Jaz Brisack

Jazlyn Brisack is an American labor organizer known for leading unionizing efforts at Starbucks, namely at a Buffalo, New York store.

Brisack was homeschooled in Alcoa, Tennessee, where she grew up. Her family were conservative Democrats, and she became interested in activism early in her life. At 16, she worked as a dishwasher at Panera Bread where she became familiar with her coworkers’ struggles as low-paid frontline employees in harsh working conditions. She first developed an interest in labor unions there.

She attended the University of Mississippi until 2019, majoring in Public Policy, Journalism, and English. Here she received a Harry S. Truman Scholarship, and was the first woman at the university to be awarded with a Rhodes Scholarship. She was also a student of the university's honors program, the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College. Brisack finished her typically two-year scholarship at the University of Oxford in one year. She was previously an op-ed writer for The Daily Mississippian, a student newspaper.

Brisack started her career in 2016 working as a teacher-advisor for the Sunflower Freedom Project, and in 2017 working part-time in a campaign with United Auto Workers to unionize a Nissan factory in Canton, Mississippi. Nissan was criticized for one of the "nastiest" union busting efforts in history. The union push was unsuccessful. She also worked to help defend Jackson Women's Health Organization. She says her work is inspired by Eugene V. Debs and Mary Harris Jones.

In 2018, one of Brisack's papers, Organizing Unions as Social Policy, was published in the Global Encyclopedia of Public Policy and Public Administration. She also won an award at the Southern Literary Festival in Mississippi. In 2019, Brisack relocated to Buffalo, New York, following Richard Bensinger, whom she had worked with on Nissan unionizing, to start a union organizing campaign at SPoT Coffee. The campaign at SPoT was ultimately successful.

In 2020, Brisack joined the Elmwood Avenue Starbucks as a barista. Eight months into working there, in July 2021, Starbucks faced a labor shortage amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Brisack recalled thinking it was "now or never," and launched a then-secret campaign with Bensinger and Workers United to unionize Starbucks.[16][3] In late August 2021, Brisack and 48 other baristas in the Buffalo area wrote a letter to Kevin Johnson, Starbucks chief executive officer, informing the company of their intent to form a union. The Elmwood store counted its votes on December 9, 2021. On December 17, 2021, the National Labor Relations Board certified its union. Three weeks later, Brisack and the other Elmwood baristas organized a strike after a bargaining meeting regarding protections for workers from the COVID-19 Omicron variant had been unsuccessful. Cassie Fleischer, another organizer and union member at the Elmwood store, told The Washington Post that all of the union's requests were denied, including that the company pay "out-of-pocket costs on coronavirus tests".

When asked by her coworkers if she had joined the store with purpose of starting a union, Brisack clarified that there wasn't a "grand scheme", and that she would try to start a union anywhere she worked. Brisack was also employed by Service Employees International Union at the time.

Brisack told the press, "We’ve said from Day One that all we had to do was win one store," and said she recognized that to organize a "great" contract with Starbucks, they would need to unionize additional Starbucks stores around the country, and started a grassroots organizing campaign using social media. The campaign garnered the support of the Democratic Socialists of America, Senator Bernie Sanders, House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a member of Seattle, Washington's city council, where Starbucks is headquartered, Kshama Sawant. As of January 14, 2022, 15 stores had filed for union elections, and by May 11, 2022, that number reached at least 170.