The Return of the Union: How Baristas and Warehouse Workers Rebooted the Labor Movement

It’s difficult not to think about what a 24-year-old barista in Buffalo, New York changed two years before most people were paying attention when you walk into a busy Thursday morning Starbucks, the kind where the espresso machines run nonstop and the mobile order line is backed up to the door. One Starbucks location in that city had its employees vote to form a union on December 9, 2021. At the time, the company had over 9,000 stores in the US. It appears that no one at corporate headquarters has given it much thought. That was an error.

What transpired was one of the most amazing worker organizing stories in American labor history—not because it resulted in a series of spectacular victories, but rather because it occurred at all and because the workers involved were, by most conventional measures, the last workers anyone expected to pull it off. Not autoworkers or steelworkers. Baristas. Those who clean out espresso portafilters at the end of a double shift and commit your regular order to memory.

The movement quickly gained traction, something that traditional labor organizing was never able to accomplish. Starbucks employees developed their campaign store by store, shift by shift, using Zoom calls, TikTok videos, and direct worker-to-worker outreach, rather than depending on pre-existing union infrastructure and outside professional organizers carrying clipboards and talking points. Over 12,000 baristas from more than 700 Starbucks locations had voted to form a union by the end of 2025. Their organizing strategy, which some researchers began referring to as “networked unionism,” advanced more quickly than corporate legal departments could keep up.

The energy dispersed. Workers at the JFK8 fulfillment center, an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island so big it has its own internal street system, accomplished something labor historians thought was practically impossible in April 2022: they voted to form a union, making it the nation’s first unionized Amazon facility. The majority of the current and former warehouse workers who organized on their own time in parking lots and break rooms formed the independent Amazon Labor Union, which was not connected to any recognized national unions. For a brief moment, the victory seemed like a real turning point. Unions now enjoy levels of public support not seen since 1965. Union support was polling higher than anyone had anticipated, even among younger Republicans.

Key Reference Data: The Modern Labor Movement Revival

The timing wasn’t coincidental, so it’s worthwhile to consider why this occurred at that particular moment. Something had been exposed by the pandemic. For two years, workers in retail and warehouses were referred to as “essential” despite receiving wages that were insufficient to cover rent increases in the majority of major cities, working in establishments where Covid protocols were not consistently enforced, and taking on an increase in workload that never completely subsided after the emergency declarations ended. There’s a feeling that a specific type of rage was sparked by the recognition and the ensuing invisibility. Not explosive, not dramatic. Just a slow, objective realization that the arrangement’s terms were unfair and that no one at the top would voluntarily alter them.

But the part that merits a more candid analysis is what transpired next. It turned out that winning elections was the simple part. Starbucks responded to the organizing wave with what one labor researcher later described as the most aggressive illegal union-busting campaign in the 90-year history of the National Labor Relations Board — 771 open or settled unfair labor practice charges as of early 2025, with administrative law judges finding violations in 60 out of 61 cases reviewed. Workers were fired. Hours were cut to eliminate health coverage eligibility. Stores that decided to form a union discovered that previously disregarded regulations were suddenly enforced more strictly. In order to combat the organizing drive, CEO Howard Schultz reportedly came out of retirement and told managers that it was their “number one responsibility.”

In 2022 alone, Amazon paid anti-union consultants more than $14 million. Anti-union signage was displayed by the company on large monitors across the warehouse floor, on the walls of the break room, and in restroom stalls. It announced a policy prohibiting off-duty workers from entering facilities following the Staten Island vote, which essentially made further organizing nearly impossible. One of the main organizers, Connor Spence, was ultimately let go for breaking that rule. He had been in the break room during his off-shift time. Amazon insisted that policy compliance was the reason for the termination.

To be honest, the contract situation is dire. The workers still don’t have what they truly organized for, despite all the successes, viral TikTok moments, and congressional letters pleading with Starbucks to engage in sincere negotiations. The majority of Starbucks locations that are unionized still lack a first contract. The Staten Island Amazon employees have been waiting for years. Trader Joe’s United, formed in 2022 after workers at a South Hadley, Massachusetts location voted to organize, described the bargaining process as Waiting for Godot — management attorneys showing up, going through the motions, ensuring nothing actually gets resolved. This may be the desired result: wear out the organizers, allow the initial enthusiasm to fade, wait for the founding members to give up or lose hope, and then declare the movement to be over.

And yet. The public figures are startling. According to research cited by the Economic Policy Institute, about 60 million American workers say they wish to organize a union. The discrepancy between what employees desire and what the system provides is, at the very least, a genuine and continuous conflict that doesn’t go away simply because some contract negotiations stall. The question now is whether this wave has actually altered American workers’ perceptions of collective action in a lasting way. It has been clearly slowed by corporate legal strategy, weakened labor laws, and the stark resource disparity between a $14 million budget for anti-union consultants and a group of warehouse packers with a fundraising page.

The most honest response, given how this has developed over the past few years, seems to be: maybe. The strategies are novel. The culture is distinct. Compared to their parents, a generation of workers who joined the workforce during the financial crisis and worked gigs and zero-hour contracts during their twenties have a different perspective on institutional loyalty. They have no intention of waiting for the AFL-CIO to present a strategy. They’re organizing themselves, and they’re doing it in front of cameras all the time.
It’s still genuinely unclear if that will be sufficient to overcome decades of lax labor laws and billion-dollar corporations’ willingness to spend whatever it takes.