Jaz Brisack: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World

Join us in-person as Jaz Brisack, the leader of the Starbucks and Tesla union movements, shares stories from the front lines to help us learn about the modern labor movement.

Brisack, author of Get on the Job and Organize, tells the broader story of the new, nationwide labor movement unfolding in our era of political and social unrest. As one of the new faces of the American labor movement, Brisack argues that while workers often organize when their place of work is toxic, it’s equally important to organize when you love your job. Brisack puts everything into the context of America’s long tradition of labor organizing and shows us others can organize their workplaces, backlash can be expected and how to fight it, and what victory looks like even if the union doesn’t necessarily “win.”

Brisack is a union organizer and cofounder of the Inside Organizer School, which trains workers to unionize. After spending one year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, they got a job as a barista at the Elmwood Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, becoming a founding member of Starbucks Workers United and helping organize the first unionized Starbucks in the United States. As the organizing director for Workers United Upstate New York & Vermont, they also worked with organizing committees at companies ranging from Ben & Jerry’s to Tesla.

SPEAKERS

Jaz Brisack, Union Organizer, Co Founder of Insider Organizer School; Author, Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World

Moderator TBA

5:30 p.m. doors open & check-in
6–7 p.m. program
7 p.m. book signing

Host or Publisher The Commonwealth Club