Jaz Brisack w/ Ijeoma Oluo, GET ON THE JOB AND ORGANIZE

Union organizer Jaz Brisack visits the store to discuss their book Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World, a compelling, stirring narrative of the Starbucks and Tesla unionization efforts, telling the broader story of the new, nationwide labor movement unfolding in our era of political and social unrest. A leader of the Starbucks and Tesla union movements shares stories from the front lines to help us organize our own workplaces and “better understand the aims and goals for a resurgent trade union movement and how workers all over the country can join in solidarity with it” (Senator Bernie Sanders). They are joined by Ijeoma Oluo.

Get on the Job and Organize is a compelling, stirring narrative of the Starbucks and Tesla unionization efforts, telling the broader story of the new, nationwide labor movement unfolding in our era of political and social unrest. As one of the exciting new faces of the American Labor Movement, Jaz 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. Here, Brisack delivers practical advice on how workers can and should stand up for their rights, especially when electoral politics seem to have failed us.

With an accessible tone, a deep love of labor history, and profound empathy, Brisack puts recent efforts into the context of Americans’ long tradition of organizing. In the process, they show us that we, too, can improve our workplaces, from how to educate ourselves and our colleagues, to what backlash to expect and how to fight it, to what victory looks like even if the union doesn’t necessarily win.

Jaz 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.

Ijeoma Oluo is a Seattle-based writer, speaker, and internet yeller. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling first book, So You Want To Talk About Race, Mediocre, and Be a Revolution. Her work on race and gender has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and NBC News; and she has been featured on The Daily Show and NPR’s All Things Considered. Named on the TIME 100 Next list and The Root 100, she’s been awarded the Harvard Humanist of the Year Award, the American Humanist Association’s Feminist Humanist Award, Gender Justice League’s Media Justice Award, and the Equal Opportunity Institute’s Aubrey Davis Visionary Leadership Award.

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company