Al Zone Media. It's it could happen here a podcast where I didn't come up with an intro, So you're getting this one. I'm your host, Bia Wong. This is this is the podcast where actually this is the part of the podcast where after things have fallen apart, you put them back together again. And yeah, the thing that's being put back together here. You know, I really I really should have planned this intro more, but this is this is what happened. This is what happens when we
get in night recordings. But yeah, the thing, the thing we're putting together today is a union at a really interesting kind of very very interesting kind of coffee shop. So with with me to talk about this is Alex Rocky and Madeline from Blue Bottle Independent Union. And yeah, thank you all for joining me.
Yeah, thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk with you all. And so I guess the first thing that I want to start with is can you talk a bit about what Blue Bottle is, because this is a really weird story that I think kind of reveals a lot about the way I don't know, the it is sort of lofty terms, is like the direction that capital has been moving in the past like ten years. Absolutely.
Yeah.
So Blue Bottle is a specialty coffee chain founded by James Freeman in Oakland, California, like two thousand and two. Like most specialty shops, starts off as like this small little cart where you know, one guy is doing all the parts of production, roasting, serving the coffee and all that.
And then.
Throughout you know, the early aughts twenty tens, they do lots of rounds of venture capital financing with like Fidelity and other firms until twenty seventeen, when Nesley purchased a sixty eight percent majority ownership in Blue Bottle at I think a seven hundred million dollar evaluation. And since then, no, no, no, the it was a seven hundred million dollar evaluation. They paid four hundred million dollars too. Yeah, isn't this great?
And since then they've expanded from you know, the tiny little location in California to seventy stores in the US and then over one hundred globally, including in China, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and am I forgetting anywhere else.
I think that's I think that's it.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's a fun time to be a coffee worker.
I guess, Yeah, it's interesting to me the extent to which this it has. I mean, okay, so like a hundred shops is like a lot of shops, but it's not seven hundred million dollars of shops. Like it really seems like this company has like it really has like tech valuation, which is alarming.
Yeah, and I mean it's not uncommon for specialty right now, which is also concerning. Like, as far as I understand, Intelligentsia and La Cologne are also owned in part by venture capital firms, and this is really confusing, especially because for anybody that knows anything about like the economics of
coffee shops, the margins are terrible. Yeah, and really, as far as I can tell, the only value that Blue Bottle offers to Nesley is brand and like the ability to eventually grow to the point where at some point in the future they'll be able to make a little bit of money.
Off of it all, which is a deeply weird business strategy. Yeah, and so I guess I wanted to start here because it feels like a very different organizing terrain than a lot of like, you know that a lot of the shops that we've been that we talked to on this show, because it's like the value this company is only kind of tangentially, you know, all like honest, a macro level, the value of the company is like kind of tenuously
connected to your labor. But on the other hand, like at the individual shop level, you're still dealing with all of the same sort of like you know, like hyper exploitation and trying to like ring every cent out of stuff. So so I guess I wanted to start by kind of asking, like how how did that the weirdness of what of what Blue Bottle is influenced? Like how this campaign started to.
Be pretty frank about our campaign, Like there was a crop of organizers before Gonzo myself, who I would say at this point are kind of the longest running organizers on this campaign. Look, there was a crop before us, so we joined. We did not start the campaign here at Blue Bottle, but I think, I mean it was difficult in the very beginning, Like you know, blue bottle it pays now, like I think starting wage for bristas like eighteen an hour. You know, we just got to
pave up in April. So it's like I, you know, I do make more than minimum wage. It's it can be a tough sell for people to be like, oh, but you know it's like marginally better, Like, oh, I'm working at this like fancy coffee shop, don't they treat
us a little better? Like? But when you look at like also, the coffee industry has a whole on like on a global scale, incredibly exploitative industry that like we are both we play into as people like in the US who make incredibly expensive specialty coffee, but also like
as workers who are exploited ourselves. Like, this is something that I think we have to think about often as like how I don't know, how can our union affect this industry as a whole, How can we affect you know, Nestle as this conglomerate as a whole, But also how can I afford my rent next month?
