Bardacke starts the book with an epigraph, a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “O what a fall was there, my countrymen! Then I, and you, and all of us fell down...”

Bardacke was a farmworker in the fields of the Salinas Valley for six seasons in the 1970s. When he decided to write his book years later, he went back to his carpool co-workers, finding them still at work in the fields. In 1994, the union had been thoroughly defeated for nearly 10 years—but his old friends were afraid even to mention its name where the foreman might hear.

I interviewed Frank Bardacke after a New York Times investigation revealed evidence that Chavez had sexually abused young girls who were volunteering with the union, and the allegation that he had also assaulted union co-founder Dolores Huerta. –Jane Slaughter

Jane Slaughter: The revelations about Cesar Chavez as a sexual predator: many people have said they were “surprised but not shocked” or “shocked but not surprised.” How did you react?

Frank Bardacke: The abuse of Ana Murguia was rumored at the time among UFW staff, primarily at the La Paz headquarters. Many of the rumors originated with Ana’s stepmother, Kathy Murguia. But people just didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t want to look into it very deeply because Cesar was one of these powerful men who could do anything he damn well pleased; he was immune from investigation.

It puts him in the category that seems to be so prevalent these days, or at least more known about: powerful men who can do whatever they want to do, including groom children and abuse women, and they don’t have to answer for it.

Where did that power come from?

For the men we know about, it comes from money or political connections or celebrity. Where did Cesar’s power come from?

The first answer is that he had just turned a losing 1965 grape strike into the most successful boycott in American history, at the conclusion of which, in 1970, farmworkers won the most substantial contracts they’d ever had: a hiring hall, grievance procedures, seniority lists. They’d never had those before.

That’s the first reason he had power. Through that he became a celebrity. He was the organizer, the architect, and the main energy behind that boycott, a hero and a celebrity with the kind of immunity that modern celebrities have.

But the second reason was an internal reason within the UFW. Everybody within the organization owed their job to Cesar. He appointed everybody, he could discharge anybody at his will, which he often did. That wasn’t just theoretical power; periodic purges pulsed through the organization. So you didn’t disagree with Cesar except at the peril of losing your job.

Those were the two reasons that no one wanted to follow up on the rumors of abuse. He was an authentic hero who had led and directed that boycott, and everybody in his organization owed their job to him.

Tell us more about the structure of the UFW.

That’s a crucial part of this. From the beginning, say in the early 1960s, the structure was basically volunteer organizers appointed by Chavez who earned $5 a week, plus expenses if on some kind of assignment.

That structure lasted even when the UFW Organizing Committee (UFWOC) became an actual union. They continued this organizational structure of volunteers. They did not set up union locals. The union constitution did not have provision for union locals. There was no way that an ordinary farmworker could elect anybody; everybody served at Chavez’s pleasure. That included the field offices in local places where there were farmworker contracts.

Then in 1969 there was a victorious farmworker strike in the Salinas Valley. There was a provision in the agreement that allowed for farmworkers to elect their own reps, called field reps, who would help enforce the contract in the local areas.

Field reps were in place in addition to the field offices, where everyone owed their jobs to Chavez. But the paid reps owed their jobs to their crews. They got the pay equivalent to what their former crews were making. They were highly skilled, high-paid crews, earning as much as $500 a week back in the day.

This was an entirely new situation in the UFW and Chavez had tremendous trouble from the outset with the field reps—who could disagree with him. People hadn’t successfully disagreed with Chavez for nearly 15 years. There was no tradition of arguing and debating and voting as in other unions.

The paid reps became quite independent and collectively they decided that the big problem in Salinas was that they only had half of the valley organized, and for the union to survive, they had to organize the nonunion companies.

So they started organizing the nonunion companies and had some success. But Chavez was never comfortable with the Salinas contracts. There were lots of contract disputes and Chavez had never dealt with contract disputes. He was sick of the complaints, he thought contracts were a pain in the ass. He was busy with the boycott, which he thought was the most important tool the union had.

But what was the boycott for if not to win more contracts?

The reality of contracts was different from the idea of getting more contracts. Contracts brought problems, especially in 1970 in Salinas after a victorious strike. The workers were testing the extent of their victory. They were filing grievances and fighting for seniority rights.

