Starbucks organizer Jaz Brisack sounds the call to "Get on the job and organize" in a new book laying the groundrules for successful organizing in a revitalized labor movement

Here it is, May Day 2025, and a perfect time to file this post on the visit this week by labor organizer Jaz Brisack to Oxford, Mississippi, to promote the activist’s new book, Get On The Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World. This writer interviewed the new author at an event at Off Square Books in Oxford April 30.

 

Jaz, echoing Joe Hill, wants us to “Get on the job and organize!”

 

 Before he was executed by firing squad for murders he didn’t commit in 1915, Industrial Workers of the World organizer and troubadour Joe Hill urged his followers, “Don’t waste any time in mourning, organize!”

 

Jaz Brisack, a veteran of the unsuccessful United Auto Workers campaign at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi, and the leading organizer in the successful unionization of Starbucks shops across the country, has answered Joe Hill’s call. The 27-year-old Rhodes and Truman scholar went to work as a barista at a Starbucks shop in Buffalo, New York, soon after her stint as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England, and by December 2021 workers there voted union.

 

Soon Starbucks baristas were voting union across the country, and Brisack became a labor star. Interviews with National Public Radio, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Guardian followed.

 

Other campaigns also followed—the Tesla plant in Buffalo, Ben & Jerry’s—and now a book as well as duties at the Inside Organizer School, where Jaz helps train future organizers who work at a workplace first and then organize next.

 

A former student of this writer at the University of Mississippi’s School of Journalism and New Media, Jaz has been on a labor crusade since learning about long-ago labor heroes like Eugene Debs, Albert Parsons, and Joe Hill as a young girl.

(To the right, Joe Hill)

 

“Labor history is full of heroic struggle, courage, care, solidarity, collective action, fortitude, hope, joy, defeat, and martyrdom,” Jaz writes in Get On The Job And Organize. “People don’t start unions to extract small improvements. They start unions to fight for their rights, a voice, workplace democracy, and greater dignity and freedom. Organizing enables workers to define themselves in terms of their humanity, not in terms of their productive value to a corporation.”

 

The book is full of gems—from a discussion of how big union bureaucracy and interference can kill organizing momentum such as what happened in the Tesla campaign to Jaz’s analysis of how even a losing campaign can be a labor victory by creating solidarity and labor consciousness among workers who never before had those feelings.

 

Taking up an issue that this writer has addressed many times—how identity politics has often served corporate interests by pitting people against one another and blurring the importance of class and economic issues—Jaz sees unions as the best solution to such divisions. In doing this, Jaz echoes Martin Luther King’s belief that seating rights in buses don’t amount to much without economic rights.

 

“Without class liberation, other forms of liberation aren’t possible,” Jaz writes. “As we saw at Starbucks, support for LGBTQ+ rights without union rights equals pinkwashing. Oppressed groups cannot secure liberation without also winning economic liberation, and unionizing offers the only way to do that.”

 

Joe Hill would be proud.