Yeah?
And so you know, having those kinds of discussions with workers, like putting our day to day labor into this kind of larger context both of the company and of the industry. I mean, I think this campaign, you know, we didn't we didn't start it out independent. We had a little bit of shopping around almost of different unions. I think we were also largely spouted here in Boston specifically, like it is kind of a hotbed for coffee organizing. A
lot of shops around here organized. There've been some incredibly like militant shops out here, Like I think Gonda and I first got introduced to the Bluebell campaign from the Starbucks eight seven four picket line and they were out there for like two months, and I think that that, you know, those kinds of things have really influenced campaign and really influenced our organizing as we go into this like really kind of corporate bougee coffee shops that is
hard to hard to reconcile with, like, hey, I am also an exploited laborer. I you know, I am forced to make coffee all day for customers who are frankly quite rude, and having to have those conversations with your coworkers of like, hey, we deserve better. It might be marginally better than some other place, we still deserve better and we can fight for so much more. So I feel like I went on for a little bit there, but I hope that is.
One thing to kind of add on to that is when organizing in the stores, part of the fact that we're owned by NESTLEI makes it actually much easier because people aren't like easily fooled. We understand that Neslie is putting a lot of money into this company with the hope of future returns you know, in the shortter, medium term.
And also people implicitly understand that the current model that the cafes operate on is kind of reckless, Like because we're owned basically as a venture capital scheme, this means that, you know, we're constantly trying to cut costs that shouldn't be cut. Like even today, Madeline and I ran out of decaf.
Coffy beans because they.
Hadn't placed in order for them, Oh my god. Yeah. And you know, we've run out of you know, milks fairly frequently. We've run out of things like cups and lids and very basic things that you need to run a coffee shop as far as I can tell, only because they need to keep operating costs comically low so that way they can appease their nesty overlords.
Which is pretty funny because the math doesn't make any sense on that right, because it's like, okay, you need to find a way to make like four hundred million dollars. Your solution to this is We're going to delay ordering more coffee beads? Like, is there anyone who like, No, you don't like. This isn't even an accountant situation. This is a like, is there anyone here who understands what an order of magnitude is? What are we doing here?
Wait till you hear about the saffron latte.
Oh god, what a disaster.
Oh yeah, so they don't have enough money to pay us a living wage. But from January until April of this year, we were serving a saffron alatte with and I kid you, not real saffron, both in a syrup and also and a powdered Yeah, no, no kidding. It tasted like Plato. I kind of like that, but not everybody does.
Apparently, you know the first time, This is the first time I've ever said this in my entire life. But I sincerely hope that they were buying the fucking cheap fake stuff they were real saffron. Oh god, Well, to be fair, to be fair, a lot of something people think is real saffron probably is fake. So maybe maybe the scammers were getting something out of this. But dear God, that doesn't make them look good.
But yeah, no, real, somebody who's good with the economy helped me out here. You know, three thousand dollars a week for Saffron and eighteen dollars an hour for Bereiza's.
God, that's gonna like haunt me in my dreams. So what order are gonna add? How much should that lost? Eight Jesus Christ yep, oh no, but not enough money to pay us a living wage. No, that's I don't know that is that is that is jeny wily disgusting.
Like how you know, when you think about it, we can like buy a little over two of them every hour we work, so like that's all we need.
Yeah, yeah, that's also got to be like a kind of radicalizing moment of oh my god, yeah, and our time is worth so little to these people.
This is actually one of the biggest conversations I would have with my cochers that I had to stop having so it'd make them incredibly upset. Was I would break down the mouth of them. I'd be like, you can make a latte in about a minute, two minutes, Like, and those lattes are seven dollars you make seventeen an hour make three lattes and that's more than your hourly wage, and you're making what one hundred of those an hour
in a rush. Like people would get really upset when you're confronted with like the oh wow, the money coming in and then the money that I'm receiving. It'll drive you crazy.
