This book is both infuriating and beautiful.

It documents the author’s Jaz Brisack’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 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, Mississippi.

She was 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 multi-national corporation, the State’s Governor, Dewey 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 the United Auto Workers (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).

To Continue Reading This Labor News Story, Go To: Infuriating and beautiful ‘Get on the Job and Organize’ is lesson for balancing radical vision with practical discipline – People's World

Book Cover Shot Via Amazon.