’re queer or in queer spaces, you kind of do get radicalized because you can see that the system doesn’t work for you in certain ways, right? And then being a worker, you are also able to see how the system isn’t working in that way either.

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