Yeah, And I think, I don't know. That's one of these things where I think in a lot of industries it's kind of that kind of value thing is abstracted because like I don't know, like you're like I just talked about it like an accountant earlier, right, Like you're an accountant. You have no idea how much of well, I guess maybe an accountant would know exactly about a value, Okay,
I don't know. You work in like you work in a factory that produces an auto part, right, like one thing that goes into an assembly of an auto parts, Like you have no like there's no good way for you to like actually understand the sort of value things.
You can get kind of close, but I think it's less visceral than just yeah, this is an item of food that I'm watching all of these people like consume that I'm making, and it's like, yeah, sure, obviously there's like you know, like back down the value chained is also probably like Nessley doing like slave labor, like child
slave labor to get chocolate or something. Right, But I don't know, there's this there's something really kind of just viscerally horrifying about like I've produced eight hundred dollars of coffee and they're paying me eighteen dollars. Yeah, so speaking of eight hundred dollars of coffee this show. Actually, I don't think we've ever gotten the coffee ad, which is sort of remarkable. You'd think at some point.
I don't know, I don't dream really funny, you know, if if on the ad that we're about to go to it's you know, like the Black Rifle Coffee Company or some shit.
Oh god, wait no, I think I think one of the I think one of the insane. It might have been the other one. So there's like Black Rifle Coffee, which is the right wing coffee thing. But then they they condemned Kyle Rittenhouse murdering all those people, and so then there became a second, even more anti wokee coffee shop that was even shittier. I think those people might legitimately have tried to sell it add to our show.
At one point we were like, no, what the fuck's there's We had so many insane ads we had the famously the Washington Highway Patrol put one on here. So all right, let's let's hope you have a reasonable ad instead of that, and we are back. Luckily this is podcasting are not regulated like radio, so I could just fucking say, shit, it's great. We love we love, we love to be we love to be in podcasting. So yeah, this this brings us in no particular bye by by
no particularly rhymer reason. This brings us to a neoxt thing I wanted to sort of talk about, which is about the decision to go independent and about independent unions versus sort of the traditional business unions that have been trying to run a lot of these campaigns. So yeah, I guess wherever you want to start in that whole sort of thickets of issues.
Yeah, the decision to go independent was maybe eight months into our campaign. We did pivot to go independent. We were, you know, kind of we had not affiliated with anyone. We some weird stuff it had happened with some previous business unions and so we were kind of a nice shopping around phase, and I like good friend of the union and someone who has helped us incredibly throughout the campaign, said hey, can I pitch you guys on going independent?
Like and at that time, I mean I can't speak for the other folks, Like I did not know anything about independent unions. This campaign has also been an incredible like learning process for me. And so you know, we talked about a little bit of like, hey, unions, everything that a union does, workers can do and really like trying to like instill this like we can do it ourselves.
I think that like for me, like the dream of independent unionism is like the having autonomy and control of our lives both in the workplace and in our unions at like ads workers and so you know this idea of like oh yeah, this the union just takes care of it. Oh, you pay dues and this stafford does all these things for you. But when you know, when we filed our petition, you know I filled that out, it's not that hard.
You know.
There are so many things where it's like oh, yeah, the union will take care of it, or oh this is what dues pay for, Like oh, we can have a lawyer look at it. At no part of this process was there really anything that workers could not have done. Did we seek legal advice? Absolutely? Did we have people help us out who maybe knew more than I did. Yes, But that isn't to say that we were not learning
the entire time. So to me, that's like the big ethos of independent unionism of like learning it, doing it, teaching others. I think it has been an incredible opportunity.
I think also like we really are committed to like rank and file democracy and so having workers have they say in all major decisions, especially like now that we have had our election, we're moving into bargaining hopefully soon, like being able to have workers submit proposals, have workers look and do open bargaining, have them look at every at the contract at every step of the way, and
things like this, having people participate in their unions. I mean, I think that we are in a time of like the revitalization of the labor movement, and I don't want workers to get left behind in that. Like I think that we, you know, like we are the labor and so being able to control our unions and lead them in the ways that we want to as democratically as we can. To me, it's been what it's all about. Did that mean that it was an easy campaign. No,
it was a lot of work. It was a lot of work that maybe a paid staff or would have done, but we did it ourselves and it took longer, and it took a lot of education as well of explaining to my coworkers of like, hey, we want to form a union and it's not just this thing that kind of happens to you, Like, actually, you have to make it happen now if you want to do it. So I think that for us the choice to go independent independent has like only reaped benefits so far, it's been
this wonderful thing. I think that we are all much better for it and much closer like as co workers. I think that people are more excited about their union. But it certainly, you know, it took a lot of work, It took a lot of time, It took a lot of trust from our coworkers as well.
