Jaz Brisack’s book, Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World, is both infuriating and beautiful. It documents the author’s experiences in three major labor organizing campaigns: Nissan in Canton, Mississippi; several Starbucks stores in Buffalo, New York; and Tesla’s Gigafactory, also in Buffalo. The account celebrates individual workers and highlights their courage and fears. It showcases their collective actions and occasional triumphs. Overall, it emphasizes that workers can gain control over their lives and society by taking on the “dictatorship of the bosses” in the workplace.
The first campaign Brisack joined took place in 2017 in Canton. They were drawn into it as a student at the University of Mississippi, organizing fellow students to support the campaign. Ultimately, the campaign failed because Nissan bosses successfully exploited racial divisions to weaken worker solidarity. At the same time, high-ranking state government officials threatened workers with the claim that if they chose a union, Nissan would close its factories and cost the state resources.
Instead of defending his working-class constituents from the abuses of a multinational corporation, Mississippi Gov. Dewey P. Bryant feared that the factory’s majority Black workers would control a local union, Brisack writes. He angrily denounced the union and stated that he believed Nissan workers who voted for the union deserved to be fired.
A billionaire-funded, relentless right-wing media campaign against labor organizing compounded these threats and innuendos. Nissan’s intimidation tactics were “illegal,” declared Derrick Johnson, who headed the NAACP at the time and had stood with the workers during the campaign. Despite this massive wave of illegal threats and intimidation, Brisack concludes that the UAW was primarily at fault for the failed campaign.
After a period of post-graduate studies at Oxford University, Brisack returned to the U.S. and joined a group of organizers at the AFL-CIO’s “insider organizer school.” They took a job as the organizing director for Workers United in Upstate New York and Vermont, focusing organizing efforts in Buffalo. As COVID took hold in early spring of 2020, in-person organizing became difficult, and Brisack took a job at a Buffalo Starbucks store. They state that they took the job as an “inside organizer” or a “salt,” with the deliberate goal of organizing the workers there. They helped to launch the Starbucks Workers United campaign (affiliated with the Service Employees International Union).
This section of the book, covering chapters three through six, is the heart of Brisack’s story. Starbucks is a multinational company with 9,600 stores in the U.S., each averaging about twenty workers. Once thought to be unorganizable, Brisack and the co-organizers of the campaign not only proved the doubters wrong but also built a youth-centered worker culture that redefined organizing in small chain stores and retail settings during the COVID pandemic. Starbucks exploited the alternative identities of its predominantly white and female workforce to project itself as a diverse and progressive corporation.
In the aftermath of the lockdowns, vaccine and mask mandates, and the Trump administration’s failure to protect the lives of American workers, Starbucks workers faced a company that shared the president’s demand that people just get back to work. In helping to shape the pro-union community of workers in the Buffalo area, Brisack describes walking a fine line between their own radical political views and the aspirations and specific demands of the workers. 
The workers wanted protections from rampant sexual harassment from bosses and abusive customers, the right to negotiate their pay and benefits, and improved working conditions, including more staff to reduce speedups and on-the-job injuries. The workers wanted a collective voice in how to better manage speed-ups through improved training, better working equipment, and additional staff. Above all, they took seriously the name given to them by the company: “partners.”
How could they be partners if they were denied a collective, legally protected voice? Brisack writes that when Starbucks was eventually forced to negotiate with the unionized workers, one corporate executive insulted the workers by asking them if they needed to go back to high school English to learn what a metaphor was. Corporate executives, according to Brisack, were also caught describing workers as their “little peasants.” Such insulting and abusive language showed that the company never intended to be held accountable to the workers who created all the value the company claimed as profit for its shareholders.
Brisack describes thinking and acting strategically about organizing through every relationship and every workplace deed they took. From picking up shifts for other workers to participating in the cultural activities (music, video games, comic books) of the people in the Starbucks worker orbit, Brisack focused nearly all of their life on sustaining the movement.
Because the number of workers in the handful of stores Brisack and the Starbucks United organizing committee selected was relatively small (as compared with the more than 6,000 workers at Nissan in 2017), tactics such as a “blitz” of contacting workers and the rapid shift from one-on-one conversations to filing for an NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) election took only a matter of weeks. The workers developed sophisticated social media campaigns, slogans, and merchandise for the campaign, which helped stimulate a supportive nationwide movement. Brisack writes about workers from across the country getting in touch to learn more about how to organize in their workplaces.
Once the campaign became public, Starbucks retaliated with firings, pressure tactics, and a lot of whining. Managers swarmed the stores where workers had filed for union elections. They constantly kept workers under surveillance and held captive audience meetings. They repeated the company’s mantra that workers didn’t need a union and even whined to workers about “what had they ever done to deserve this.”
The company’s position seemed to be that worker organizing for a collective voice was a personal attack on managers and company executives. The corporate center desperately attempted to address the issues raised by the workers, claiming that workers could individually express their concerns and that the company would resolve those problems. That approach had never provided meaningful resolutions, however. People who refused to resolve issues in this manner were violating the company’s culture, the company insisted. Eventually, Brisack discovers that “Starbucks was a cult.” It upheld loyalty and obedience, rituals, and a catechism of slogans and would do anything, including spreading fear and anxiety among the workers, to suppress their democratic demands.
