Jenny Brown

Uncover How Your Employer’s Power Flows

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Jenny Brown

Review of What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know: Discovering Power and Winning Campaigns by Tom Juravich, Olivia Geho, and Andrew Gorry (PM Press, 2025)

When workers at one company started researching their employer, says a union leader in What the Boss Doesn’t Want Us to Know, “it felt like the curtain was pulled back on Oz. All these things that didn’t make sense to them for so long suddenly made sense.”

Salts and Peppers Build a Union at Starbucks

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Jenny Brown

Review of Jaz Brisack, Get on the Job and Organize (Atria/One Signal, 2025).

Starbucks Workers United recently celebrated the unionization of their 600th store, disproving reams of conventional wisdom: you can’t organize small shops… you can’t organize high-turnover workplaces… you can’t organize young people.

For a gripping first-person account of how it happened, read Jaz Brisack’s new book Get on the Job and Organize.

Columbia Tries to Undermine Its Unions, Hire Scab Instructors

Imagine you get a letter from your manager a week before you are set to teach classes, removing you from teaching duties but saying you’ll get paid anyway. This odd experience has happened to around 137 graduate students at Columbia University in New York City who teach core curriculum, language, and writing classes. They are members of Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), Auto Workers Local 2710.

Getting paid to not teach might sound pretty good, but in fact the university is hiring adjuncts with no union contract to do the work of union members.

Environmental Protection Agency Workers Investigated for Defending Its Mission

After signing a critical letter to their boss, 139 EPA workers were put under investigation and on a 2-week paid administrative leave July 3.

The Government Programs They’re Axing Came from Our Struggles

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Jenny Brown

Ronald Reagan used to say the scariest nine words were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Wait, what?

When my house was half destroyed by Hurricane Frances in 2004, a Federal Emergency Management Agency agent showed up three days later and cut us a check so we could get the giant tree off the house and do temporary repairs. Through FEMA, we were able to get a $20,000 low-interest loan from the Small Business Administration so we could rebuild. The federal government was there to help.

Federal Unionists Say It’s Not Game Over, It’s Game On

A scrappy network of federal unionists is leading the response to the Trump administration’s attacks on their workplaces, including Trump’s March 27 order purporting to end union contracts covering most federal workers.

Where the Federal Unionists Network has led, union leaders have followed. In a Zoom event that drew 65,000 viewers, FUN got official support from all the significant federal unions for their bottom-up organizing approach to the Trump onslaught.

Trump Tries to Blow Up Airport Screeners Union

In a memo that that one TSA employee said sounded like “a teenage blogger writing about someone they don’t like,” the Department of Homeland Security announced March 7 that it was cancelling the union contract for 47,000 workers at the Transportation Security Administration.

The American Federation of Government Employees signed its contract with TSA in May 2024, and it wasn’t set to expire until 2031.

DHS also stopped deducting union dues, and ordered all union officers to immediately return to their TSO duties. Workers voted in the union in 2011.

Federal Workers Mobilize against Musk’s and Trump’s ‘Corporate Coup’

Federal employee union members have been speaking out, rallying, and suing, as agency after agency has been hit by Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE)—a private unaccountable entity which has been demanding access to all government records while spreading wild lies about waste and fraud.

Around 20,000 workers have been summarily fired so far.

2024 in Review: Strikes and Organizing Score Gains, but Storm Clouds Loom

Union workers broke open the cookie jar in 2024, after years of stagnant wages and rising prices. With strikes and the threat of strikes, workers did more than forestall concessions: They gained ground. Union workers in the private sector saw 6 percent real wage rises for the year.

Just the fear that workers would organize drove up wages at non-union employers like Delta Airlines, Amazon, and Mercedes.

Boeing Machinists End 53-Day Strike with 38 Percent Raise

Striking Boeing Machinists will start returning to work tomorrow after voting for a new contract with substantial wage increases. The 33,000 Seattle-area Machinists voted 59 percent to accept, just two weeks after two-thirds of them voted to reject a slightly worse contract.

Voting was more subdued this time, workers said. “The big difference in this contract is that we're getting a lot of intimidation from our CEO now,” said striker Mylo Lang. He voted no.

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