Yeah, I mean one of the most formative experiences that has stuck with me, and I think I might have mentioned this in the interview before the interview was when we were shopping around with business unions Rocky and I had sat down with somebody from a fairly large one, and we're trying to ask all of these questions about, you know, would we be able to have rank and file control of our own campaign, would we be able to you know, legitimately examine unconventional tactics for launching or
sustain our campaign, you know, what is the actual process for requesting finances from the larger affiliate if we needed it, And more or less, what we were told by the staffer was that none of this would be in the hands of rank and file, and it would either be determined by what this particular staffer thought was best or you know, they would have to get approval from you know, whoever was above them, which, despite the fact that this person was within the reform caucus of their union, did
not strike them as being anti democratic at all.
Yeah.
Yeah, And at that point, I mean, you know, we'd been talking to our co workers for months at that point, you know, hanging out with them, becoming building community, and it didn't seem like there was really anything that you know, a larger business union would have had to offer to
begin with. In fact, in my own experience, the idea of affiliation has more or less come across as an implicit threat of how else you're going to take on Nesley without all of the money and resources that we have but won't let you use anyways.
Yeah, which is like not a thing. I don't know, if you've gotten to the point where your union is threatening you, and this is something that like happens more than you'd think, Like, you know, but listeners of this show may or may not have listened to some previous episodes talking to some of the reformed nurses slates that
we've had on the show where that's happened. But if your union is threatening to you, something has gone very badly wrong, and you're probably you're in a position where you're probably going to be having to fight yourself out of a deep hole. And one way you can avoid getting in there in the first place is by not digging the hole and building something yourself. Yeah, exactly.
And I mean, you know, one of the things that we heard a lot about at Labor Notes two weeks ago at this point was people within larger unions talking about how to fight off staffers or bureaucrats. And I'm personally very glad that we are not in that fight ourselves because we have Nestlie to take care of.
Now.
Yeah.
Yeah, the the sort of two way fight between you your boss and then also your union staffers is not a thing that usually goes well for you. It's a bad situation to be it. I would recommend of waiting it.
Yeah.
Yeah, So I guess the next thing that I'm sort of interested in is, you know, so you talked a bit about how sort of being an independent union like made the union closer. How else did that influence how the campaign went? And how is like how how has it been going in the past, Like, I know, I know you won your election remembering there, right, Yeah, it was an election with Sorry it has been. This has been the most chaotic two weeks I've had in several years.
So, I mean, it's just like Lennin said, there are years where you fuck around and weeks where you find out. All Right, I'm gonna get so much shit for that comment now. Anyways, cool Zobia is not endorsed. Letting yes, two good lines.
I promise I only said it for the joke. Yeah.
Our campaign started April third. There are six stores in the Greater Boston area with roughly sixty seven sixty five workers across all of them. On April third, fifty workers from five of those stores handed cards like union authorization cards to management, announcing our campaign, our union, and asking
for voluntary recognition by noon on April eighth. Management accepted the cards, but then did not recognize the union voluntarily by newon April eight, and instead they put up a flyer in the back of the house of all the cafes saying that they would respect the outcome of an election, at which point, no, yeah, they didn't even publicly acknowledge us.
So at that point, across five of the six stores, we had to walk out on the eighth, and then that same day went downtown to file for an election with the NLRB, which despite the fact that we called them a week in advance to be like, is it okay if a lot of people show up kind of spontaneously to file for an election, and despite the fact that the person in the office said, yeah, it's fine, so long as like less than one hundred and you don't have like a sound stage or anything you got
to set up and if you do get a permit. Once we walked up to the office at least four DHS cop cars like s in front of us, and they would only let Rocky go into the office to file for our election while being escorted by a DFS agent the entire time.
