Practitioner in Residence Jaz Brisack: Building the Inside Organizer School

What does it take to build a union at the world’s largest coffee chain? Jaz Brisack is trying to get it down to a system.

Brisack, the Labor Center’s newest Practitioner in Residence, shared their vision for labor organizing, from igniting the spark of unionization at Starbucks to organizing with the UAW in Mississippi. During their time at the Labor Center, Brisack wants to empower workers to organize across different states and industries by building a model to fight for workers’ rights through the Inside Organizer School.

Brisack shared more on the Inside Organizer School, some hurdles, and their future plans in an interview soon after joining the Labor Center in May.

Labor Center: How do you think your experience organizing at Starbucks will help you with the work you’ll be doing at the Labor Center?

Jaz Brisack: The Starbucks campaign showed that workers can create a replicable model for unionizing. We trained people in Buffalo, New York, to get the campaign going in their stores. Not as the vanguard of the revolution, but as people who could light a spark and find workers who would lead the campaign. At my store, I wasn’t the leader of the union campaign; Michelle Eisen, who is a 12-year Starbucks worker, was the leader of the campaign. But I was able to give Michelle enough info that she could successfully lead our store to victory. And then we trained service workers to help organize the next groups and waves of workers who wanted to unionize. That’s what we’re trying to do at the Inside Organizer School. This school was the foundation of the Starbucks campaign. That was when we had learned how to do this, so we’re trying to build out that model now that we’ve seen it really can work.

Labor Center: How will the resources at the Labor Center help you better establish the model for the Inside Organizer School?

Jaz Brisack: For the last six years, the school has been an all-volunteer organization. No one has been able to work full time on the school, or develop it or make it an independent project.

The position at Berkeley will provide an opportunity to work on developing the school, getting our own structure and budget, and building deeper relationships with more unions and groups. We want to be able to provide scholarships for workers who aren’t yet affiliated with a union to be able to attend. I’m also really looking forward to having the Inside Organizer School at Berkeley and expanding the geographic reach of the program. I’ve talked to a lot of unions in California that are super interested in participating or hosting Inside Organizer Schools. Being able to expand the school to more parts of the country, including California and the South, is important to me.

Labor Center: Your time working on the UAW campaign in Mississippi sounds like it was a pivotal moment for you. How will you incorporate that experience into your current work?

Jaz Brisack: While at the University of Mississippi, I worked on the UAW’s campaign at Nissan. At first I was a volunteer, organizing student support, and then I became a full-time organizer: house calling, writing leaflets, and working on health and safety issues. The Nissan campaign was an interesting precursor of the Starbucks campaign because you had this company that was presenting itself as really progressive, but doing everything possible to bust a union, including resorting to incredibly racist statements and threats to workers, while presenting itself as a sponsor of civil rights organizations, environmental groups, and pride festivals. Nissan had hired the same law firm that Starbucks hired, Littler Mendelson, to fight against unions. There were many similarities.

I had learned about labor while a teenager, as a historical phenomenon. I was in love with figures like Eugene Debs, Joe Hill, and Mother Jones. But I didn’t know that unions were something you could help build, not just something you could read about. Being able to participate in the Nissan campaign as an undergrad was transformative. My organizing mentor, Richard Bensinger, was working on Nissan while simultaneously working on barista organizing in upstate New York. Because I was working on health and safety issues at Nissan, it showed me that this is truly a fight for our lives. Workers had died in the plant or had been seriously injured in preventable accidents. If they had a union, they could have avoided some of those deaths and injuries.

Labor Center: Can you think back on some of the major hurdles you encountered that you might work on developing responses to while here at the Labor Center as you mold the Inside Organizer School?

Jaz Brisack: There’s everything from planning the schools to working with new unions on training people and placing people on campaigns. So far, the recruitment for the school has been through individual unions, so being independent will allow us to bring in more activists who aren’t yet aware of how to organize. Our goal is to teach nonunion workers and people who want to get jobs at nonunion companies how to organize their workplaces. The demand for union organizing has never been higher with workers. But there’s not always a pathway for those people to join the labor movement. There are so many cases where workers want to organize but can’t even find unions willing to help them. Having the Inside Organizer School as an independent organization that can be a matchmaker, but also be a support system for workers organizing their workplaces, will fill a critical need.

Labor Center: Have you seen anything in California specifically that you think the state could do better, or where there’s room for growth for union organizing?

Jaz Brisack: I’m still learning the landscape in California, but there’s a ton of interest in having Inside Organizer Schools and building out campaigns on the Starbucks model. We’ve been working closely with some UFCW and SEIU locals that want to expand their inside organizing programs, and one of the school’s co-founders, John Murphy from UNITE HERE, is based in LA. The really cool thing about the school is that it’s transferable across different industries, different sectors, and different kinds of workers. The specifics of a campaign may vary, but what companies try to do to fight unions is similar. The training focuses largely on how to set up a campaign to anticipate and respond to union busting and to give workers the best chance of organizing and winning a contract.

Labor Center: It’s still early, but have you thought of any plans after your residency?

Jaz Brisack: My goal is to get the Inside Organizer School set up as an independent nonprofit and be able to get it to a place where we can keep expanding how many trainings we’re able to hold, the number of workers we’re able to bring in, and the locations and regions we’re able to do it in. There’s even interest from global union federations in having international schools, which I think would be really cool. I just want to organize and give people the training that they need to take on corporate power and win.