It was the year I went into the fields and I was astounded by the militancy. I was on a crew that was told to thin the lettuce, and people wouldn’t leave the bus because they said the fields had been fumigated too recently—this was a right which was in the contract. The foreman was furious. He ordered us to go into the fields and somebody went to the union office and somebody came out and argued with the boss and we never went to work that day.

Chavez was primarily a boycott leader by this time. He was not really interested in rank-and-file problems on the ground. Moreover, he could see the reps were expanding their constituency and he thought they would become even more powerful. He ordered them to stop organizing, and when they didn’t, he fired them. Even though he didn’t have a legal right to do so.

There was a big battle and it all came out at the UFW convention—and the growers knew about it. They knew the union was divided, and in 1980 they went on the offensive and basically defeated the union. This story in all its gory details can be found in my book.

Is there a lesson here for unionists about how their unions should be run?

Yes. Democratic unionism is essential to union strength. Open discussion and debate is essential to building the kind of unity that you need. The lack of democratic organization is what caused the downfall of the UFW. The lack of democratic organization not only gave Chavez immunity in his abuse of girls and women, but is also what caused the downfall of the UFW.

Is there a lesson about making it all about one leader?

I’m not against leaders. Good leaders are essential to a movement. The main lesson I see is that the good leader has got to emerge out of a democratic tradition and democratic discussion and shouldn’t serve for life.

What about the rumors that the union was opposed to undocumented workers?

That is another long, sad story. At various periods the union was actively opposed to the undocumented. They even set up their own border patrol line in the Imperial Valley, called the “wet line.” The UFW had an anti-illegals campaign in the early ’70s in which they actually fingered undocumented people to the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] . UFW loyalists would provide a list to the local INS office of the undocumented people working in the fields.

These were their co-workers.

Yes. Close to half the workers in the fields were undocumented by this time. Why would an organization that was trying to organize field workers set one half of field workers against the other half?

Chavez’s answer was, “We have to explain to the boycotters why we are losing contracts. Illegals is the answer. The undocumented are taking the contracts away from us.” Which points to the fact that the best way to understand Chavez in the mid-1970s was as a boycott leader, not a farmworker leader. He sacrificed the organizing of farmworkers to strengthen his boycott organizing.

What now?

I’m for taking down the statues and renaming the schools and the streets. I’m not for replacing them with the name of Dolores Huerta, who was a loyal lieutenant and very often the point person in the various purges of people who had elicited Chavez’s displeasure.

If you want to give them a name of a farmworker, give them the name of one of the reps who are still known in the fields. Cleofas Guzman. Mario Bustamante.

After just four days on strike, February 9 to 12, they won their top demands—some of which the district had previously refused even to bargain over.

“It was hard and it was joyful and we f-ing beat them,” said Ilan Desai-Geller, a high school teacher who served on the bargaining committee and as a regional strike captain. “They found the money all of a sudden.

“They found the money for the things they said they couldn’t. They agreed to the language they said they couldn’t.”

Workers in classified roles, such as paraeducators, will get a raise of 8.5 percent over the two years of the contract; workers in certificated roles, such as teachers, will get 5 percent.

Next up will be Los Angeles, where 35,000 educators are poised to strike on April 14 alongside 30,000 members of SEIU Local 99, such as cafeteria workers, custodians, bus drivers, and special ed assistants.

In San Francisco, other union workers including principals, custodians, and lunchroom staff joined educators on the picket line in a sympathy strike.

United Teachers Los Angeles and United Educators of San Francisco are part of We Can’t Wait, a statewide campaign by more than 30 California Teachers Association locals, with a shared platform calling for smaller class sizes, more resources for schools instead of layoffs, and competitive wages and benefits to address the thousands of vacancies in California’s public schools.

The locals also agreed to escalate along a common timeline. Across the bay from San Francisco, Richmond Teachers United also struck this year, for the first time ever, and won 8 percent raises over two years. Two locals in the Sacramento area also struck; one of them, Twin Rivers Educators United, stayed out for 12 days and won 7 percent raises over two years.

YEARS IN THE MAKING

The San Francisco strike success was five years in the making, as the union worked to develop an elected committee at each school. The committee focused on problems within the school, but also kept in touch with the larger union.

