Retail Rising

Introducing the second edition of the Utah Labor Bulletin

By Ian V

Local labor punched hard this winter; up and down the Wasatch Front, half a dozen organized Starbucks stores participated in a nationwide strike while in the mountains, organized ski patrollers held a 12-day-long strike which gained national attention.

This issue will focus on two local retail industry fights, Starbucks and a return to WinCo. No Contract, No Coffee was a report from the Salt Lake Starbucks picket line on Christmas Eve published several days after the picket; newly published here are two articles from Matty J, one of the main organizers behind the WinCo union, the first providing a timeline of their campaign and the second reflecting on what they could have done differently; finally, this issue closes out with the story of a Starbucks store which lost its union campaign. Throughout the issue, readers will come face to face with the realities of organizing in retail stores, where precarity, high-turnover, and low wages both demand and hinder unionization. While the victories explored in this issue appear to be balanced out by setbacks, as Matty’s articles highlight, organizing in the retail sector is an iterative process, and workers must engage with our losses just as much as with our wins.