Introduction Part II

Worker action informs good union strategy

This post is part of an ongoing series. Part I can be found here.

This model of worker-to-worker organising popularised in the Starbucks Workers United campaign has relevance beyond the United States, and arguably it was not even invented there. As a general rule, if you want to find a labour movement breakthrough within the Anglophone world look to Aotearoa New Zealand.¹ We can thank our comrades across the Tasman Sea for globally significant wins for workers from the 8-hour day, women’s suffrage and the world’s first Starbucks worker strikes.

Worker-to-worker organising in the Antipodes

Unite Union in Aotearoa New Zealand led Starbucks workers across Auckland on strike in 2005 to win union recognition and collective agreement pay increases as part of their broader Super Size My Pay organising campaign. This campaign went on to build union members, delegates and collective agreements with improved pay across Starbucks, McDonalds, Burger King, KFC and others.² Critically, the 2005 campaign shared many of the common features of the latter Starbucks Workers United drive, including:

• A relatively low-cost organising model that is scalable across geographically diverse work sites. Unite Union started with effectively no resources;

• A commitment to worker leadership and democratic rank-and-file structures; and

• A commitment to using collective action as a means of union education in deed.

Obviously, the challenge of sweeping through a political community of approximately 5 million people compared with that of nearly 350 million people across the US is of a different order. The technological capacity for workers to remotely educate and mentor each other has greatly increased in the intervening 15 odd years. This is one of the key distinctions between the two campaigns aside from differing legal and political contexts. However, even then Unite Union was an early adopter of social media and communications technologies to drive its campaigns.³

The worker-to-worker organising model can also win in Australia.

In early 2023, young service workers who worked for Merlin Entertainments at SeaLife Aquariums in Melbourne, Sydney and the Sunshine Coast worked together nationally to take on the world’s largest venue entertainment company through short, sharp strike actions combined with solidarity actions by members of the public. The workers finished their bargaining campaign with better pay, improved conditions and union recognition. It would not have been possible without shopfloor delegates stepping up and organising together within their own workplaces and across other workplaces in their company.

Moreover, in October 2024 Australia had its first fast food workers strike when workers at the Grill’d store in Flinders Lane, Melbourne walked off the job. It was the senior delegate from the shopfloor who was running the bargaining meetings representing a small cohort of members, and it was the members at the store that advocated for taking action. This small group of members took on themselves the responsibility of building an effective union committee, running their communications and reaching out to new workers under the very deliberately chosen name of Grill’d Workers United.⁴

They expanded their membership to over 20 stores all across Australia, and followed up with further strikes in June and July this year. The story of these Grill’d workers is ongoing but they are the ones writing it now.

Collective worker action informs solidarity bargaining

I originally conceived of solidarity bargaining, as one of integral points within the solidarity wedge, in 2022 as a union movement-wide bargaining strategy to link up various worker-to-worker organising campaigns alongside already existing union workplaces.⁵ The idea being that it would open up relations of solidarity between groups of union workers and the broader working class to fight for common material outcomes.

One of the legal means of enacting solidarity bargaining would be through the tactic of implementing a common set of agreement expiry dates timed for broad-based actions to occur on May Day.

In 2023, workers actively started putting in place the foundations for such a future with United Auto Worker union members pulling off their Stand Up strikes against automakers GM, Ford and Stellantis resulting in a common expiry date of 30 April 2028.⁶ The UAW resultantly issued an invitation to the broader US union movement to align their contracts for the same day.

Sit down UAW strikers in the Fisher body plant factory number three. Flint, Michigan.

The alignment of union contract expiry dates, however, is merely one possible practical expression of solidarity bargaining. It is a tactic that can be consistent with the strategy. The elite will attack solidarity bargaining if it gains momentum, including the alignment of expiry dates. At such a point, it will be the reflective and problem solving capacities of workers unleashed by the mass investment in dialogical education and broad cross-workplace communicative structures that will determine just how much progress can be made.

I have felt a drive to set out this intervention because I believe that my accumulated and particular experience as an active unionist for 20 years has made obvious to me a critical gap in radical strategy and given me the benefit of some insight on how such a gap may be bridged. That gap is this – a workable strategy for the mass reorganisation of the working class, inclusive of a revitalisation of the union movement, in the dying days of the neoliberal era.

While this strategy is shaped to the decentralised bargaining regimes of the Anglophone world, I believe that many of the principles and conclusions I draw are capable of substitution and adaptation to other political contexts as I have taken inspiration from international struggles.

This newsletter is not to be read as a union movement step-by-step strategic guide. Capitalism is a system in motion, and even as I write of particular conditions those conditions are subject to change. Moreover, I deliberately steer clear of discussion around the art and strategy of organising deeply into a single workplace, corporation or market segment. This is not for a lack of belief in the necessity of such work on my part, for while this writing has been initially inspired by worker-to-worker organising in Starbucks and other contexts, it is as a jump point to a social wide struggle.

I seek to draw out, in this newsletter, how to both connect such organising together on a class basis, and contribute to a social context where more of such organising is occurring.

Further, the solidaristic approach I outline is itself dependent on specific and active workplace organising. A universal strategy for the revival of the labour movement must be rooted in specific and particular workplace and community organising. Nothing I write should be interpreted as a means through which to avoid or bypass this work. Active organising and struggle in particular workplaces is integral to the solidarity wedge strategy.

Overall, I hope to contribute to a collective and ongoing discussion on labour movement strategy where unionists can use this work as a stepping stone for their own critical engagement. This newsletter is only one small part of a continuing critical dialogue.

In the next part, I will start going into some of the underlying contexts and assumptions that inform the solidarity wedge strategy.

1. Effective change begins at the margins of empire. It’s why (a small) part of me is amused by American billionaires buying doomsday bolt holes in Aotearoa New Zealand for these properties are likely to be subject to a true democratic socialist system before their American assets.

2. For a fuller first-hand history of Unite Union from founding until 2014, check out Mike Treen’s overview here: https://links.org.au/aotearoanew-zealand-history-unite-union. There’s also this 15-minute documentary that covers the period:

3. Unite Union also have a rich tradition of combining their collective bargaining campaigns for the working class from ending youth rates, taking on zero-hour contracts, and increasing the minimum wage to $15 (years before Fight for 15). There is much strategic insight the wider labour movement can gain from studying this plucky union (much of which informs what will crop up in latter posts especially with respect to the concept of solidarity bargaining), and I will forever be in debt to the solidarity these comrades showed me as a young call centre worker/organiser.

4. For an idea of the capacity that these Grill’d workers are exercising see their own website https://grilldworkersunited.org/.

5. There is, in this regard, nothing inherently original in solidarity bargaining. Solidarity informs every successful upsurge in labour organisation.

6. See my previous writing on this https://jacobin.com/2023/11/solidarity-bargaining-labor-movement-strategy-uaw-australian-unions-may-day.