There were meetings bringing together all the elementary school committees, for instance, and all the middle and high school committees, and a citywide general assembly. Activists from different schools got to know each other and saw what issues they had in common.

“Once we start getting more sites with union building committees, then there’s more conversations happening at each site, there’s more information getting shared to each member,” said Alanna Merchant, who teaches sixth- and seventh-grade science.“I feel like that was how all of this started.”

From these building committees came many of the strike captains and 120 members of the bargaining committee, Merchant among them.

Paraeducator Faith Avalos said that building to a strike took a lot of conversations with her co-workers, asking questions like, “How do you feel about the district right now?”

“It was issues-based, but a lot of it was just, do you feel supported at your job by the district? Do you feel they could be doing a better job?” said Avalos, who would become a strike captain.

Schools held their own strike votes and practice pickets. The union asked rank and filers who were organizing in their own schools to go help out other worksites too, Merchant said, and this developed into a network of regional strike captains like her, who helped support the strike captains.

OUTSIDE THE BARGAINING ROOM

The strikers picketed at schools in the mornings, then gathered for larger community actions in the afternoons.

Strike captains were responsible for turning out members to picket and keeping track of participation. Each picket also had an attendance person, a communications person, and chant leaders—everyone had a role.

At Avalos’s middle school in northern San Francisco, art teachers made custom banners and painted the sidewalks. Two workers made custom signs with a picture of Superintendent Maria Su crying that said: “Boo Su.”

When middle school students came out to show support, the strikers taught them how to lead chants and walk the picket line, and explained why they were taking action.

“Middle school students don’t do anything unless you tell them they have to do it, but we had a bunch of students show up [on their own initiative],” Avalos said. “They were the most energetic. They drew hopscotch, but you were jumping on Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s faces. They made signs that were like ‘Teachers can’t survive on only apples.’”

Avalos’ middle school was one of the sites where the district chose to send scabs from human resources, so small groups of strikers covered the back entrances. However, the strikers at her school mainly focused on getting support from the community. Out of a staff of about 500, only one person, who was non-union, crossed the picket line, she said.

The afternoon rallies and marches drew up to 15,000-20,000 participants, according to the union. One day they marched from a rally in Mission Dolores Park to City Hall. Another day, thousands gathered on the beach to spell out “Strike” and “For Our Students,” an impressive turnout given the “schlep to the beach,” said bargaining committee member and regional strike captain Michelle Cody.

Though the bargaining committee couldn’t always attend them, those actions gave them the morale boost they needed to keep going and the leverage to win their demands, said special education paraprofessional Diana Mueller, another regional strike captain and bargaining committee member.

“We filled the streets; it was incredible,” Mueller said. “And it really is true when you hear folks talk about how what happens outside the bargaining room really has an impact on what happens inside the bargaining room.”

LOVE LETTER TO THE CITY

Even though San Francisco has fewer children and parents than many other cities, the community support for the strike was strong. Local businesses provided free food, coffee, and restrooms. Desai-Geller said he heard from a lot of people that it felt like a version of San Francisco they hadn’t seen for a long time.

He said gentrification and an influx of transplants in A.I.-related jobs are pushing the working class out of the city, to the East Bay. Meanwhile educators were being told there was no money for public schools.

The school district had initially refused to negotiate over union demands that it claimed weren’t legally mandatory subjects of bargaining: sanctuary schools to protect immigrant students and families and extending an in-school shelter program for students who need housing, according to Desai-Geller. But ultimately, the district agreed to these demands during the strike.

Cody, who was born and raised in the city, said the strike felt like “a love letter back to San Francisco.” She got to lead chants at two of the actions and said that “one day longer, one day stronger” became like the soundtrack of the strike. She loved seeing people say “The rain be damned!” and fill the streets together, singing.

“In that moment, it was like everyone believed in what we were doing,” she said, “because it wasn’t just about us, it was about what this could mean for our city, our government. Everyone could connect with something that we were asking for. Everyone at some point had a teacher, an educator, a social worker, a para, a counselor that has impacted their lives.”

In this sliver of land across from the sprawling JBS beef processing plant—among the largest in the country—workers from around the world have united in the largest U.S. meatpacking strike in 40 years.

