By Malcolm Harris The Nation

The radical tactics of the IWW are better suited to the bleak US jobs landscape than those of mainstream trade unions.

When the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, whose members are often dubbed “Wobblies”) launched a campaign to unionize Starbucks baristas in 2004, the idea was so quixotic it seemed more like performance art designed to comment on the labor movement itself than an earnest attempt to organize shops. Unionizing Starbucks baristas was like unionizing the Death Star stormtroopers: both impossible and pointless. Now, as I write in the spring of 2022, workers at over 100 locations nationwide have petitioned for recognition and the Starbucks Workers United campaign is the labor story of this young year. What changed?

Twenty years ago, when the coffee chain entered a period of meteoric expansion, “Starbucks” and “union” were such antithetical concepts that to combine them was to suggest more questions than answers. In the 1990s, it had been standard practice for anarchist protesters to break any Starbucks windows they happened upon as symbols of yuppie consumerism, corporate chain consolidation, and the exploitation of the Global South. With their anarcho-syndicalist heritage, IWW Wobblies were supposed to be smashing Starbucks glass with their bike locks, not inside taking orders. But after the defeat of the Global Justice Movement, it became clear that not only were big chains like Starbucks going to keep growing but more and more jobs were going to look like Starbucks jobs. The labor movement needed a path forward, and the IWW was uniquely positioned to blaze one.

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