It was refreshing speaking to Laila Dalton & Bill Whitmire, who devote their time to organizing workers at Starbucks and enlightening Americans on the need for unions.
Laila Dalton & Bill Whitmire are challenging Starbucks.
I enjoyed listening to Laila Dalton, a young woman who decided to be a part of organizing workers even as blowback came from this giant corporation, Starbucks. And her former supervisor, Bill Whitmire, showed his resolve as he decided he was not going to take it anymore.
“It all started in late January when I recently got out of the hospital about a month before,” Laila said. “And my new manager, she wanted me to put work before my health or my education. And I didn’t know what to do because I love my job, I love my coworkers, and Bill, my co-leader here, just became a supervisor and got no training.”
Leila continued with their grievances.
“So we were both in really bad situations,” Laila said. “We saw that our store was going downhill, and I kept speaking up to management, and they kept blowing me off, just wouldn’t talk to me. It came to the night that Bill came up to me and said, we can make a change because I thought I was going to have to quit. I wanted another day off since I just got out of the hospital, and a part of the reason I go to Starbucks is to get free ASU. So the fact that they wanted me to either demote myself or transfer to a new store just because I can’t be a full-time student and worker, I realized that even though I’m putting in my all, they don’t care. They care more about profit over morals. They care more about how they care more about making money than our livelihood. And we can’t put work first all the time. So that’s when Bill and I got started. And Bill really is a big reason why I got very empowered by unions because I never knew what a union was until Bill.”
In a nutshell, these two Starbucks employees decided they would not be corporate widgets or antiseptic slaves. It was the time they acknowledged themselves as stakeholders. They had agency.
The corporate and wealthy class cannot exist without those who do the work. The executives of corporations rarely have the intellect or know-how that determines the success of the company, yet they are often paid times orders of magnitude more than the rank and file employees.
We have been brainwashed into believing that our current hierarchy is fair or moral. It is not. A parasite preys on a functional body. Too often, executives fit that description. Every American worker must be unionized to ensure that they are immune to the parasitic nature of corporations. Ironically, while corporations put up obstacles to employees unionizing, they forget that the Chamber of Commerce and other trade organizations they are members of are nothing but unions by another name.
Please listen to the entire interview. I am sure you will find it enlightening.