The 3,800 workers at the JBS beef processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, walked off the job on Monday, March 16, launching a two-week unfair labor practice strike.

This is the company’s flagship beef plant in the U.S. Its previous contract with Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 expired last July.

Strikers say JBS has been increasing the speed of the production line while cutting work hours from 40 a week to 35, squeezing out more work for less money. A thousand Haitian workers at the Greeley plant have filed a class action lawsuit against JBS for discriminatory practices that push them to work at dangerously fast line speeds.

Line speed is a major issue in the meatpacking industry. The UFCW International recently spoke out against a new proposal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to remove federal limits on line speeds entirely.

“We’re demanding our rights, both in terms of wages and working conditions, because before the strike, they really took advantage of us,” said a worker in the brisket trim department, who spoke in Spanish and asked to remain anonymous. “They want the same output, but fewer hours and fewer people.”

After 18 years working at JBS, he said, “everything is so expensive. Everything has gone up, except our wages.”

‘ONE WRONG MOVE CAN TAKE YOUR LIFE’

Workers are also demanding that the company stop charging them out-of-pocket costs for personal protective equipment like mesh vests and arm guards—essential because they work with knives, saws, and other sharp, dangerous equipment.

JBS garnishes workers’ wages when equipment needs to be replaced due to daily wear and tear, damage, or theft. This gear can cost workers up to $1,100, taken directly from their paychecks without their consent.

“I have never experienced anything harder than this in my life,” said Teshale Dadi, who works on the chuck line. JBS was his first job after moving to the U.S. from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. “One wrong move can take your life away.”

The various jobs mentioned in this article are all similar: cow carcasses are moving along on a conveyor belt, and workers are very quickly cutting them into smaller pieces and trimming off fat with knives.

“Access to the equipment is essential for us,” said Brett Tanner, who moved here from Arkansas and has worked as a ribber at JBS since 2024. “Personally, I love my job. I really do. We feed America. But it’s stressful sometimes, the hours we work and the physical toll the job does take on your body.”

Meatpacking jobs are among the most dangerous in the country. Workers on the picket line showed cuts, deep callouses, and chemical burns on their hands from years at the plant. Repetitive motion injuries are also common. Slips, falls, and machinery crushes can even be fatal; in 2021, a worker at the Greeley plant died after falling into a vat of chemicals.

“Our hard work makes JBS a profitable company, the biggest [meatpacking] company [in the world],” Dadi said. “Doing this hard work, everyone deserves the highest respect. Our pay is generally good, relative to [the rest of] the country, but for this specific job, I don’t think it’s even close to what we deserve.”

“It feels empowering that we have so many people standing together to send a message that we want better pay, we want more access to equipment,” Tanner said.

FACING DOWN A CORPORATE GIANT

Organizing across many languages and cultures has been a historical constant in the meatpacking sector. Union drives in the 1930s brought together Black, Mexican, and Eastern European immigrant workers to build some of the earliest meatpacking unions in the U.S.

This is the first strike ever at the Greeley plant, and the first major U.S. meatpacking strike since the 1985-6 strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota. (There were wildcat walkouts at Smithfield Foods in Tarheel, North Carolina, in 2006 and 2007.) At Hormel, 1,500 members of UFCW Local P-9 struck for 13 months, refusing concessions that their international union was pressing them to accept. The Hormel strike galvanized grassroots support from around the country, though ultimately the workers were defeated by the powerful forces arrayed against them.

Over the last few years, UFCW Local 7 has built up a fighting reputation, with some of the largest strikes in the union. Last year 10,000 Kroger grocery workers in Local 7 went on strike for two weeks in February, followed by another 7,000 grocery workers at Safeway in June.

But meatpacking workers face a steep uphill battle as they fight for better conditions. Union density in the industry has fallen precipitously. Up to 90 percent of meatpacking workers belonged to unions in the postwar era, but only 15 percent did by 2019, as the industry consolidated and shuttered unionized plants, only to restart production in non-union plants.

The meatpacking industry is now so concentrated that the “Big Four” companies—JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef— control 85 percent of beef processing in the U.S. JBS acquired the Greeley plant when it bought Swift & Co. in 2007, one of many acquisitions and mergers on its road to becoming the world’s largest meatpacker.

