All right, hello. Welcome to Current Affairs. I'm associate editor, Alex Skobik.

And I am current affairs contributor, Stephen Prager, and I'm also a reporter for Common Dreams.

And we're here with Jason Woods from the Starbucks Union, Starbucks Workers United. He's a

organizer, national spokesman. He knows what's going on.

Jason, thanks for coming on.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for allowing me to be here today.

Yeah.

All right.

So just to start, I want to ask, you know, for, you know,

anybody out there who might not know much or anything about the Starbucks union,

how did this get started?

Why are Starbucks workers trying to unionize?

So Starbucks Workers United started in about 2021 in Buffalo, New York.

Those braidsoles led the way for over 600 stores now to be able to be

able to be unionized and to five protections against

upper management, against any kind of issues that may arise

in the workplace, to know that braces have rights

as much as any other worker.

Since 2021, we went from, you know, one brave set of baristas up in Buffalo to almost 637, I want to say now at the time of recording, no, 637 stores.

And we're just rapidly growing.

And we're, of course, we're organizing because we deserve to be able to be, you know, protected.

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