In the end, Starbucks had spent tens of millions of dollars crafting an image as a diverse, progressive organization. However, when it came to workers protecting their rights and collectively negotiating for improved conditions and pay, the company proved to be the opposite.
It adopted a stance that defines capitalist enterprises: It claimed sole power to determine the working conditions and the intensity of exploitation of workers. Brisack brilliantly pushed back against the corporate performativity of being progressive and hearing workers’ voices. Much of the Starbucks reaction to the campaign centered on the false claim that the workers are not the union. When the company’s anti-union task force (ironically, an outside firm hired to bust the unionization campaign) tried to claim that unions are a “third party” trying to control the workers, Brisack stated, the union “is just a way for all of us to be able to speak for ourselves and to make sure there’s accountability.” The bosses cannot pretend to “hear” our voices unless we have power to hold them accountable.
Despite the fear campaign and systematic one-on-one pressures, the organizers successfully pushed back, meeting constantly with workers to instill trust and empowerment through their collective efforts. In the end, most of the stores connected to the campaign in Buffalo won their NLRB elections and began the slow process toward contract negotiations. Within four months of the Buffalo victories, some 200 stores across the country filed for elections. Hundreds of others joined the organizing struggle. Today, more than 400 stores have won NLRB elections.
After success, Brisack’s radical political affiliations seemed to surface, negatively impacting their subsequent role in the labor movement. When SEIU, the international union that had originated the Starbucks campaign, sought to oversee the national campaign and resourcing more directly, Brisack appears to have equated those moves with undemocratic bureaucratization. Brisack’s ideological affiliation with the anarcho-syndicalism of the IWW seemed to lean more toward the anarchist side, elevating what they call “local autonomy” over centrally planned campaigns. This portion of the narrative, however, seems to fudge the lines between a political ideal and the inability to allow others—who may not share that political viewpoint—to take leadership in the movement.
This second major turn against the labor movement seems to have negatively impacted Brisack’s decision-making in the third major campaign with which they were involved: Tesla’s Buffalo factory. Though the Steelworkers had already begun the protracted process of organizing the 1,500 workers at the plant, Brisack and her political grouping decided they could do better. Ignoring the “non-compete” agreement that SEIU had with the Steelworkers and adopting an abstract concept of a “geographical model” of organizing that believes workers in a particular place share the same ideas about unions and bosses, Brisack adopted similar organizing strategies that had been successful at the smaller Starbucks stores to the much larger factory.
Although the organizers had limited relationships with the workers inside the plant, they conducted a “blitz” campaign, attempting to meet with workers at their homes in a very short period. Most of the blitz, however, relied on texts and phone calls to numbers presumed to belong to workers. Most of the organizers were not Tesla workers; they were volunteers from other unions and organizing campaigns and lacked a direct connection to the experiences of the factory workers.
Most of the conversations they held, Brisack writes, focused not on assessing union sympathy but rather on educating workers about what unions were. The “blitz” was shortly followed by a traditional and social media campaign that brought the unionization drive into the public sphere well before there was a clear, data-driven assessment of union support inside the plant. Jumping the gun and going public early allowed the company to mass fire dozens of workers without fear of legal repercussions (as weak as they are). As was their right, the Steelworkers complained to SEIU about the interference. SEIU’s leadership then ordered a halt to the campaign. Brisack criticized this decision, accusing the unions of undemocratic bureaucracy. In doing so, Brisack conceals their own pattern of poor decision-making.
The narrative’s discussion of success at Starbucks showcased an effective approach to the organizer’s role. There, the author had set aside personal political ideals to patiently and in a disciplined way help the workers build an organizing culture and campaign that reflected their shared values. Indeed, much of that section of the narrative focuses on Brisack’s explanations of how to be a good co-worker in order to foster a culture of solidarity. This success in achieving such an extensive collective worker culture and in winning the union campaign is the true heart of the book. However, to fully grasp these lessons, readers need a broader context for the later lapses at Tesla, which the author appears unwilling to provide.
In Get on the Job and Organize, Jaz Brisack delivers a powerful, if uneven, account of labor organizing in modern America—one that is as inspiring as it is cautionary. The book shines brightest in its vivid portrayal of the Starbucks campaign, where Brisack’s strategic patience and deep solidarity with workers led to groundbreaking victories, proving that even “unorganizable” workplaces can be transformed through collective action. However, the narrative falters when examining the Tesla campaign, where ideological rigidity and a disregard for established organizing principles led to avoidable failures.
Brisack’s story ultimately underscores a crucial lesson for the labor movement: Success demands not only courage and commitment but also humility, collaboration, and a willingness to prioritize workers’ needs over personal political ideals. While the book celebrates the transformative power of worker solidarity, it also serves as a reminder that even the most passionate organizers must balance radical vision with practical discipline to build a truly worker-led future.
Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World
By Jaz Brisack
Atria/One Signal Publishers (2025)
ISBN: 9781668080795
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