Meatpacking companies have been reaping record profits since the Covid pandemic (notwithstanding fines for price fixing), even as communities suffer from plant closures and beef prices soar for consumers.

JBS, a multinational based in Brazil, is the U.S.’s largest beef processor, and also owns the second-largest chicken processor, Pilgrim’s Pride. It provides meat products for fast food chains like McDonald's and Burger King, as well as wholesalers and grocers like Costco and Kroger.

Even in an industry known for greed and lawbreaking, JBS has a notorious reputation. The company paid a $4 million fine last year after the Department of Labor found that cleaning contractors at the Greeley plant were using child labor. It also paid $55 million in a $200 million meatpacking industry settlement over collusion to repress wages.

For a long time, the company’s effort to get listed on the New York Stock Exchange was held up by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission due to extensive corruption scandals and the company’s role in deforesting the Amazon rainforest.

In January 2025, Pilgrim’s Pride made the single largest donation to Trump’s inauguration committee, $5 million, leading to allegations of a quid pro quo. A few months later, the SEC approved the stock exchange listing.

NATIONAL NEGOTIATIONS

The Greeley plant is one of dozens of JBS plants represented by the UFCW. Fourteen of these plants, including 26,000 workers in 12 locals, are now covered by a national contract that was settled for the first time last May. Local 7, which opted out of national negotiations, is pushing beyond this agreement, citing higher costs of living in Colorado.

The national contract included wins on regulating line speeds, including steward training and provisions for walking stewards (who are empowered to move around the plant to proactively enforce the contract, and who are paid by the company rather than the union), and improvements to wages and sick leave.

A particular triumph was the establishment of a new Taft-Hartley pension plan. Pensions used to be standard within meatpacking; the UFCW touted this one as the first to be offered by a meatpacking employer since 1986. (At least one news report speculated that JBS agreed to a pension as an optics move to get its stock listing approved by the SEC.)

That said, the national JBS pension plan is relatively modest, starting at contributions of 10 cents per hour worked in the first year of the contract, and increasing by 10 cents per hour each additional year. Local 663 and Local 1846 negotiated separate language to give individual members the choice whether to continue with their previous 401k or opt into the pension.

Nearly a dozen UFCW locals have been showing up in solidarity at the picket lines in Local 7, including Local 663 from Minnesota and Local 431 from Iowa, which were part of national negotiations.

Local 7 announced at the outset that this would be a limited-duration, two-week strike. It could be shorter, the local has stated, if JBS agrees to come back to the bargaining table and negotiate in good faith.

“I hope that we get justice, and that other meat processing plants stand up and get justice too,” said the anonymous worker, who is originally from Mexico, “for the good of the Latino community, and for the workers above all.”

Caitlyn Clark is a national organizer at Essential Workers for Democracy, an organization dedicated to rank-and-file member education and empowerment for workers in grocery, meatpacking, and retail. Lisa Xu is a staff writer and organizer at Labor Notes.

The Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates, the union’s governing body, has endorsed a national call for “no school, no work, no shopping” on May 1. Recent boycotts of Disney, Target, and Tesla have shown us that we can shake the pillars of corporate America. The massive Day of Truth and Freedom in Minnesota January 23 showed us that we can remove the head of the Border Patrol.

But before upping the ante, we needed to get trained up. Our union has a proud history of strike action. In 2016, we went on a one-day strike to fight back against massive budget cuts and threats to cut 7 percent of teacher salaries. Now Solidarity Schools can spread the know-how for militant, disruptive action to knit a national movement.

This regime of billionaires and aspiring authoritarians is threatening the integrity of elections and the very concept of government as a tool for public good. The May Day Strong coalition is organizing to use all of our organizations’ capabilities to respond.

Over the past few months the May Day Strong networks have planned nearly 100 local solidarity schools—some in partnership with Freedom Trainers, Labor Notes, and local coalitions—to get ready for a day of “No Work, No School, and No Shopping” on May 1.

In fact, the forces that powered the January 23 day of action in Minneapolis had started their preparations with a May Day solidarity school three months earlier. There they established red lines for what would trigger automatic city-wide action. That set the stage for their response when ICE agents pulled teachers out of their car windows in school parking lots and executed Renee Good and later Alex Pretti.

