Starbucks. REI. Trader Joe’s. Apple. Ben & Jerry’s. All of these companies have two things in common: They have built their brands, to varying degrees, around some version of “progressive” values. And all of them have employees who are currently in the midst of union drives. These two things are related. In fact, this combination represents the near-term future of organized labor in America.
The union effort by ice cream scoopers at Ben & Jerry’s, announced earlier this week, is just the most clear-cut example of this trend. It illustrates a very basic insight about power. The biggest obstacle to most union organizing campaigns are the fierce, dishonest (and often illegal) union-busting campaigns that most employers launch to scare or trick workers out of coming together. But the spectacle of a multibillion-dollar company telling low-wage workers not to exercise their basic rights clashes with the image of any company that has chosen to brand itself as one that cares about, you know, “being good.”
These are the companies that speak of their workers as partners, who profess to care about work-life balance, who crow about their benefits and humane working conditions and commitment to living their values. The specter of saying all those nice things but refusing to put them in a union contract can provoke more than a little mockery.
Progressive-branded companies therefore offer free, built-in leverage to worker organizing campaigns. There is nothing that will force an employer to live up to all the stuff it said about caring for employees faster than a demand for union recognition.
This latent potential has always been present. But with private sector union density today having declined to a miserable 6%, it’s clear that organized labor has not gotten around to exploiting its advantage in any concerted way. Now that may be changing.
The high visibility and rapid spread of the Starbucks organizing campaign, which has successfully unionized 300 stores across the nation in little more than a year, has demonstrated that it can be done at scale. There is a vast pool of workers in food, service, and retail jobs at big-name chains who can replicate this formula—and at REI and Trader Joe’s and Apple stores and Chipotle and Barnes & Noble, they are. In this almost completely nonunion landscape that reaches into every little crevice of America, there is infinite room for unions to run.
To state the obvious: The “progressive” brand halo at most major corporations is often a sham for marketing purposes. (Noted humanist Starbucks boss Howard Schultz, for example, is now one of the most notorious union busters in modern American history.) But that doesn’t matter. For the purposes of labor organizing, the important thing is that workers can use the company’s own words against it, and can inflict a very real cost to anti-union campaigns in the form of bad PR. The reputations that these companies have painstakingly forged with decades worth of advertising do not come cheap. Throwing that away in order to tell workers outrageous lies about unions is not a decision to be taken lightly.
Setting morality aside, there is a simple business question here for these companies: “Is it really worth subjecting ourselves to widespread villainization on social media, enduring picket lines, being scolded by Bernie Sanders, and pissing off our core audience of upscale liberals who like to feel good about their consumer choices just to avoid negotiating a basic union contract?” The conventional corporate wisdom that unions should be opposed with absolute ferocity is not so clear for this particular sector.
Gaze out at the U.S. economy and think about how many jobs there are at major nonunion companies that rely, to some extent, on progressive branding and mostly liberal customers. These people collectively represent the low-hanging fruit for the American labor movement. Unions have long used accusations of hypocrisy to pressure employers at nonprofits, at media outlets, and even at labor unions themselves. But those numbers are small compared to the millions of workers waiting to be organized at the feel-good chains that permeate the private sector.
The only reason that organized labor has not already launched coordinated union drives at all of these inviting targets—Whole Foods! Patagonia! Lululemon!—is that, to be blunt, organized labor is not very organized. The degree of central coordination among unions is almost nil, meaning that conspicuous opportunities like these can go unexploited for a shockingly long time.
But not forever. The combination of the pandemic’s radicalizing effect, the attention lavished on the union drives at Starbucks and Amazon, and the highest public approval of unions in a half century have set dominoes falling in a way that is not going to stop anytime soon. Today there is a critical mass of workers who are mad about the gap between their company’s rhetoric and the dreary reality of their jobs, who know what unions are, and who have seen successful union drives in action—in the media or in person. Those basic ingredients have not come together for many decades in America. Until now.
It is a safe bet that the organizing wave is just getting started. Some companies may be tempted to panic. That’s not necessary. Instead, they can follow the lead of Ben & Jerry’s, which took only one day to say it would support its employees’ request for a union. This is the best chance in a generation for progressive companies to prove that their progressivism is more than just an advertising strategy.
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This article first appeared in https://www.fastcompany.com
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