Take your half-caf and shove it: IWW workers walk-out at MOA Starbucks

The Pioneer Press's Julie Forster reported today that members of the union, International Workers of the World, staged a brief walkout protesting the treatment of employees laid off in recent store closings.

The walkout occurred at a Mall of America Starbucks location. Workers said it involved giving a list of demands to their superiors, as well as faxing a copy to the local Starbucks headquarters in Bloomington.

Forster's piece gave a little historical background on the IWW (called Wobblies), as well as an overview of their Starbucks unionization campaign. It also tried to provide the context of the walkout by citing recent store closures.

In the end, it relied on a typical labor academic, Richard Hurd, a professor of labor studies at Cornell University, to explain how the IWW differs from more traditional labor unions. Hurd ignores the IWW's rejection of standard practices like contracts, and boils it down to the fact that bigger unions are hesitant to help workers in low-level service jobs.

That really misses the opportunity to explain the IWW's critique of these standard labor practices that are basically a criticism of hierarchical and unrepresentative labor unions (I know, as a former Teamster). She also doesn't touch on the changing nature of the economy towards service, or other recent non-traditional labor campaigns like United Food and Commercial Workers' attempts at organizing Walmart or the Steelworkers' organization of nursing homes.

But, well, all the Star Tribune bothered to do was sum up a press release.


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I usually try to avoid outright commentary on this blog, but as a barista (at an independent shop) I think I might be able to counter some of the more vitriolic points made by PP readers commenting on the story.
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Whether most of those Dilberts know it or not, the job market has increasingly veered towards customer service jobs: Blue collar was exported, white collar is on the way. What are young, even educated, people supposed to do? Corporations and baby boomers sold the basic economic infrastructure out from under them. The Democrats' pet, NAFTA, erased borders for corporations and sent wages and conditions into free-fall for the average worker. There is no longer such a thing as job security, or even of moving to another job to get better pay.

Let's balance the price of a large latte with the scant cost of a livable wage that also saves society money by lowering crime rates and the amount of people who need public subsidies. Anyway, why shouldn't more profit from the 4$ mochacino stay local rather than flying off to the pockets of shareholders and bosses in Seattle?

Workers use unions to even out the playing field in this Free market, which so often benefits the already wealthy. If the politicians in this country are unwilling to address the always increasing gap between the wealthy and those who work, than it falls to workers to do it. It's the natural cycle. It happened during our last Guilded Age and wasn't set right when people just whined about health co-pays, it wasn't set right by politicians; it was set right by unions, and held that way for 50 years to maintain a flourishing middle class that only now is disappearing, because the owners and bosses got too greedy, and people had finally eaten enough shit to stand up to them.