A JOYFUL VISION

The Memphis Solidarity School, held the same day that the Twin Cities rose up, brought together 100 labor, faith, and community organizers.

The school was hosted at Centenary United Methodist Church in the same room where sanitation workers had planned their historic 1968 strike. Samara Solomon, a member of Memphis Public Library Workers United, said the event built on existing local campaigns, like one to win civil service status for library workers.

The Philadelphia Workers over Billionaires campaign, launched in December, has already had thousands of conversations with workers about their vision for the city, said organizer Jana Korn.

“Over and over, workers shared with us their dreams of a safe, community-based, joyful city,” Korn said. They plan to unveil the results of those conversations at a meeting in March, then mobilize for May Day to demand this vision be realized.

NEW CROSS-POLLINATION

Representatives of 20 unions and 20 community organizations gathered in Maryland in January. Members of the building trades (Electricians, Steamfitters, Carpenters, Laborers) joined Teamsters, teachers, federal workers, higher education workers, graduate students, and service industry unions (UNITE HERE, SEIU 32BJ).

This was the most diverse set of organizations that most participants had ever trained with.

In Denver, a new labor, community, and youth coalition called United Denver organized a solidarity school in February. “We mapped how to escalate collectively in order to defeat the billionaire agenda and built real alignment between labor and community,” said Brian Winkler, a vice president of Communications Workers Local 7777.

In New York City, the May Day Strong school was held in four languages and brought together labor and community organizations who don’t usually work closely together.” They included the Laborers, federal workers, United Auto Workers, immigrant worker center Make the Road New York, and tenant group CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities.

TARGETING TARGET

In San Francisco, 150 organizers from dozens of community and labor organizations across the Bay Area gathered in February, convened by Bay Resistance, for a May Day Strong “train-the-trainer” solidarity school.

United Educators of San Francisco highlighted their recent four-day strike, which won fully funded family health care and boosted wages for the district’s lowest-paid workers.

In small groups, participants contemplated potential May Day actions and discussed creative tactics to build the ongoing campaigns against ICE collaborators Target, Home Depot, and Palantir. The next step was a much larger solidarity school/non-cooperation training in mid-March.

In Boston, 250 people from 70 organizations came together. Greg Nammacher of SEIU Local 26 brought news from Minneapolis. Workshops and sector-specific meetings made plans for defending immigrants, organizing against corporate interests, and defeating authoritarianism.

Simultaneously, organizations along the North Shore of Massachusetts held an education conference on the same themes.

The next day the Chicago Teachers Union and several neighborhood and community groups hosted 400 people in their second Solidarity School.

More schools are coming up in the South and the Southwest, parts of the country that have a deep history of movement organizing yet a low union density.

The May Day Strong network is pulling together different forces—from small-town Indivisible chapters to the largest unions—to build momentum for the world we all deserve. Join the growing movement at MayDayStrong.org and check out our toolkit here.

Jackson Potter is vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union.

“El miedo no se convirtió en una cuestión de si ocurrirá, sino de cuándo”, dijo Rivers: “Hemos visto ​​“carros fantasma” en la carretera, simplemente abandonados los autos. Hemos visto cosas realmente aterradoras. En algunos de los barrios en los que viven mis compañeros de trabajo, oímos silbatos [utilizados por activistas para señalar la presencia de ICE] durante todo el día y la noche.”

Hace apenas unas semanas en los suburbios de Minneapolis, según informes, ICE secuestró a un ciudadano estadounidense de 17 años de su trabajo en Target antes de liberarlo en el estacionamiento de un Walmart. Él y un compañero de trabajo que también fue detenido resultaron heridos durante el incidente, según declaró el representante estatal de Minnesota, Michael Howard, al Star Tribune en enero.

“Tenemos menores de edad en nuestras tiendas, y me aterra que les pueda pasar algo así,” dijo Rivers.

