Get on the Job and Organize

Description

For readers of Work Won’t Love You Back and A History of America in Ten Strikes, Rhodes scholar and leader of the Starbucks and Tesla union movements shares stories from the front lines to help workers organize their own workplace.

Only in her early twenties, Jaz Brisack is one of the exciting new faces of the American Labor Movement. Already instrumental in successful union efforts at Nissan, Panera, Starbucks, and now tech giant Tesla, Brisack, a self-professed “labor history nerd” from a very young age, is deeply committed to the path she has chosen. 

Get on the Job and Organize is a compelling, character-driven narrative of the Starbucks and Tesla unionization efforts, telling the broader story of the new, nationwide labor movement unfolding in an era of political and social unrest. Brisack argues that while workers often organize when their place of work is toxic, it’s equally important to organize when you love your job. Here, Brisack puts everything into the context of America’s long tradition of labor organizing and shows readers how they too can organize their workplace, from how to educate yourself and your colleagues, to what backlash can be expected and how to fight it, to what victory looks like even if the union doesn’t necessarily “win.”   

Richly detailed with never-before-reported scenes with high-profile characters like Howard Schultz, Elon Musk, and the terrifying union-busting lawyers they hired, Get on the Job and Organize will share the long American tradition of labor and organizing and how it continues today.Jaz Brisack is the organizing director of the Inside Organizer School, which they co-founded in 2018 to train non-union workers and “salts” to unionize their workplaces. They first started organizing in Mississippi, working on the UAW campaign at the Nissan factory in Canton, MS, and volunteering as a Pink House Defender at the state’s last abortion clinic. After spending one year at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, Jaz got a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, NY, becoming a founding member of Starbucks Workers United and helping organize the first unionized Starbucks in the United States. As the organizing director for Workers United in Upstate New York and Vermont, they subsequently worked with organizing committees at companies ranging from Ben & Jerry’s to Tesla.US

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