Starbucks

A short 15 minute documentary that chronicles the struggles and victories of the Starbucks Workers Union, from how it formed to members continue to organize.

Our friend Liberté Locke writes about what it’s like to work a ‘clopen’ in retail, to close the store late at night and get up early the next morning to open the store. Liberte’s story is the first in a series of stories we’re going to be running about work, sleep, and dreams. In their own way each of these stories gets at an important part of life under capitalism. Capitalists make their money by making us make products and perform services that the capitalists own. They don’t pay us the full value of what we add to those products and services. That’s key to capitalists’ profits. This is a kind of robbery. But there’s another kind of robbery...

Liberté Locke, a Starbucks Workers Union organizer, writes about how violence at work and in our personal lives are similar, how domestic abusers and bosses use the same techniques of control and that we need to fight both.

On 5th August 2010, baristas at a Starbucks in Omaha, Nebraska held a short work stoppage and demanded a reversal to the recession-era cuts that have been forced upon them.