El 14 de enero, Rivers y sus compañeros marcharon hasta la oficina del jefe para exigir que Starbucks dejara de permitir la entrada de ICE a sus tiendas. “Las directrices actuales son insuficientes; estamos empoderados a pedir a los agentes del ICE que se marchen solo si están acosando o interrumpiendo la actividad comercial”, dijo Rivers. “Por el bien de sus socios y de sus clientes, Starbucks debe seguir el ejemplo de cientos de empresas de Minnesota y prohibir la entrada del ICE sin una orden judicial.” La empresa no respondió a las solicitudes de comentarios.

Días después, los trabajadores de seis establecimientos sindicalizados de Starbucks en Minnesota realizaron una huelga de un día por prácticas laborales injustas en respuesta a “las violaciones de la legislación laboral cometidas por la empresa en los últimos meses”. Muchos se unieron ese mismo día a la marcha “ICE Fuera de Minnesota”, que congregó a 50.000 personas.

¿NOS ESTÁN PROTEGIENDO?

Otros baristas de Starbucks han seguido su ejemplo: trabajadores de Ann Arbor, Chicago, Nueva York, Filadelfia, Pittsburgh y St. Louis han organizado marchas contra sus jefes u otras acciones en el lugar de trabajo exigiendo que se prohíba la entrada del ICE a sus centros de trabajo en ausencia de una orden judicial firmada.

“Es muy posible que haya atendido a un cliente que ahora está siendo investigado por ICE, y eso no está bien,” dijo un trabajador que participó en una acción en el lugar de trabajo. Pidió permanecer en el anonimato debido a su estatus migratorio. “Puede que ni siquiera se trate de clientes. Hay muchos inmigrantes que trabajan en Starbucks. ¿Cómo los está protegiendo Starbucks si permite la entrada a agentes del ICE?”

“No hay indicios de que vayan a cambiar la regla”, dijo el barista. “Parece que no confían en que sepamos qué es lo mejor para nosotros o para la gente de nuestra comunidad, pero nunca han estado en ella. Nosotros, los trabajadores, somos quienes conocemos la realidad, así que no recibir ninguna respuesta de la compañía sobre algo tan importante es ridículo, es un poco exasperante”.

Hemos tenido clientes que han pasado por la ventanilla para ordenar en los últimos meses, clientes habituales a los que aprecio profundamente que no han dicho que empezaran a venir con menos frecuencia porque tienen miedo de salir de sus hogares,” comentó Rivers. “Si nosotros nos sentimos incómodos, imagínese cómo se sentirían los clientes si agentes del ICE entrarán con equipo táctico, sin que sepamos en los próximos minutos o incluso segundos.”

“Tenemos una regla para todo. Tenemos una regla para asegurarnos de que nosotros escribimos en cada vaso cuando estamos hasta arriba en pedidos móviles, y yo tengo un gerente que me está vigilando para asegurarse de que lo haga,” dijo Rivers. “Pero, ¿qué hacemos en esta situación sin precedentes?”

Over the last decade, almost every corner of the U.S. labor movement has experienced an exciting revitalization. Educators have brought a new fighting spirit to their unions, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Massachusetts.

Rank-and-file members have overthrown corrupt leadership in the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers. Grocery workers and letter carriers have rebelled against subpar contracts, and building trades workers are turning around their locals.

What do all these fights have in common? Union reform caucuses. A reform caucus is simply a group of union members who are organizing together to improve their union, and build its power to effectively fight the boss.

To that end, we have assembled a resource packet for union members seeking advice on transforming their unions: how (and when) to build a union reform caucus, and how to navigate the challenges of developing a caucus.

New reform caucuses are sprouting across the labor movement, and they are learning many lessons along the way. For that reason, this packet is intended to be a living document— stay tuned for ongoing updates!

If you are making use of it, we want to hear from you (and maybe include questions or lessons from your experience in the next edition!). Please reach out to us at labornotes[at]labornotes[dot]org with any questions or feedback.

It's an exciting time to be a union reformer, and we hope you'll find this guide useful!

Click here to access the packet.

We've also put together a caucus decisionmaking flowchart. You can access that here.

For additional resources on reform caucus organizing, check our events page for upcoming trainings. For a review of organizing fundamentals, check out Secrets of a Successful Organizer. For inspiring stories of reformers grinding it out over the long haul, check out our new book Keep Going: A Guide to Organizing When It's Hard.