“I’m almost always at the bar if I open it,” said Brisack, who has an aesthetic at the thrift store and long reddish-brown hair that splits in half. “I like steamed boiled milk, latte it.” The door to Starbucks is not the only one that has been opened to her. As a graduate of the University of Mississippi in 2018, Ms. Brisack was one of 32 Americans to receive Rhodes Scholarships that fund her studies in Oxford, England. Many students seek scholarship because it can pave the way for a career in the top ranks of law, academia, government or business. They are motivated by a mixture of ambition and idealism. Mrs. Brisack became a barista for similar reasons: She believed that it was simply the most urgent claim of her time and her many talents. When it joined Starbucks in late 2020, none of the company’s 9,000 locations in the US had a union. Ms Brisack hoped to change that by helping to unify her stores in Buffalo. It is unlikely that she and her colleagues have far exceeded their goal. Since December, when its store became the only corporate-owned Starbucks in the United States with a certified union, more than 150 other stores have voted for the union and more than 275 have submitted election documents. Their actions come amid rising public support for unions, which reached its highest level since the mid-1960s last year, and a growing consensus among center-left experts that an increase in union membership could move millions middle class workers. Mrs Brisack’s weekend change represents all of these trends, as well as one more: a change in the views of the most privileged Americans. According to Gallup, union approval among college graduates rose from 55 percent in the late 1990s to 70 percent last year. I have seen it first hand in more than seven years of reporting on trade unions, as the growing interest among white-collar workers coincided with a wider enthusiasm for the labor movement. Talking to Ms. Brisack and her fellow Rhodes scholars, it became clear that change had reached even this rare group. The American scholars of Rhodes I met from a generation earlier typically said that while in Oxford, they were middle-class guys who believed in a mediocre role for government. They did not spend much time thinking about the unions as students, and what they believed was likely to be skeptical. “I was a child of the 1980s and 1990s, immersed in the centrist politics of the time,” wrote Jake Sullivan, a 1998 Rhodesian who is President Biden’s national security adviser and a top aide to Hillary Clinton. On the contrary, many of Ms. Brisack’s classmates in Rhodes express reservations about the market-oriented policies of the 1980s and 1990s and the strong support of trade unions. Many told me they were excited about Senators Bernie Saunders and Elizabeth Warren, who made the revitalization of the labor movement a priority in their 2020 presidential campaigns. Even more than other indicators, such a change could herald a return for unions whose turnout in the United States has been at an all-time low for nearly a century. This is because the kind of people who earn prestige scholarships are the kind of people who later hold positions of power – who decide whether to fight the unions or negotiate with them, whether the law should make it easier or harder. employees to get organized. Again, Jaz Brisack is not waiting to find out.

The fight in Buffalo

Ms. Brisack moved to Buffalo after Oxford for another job as an organizer at Workers United, where she also worked as a college mentor. Once there, he decided to do a second concert at Starbucks. “Her philosophy was to get to work and organize. “He wanted to learn about the industry,” said Gary Bonadonna Jr., a senior official at Workers United in upstate New York. “I said okay.” In its response to the campaign, Starbucks has often accused “outside union forces” of intending to harm the company, as its chief executive, Howard Schultz, suggested in April. The company has identified Ms. Brisak as one of those interventions, noting that it is earning a salary from Workers United. (Mr Bonadonna said she was the only Starbucks employee in the union’s payroll.) But the impression given by Ms. Brisack and her fellow organizers is love for the company. Even when they point out flaws – understaffing, inadequate training, low pay for seniority, which they want to improve – they embrace Starbucks and its particular culture. They talk about a sense of camaraderie and community – many of whom are regular customers among their friends – and enjoy their coffee experience. In the mornings when Mrs. Brisack’s shop is not busy, employees often make tastings. A Starbucks spokesman said Mr Schultz believed workers did not need a union if they believed in him and his motives, and the company said senior pay increases would take effect this summer. One Friday in late February, Mrs. Brisack and another barista, Casey Moore, met at the two-bedroom rental shared by Mrs. Brisack with three cats, to discuss the union’s breakfast strategy. Naturally, the discussion turned brown. “Jaz has a very barista drink,” Ms Moore said. Ms Brisack explained: “There are four blonde ristretto shots – this is a lighter roasted espresso – with oat milk. It is essentially an iced latte with oat milk. If we had sugar syrup, I would take it. “Now that it no longer exists, it is usually clear.” That afternoon, Ms. Brisack had a Zoom call from her living room with a group of Starbucks employees interested in joining. It is an exercise that she and other Buffalo organizers have repeated hundreds of times since last fall, as workers across the country have been trying to follow suit. But in almost every case, Starbucks employees outside of Buffalo have approached the organizers and not the other way around. UPDATED June 17, 2022, 4:50 p.m. ET This particular group of workers in Mrs. Brisac’s Oxford college town seemed to demand even less hard selling from most. When Mrs. Brisac said she too had gone to the University of Mississippi, one of the employees fired her, as if her fame had preceded her. “Oh, yes, we know Jazz,” the worker exhaled. Hours later, Ms. Brisack, Ms. Moore, and Michelle Eisen, a longtime Starbucks employee who also joined the organization, gathered with two union lawyers at the union office in a former car factory. The National Labor Relations Council was counting ballots for elections at a Starbucks in Mid-Ariz. – the first real test of whether the campaign is rooted nationally, and not just in a trade union stronghold like New York. The room was tense as the first results came in. “Can you feel my heart beating?” Mrs Moore asked her colleagues. Within minutes, however, it became clear that the union would win in a failure – the final count was 25 to 3. Everyone was going a little crazy, as if they had all suddenly entered a dream world where the unions were much more popular than them. had never imagined. One of the lawyers left a reason before thinking: “Whoever organized down there…” Ms Brisak seemed to be in the mood when she read a text from a colleague on the group: “I’m so happy to cry and eat a week’s ice cream cake.”

A black antifa t-shirt in the formal

Mrs. Brisak once seemed to be on a different path. As a child, he loved Lyndon Johnson and imagined running for office. He was elected president of the College of Democrats at the University of Mississippi. She had developed an interest in working history as a teenager when money was sometimes tight, but it was largely an academic interest. “He had read Eugene Debs,” said Tim Dolan, the university’s fellowship adviser at the time. “It was like, ‘My God. Wow. ‘” When Richard Bensinger, former director of the AFL-CIO and United Automobile Workers, came to speak on campus, he realized that organizing the unions was more than a historical curiosity. He talked about an internship in a trade union campaign in which he participated in a nearby Nissan factory. It did not go well. The union accused the company of waging a racially divisive campaign and Ms Brisak was disappointed with the loss. “Nissan never paid any consequences for what it did,” he said. (In response to allegations of “bullying tactics”, the company said at the time that it had tried to provide information to employees and clear up misconceptions.) Mr. Dolan noted that she was tired of the prevailing politics. There were times between the second year and the new year when I would lead her to something and she would say, ‘Oh, they’re very conservative.’ I would send her an article in the New York Times saying, “Neoliberalism is dead.” In England, where she arrived in the fall of 2019 at the age of 22, Ms. Brisac was a regular at a “solidarity” movie club that screened films about workers’ struggles around the world and wore a sweatshirt with the head of Karl Marx written on it. He freely reinterpreted the term “black tie” at an annual dinner in Rhodes, wearing a black dress-coat over a black T-shirt. “I went and got dresses and everything – I wanted to fit in,” said a friend and colleague from Rhodes, Leah Crowder. “I always…