You know, sometimes you get just these This is something that's been happening, so like, I have no idea when this episode is going to go. This is being recorded the middle of the protest. Like literally today, seventy year old professors are getting dragged out of like protests by cops, And like, this is one of these moments where when when when things actually happen, these really visceral demonstrations of
like what the society you actually live in is. And I don't think there's like a more perfect demonstration of the National Labor Relations Board sometimes will help you, but also also is very clearly a bureaucratic mechanism of a police state. Then the cops show up and only one of you could go talk to the NLRP person escorted by police. That is wild.
Yeah.
It was also the same day as the solar eclipse. Oh my god, it was a very magic day. Yeah, nothing was more enchanting than the fact that we got to watch the eclipse. When we otherwise would have had to have been at work that rules.
Yeah, yeah, I get I guess. I guess that's another way to get to get turned out for a walkout. It's like, hey, look we're gonna go a walk and also you could go see the eclipse instead of serving rich people coffee.
And it worked.
Hell yeah.
Yeah. But all that is to say is I think being independent, let's us do fun and creative things.
Yeah.
Yeah, thank you for remembering what the actual question was.
Like, I think we're allowed to be a little silly with it, and we're allowed to have fun, and we're allowed to come up with ideas that maybe other like haters would shoot down. But when me and my coch are saying, yeah, that would be cool and fun, we just get to do it and there's like joy and creativity and all of it.
Yeah.
Yeah, So I guess you know, do you have anything else that you want to make sure we get you before we sort of wrap things up. Yeah.
So.
I mean, as much as we've talked about a lot of the benefits of independent unionism, one of the downsides is that we have no money, and if people would be so gracious as to give us some of their money. You can go to link t r dot ee slash Blue Bottle Union, so link Tree slash Blue Bottle Union,
where there'll be a link to our GoFundMe. I'll also say that since we don't have staffers, our overhead is incredibly low and this will once again allows us to you know, actually do cool and fun things like we were able to pay everybody that did the walkout because we were able to raise enough money in the in between from April third to eighth, which was incredible.
I have like some personal stuff when it comes to like filing independent and talking with a lot of people that I know, I feel like it actually helped the fact that we were independent because you know, there was none of that background oh unions. You know that there's a big influence when it comes to like unions and like big scary unions taking all your money through union dues and YadA YadA. But you know, with filing independent, you know we can just be like, actually we don't
have to worry about anything like that. We set union dues democratically and like, and so it's just been like really helpful for when we were getting organized and everything. Just relaying that idea to coworkers to family, friends and everyone just kind of like helps them be like, oh that makes sense.
Yeah.
I mean the old like you know, anti union talking point of like you know, there being an outside organization, Yeah, really falls flat with an independent union because it literally
is just you and all of your friends. And then on top of that, it also means that management hasn't known how to respond to us, because in the week leading up to our election, which we won thirty eight to four this past Friday, May third, Yeah, they put out like three or four different flyers, one talking about business unions that have signed management's rights clauses in the most fucking like I'm not owned, I'm not owned. I'm still going to get my mensments rights claus.
Like ever.
And then also another flyer about union dues and examples of business unions that you know, to anybody that doesn't know anything about unism, would seem high.
Yeah.
They also, in a letter that they sent out to all of us the night before our election talked complained about us seeking external assistance, and all of this just completely falls flat because you know, it's literally we've done those mostly by like having pot luckx together to talk about all of our issues at work and or like movie nights or some shit, and it's much tougher to convince people to vote against the person that they're on the floor with eight hours a day.
Yeah, the overall like way that these papers were received is has been like met with kind of like a lot of skull emojis in group chats and like just kind of like generally making fun of the whole thing. And I think that like that's been really good for morale as well, because like, you know, it's just not getting to us. It's goofy and like just doesn't work.
So and also the way that they've been handing these flyers out, I don't know about like other cafes, but at mine specifically, it's been kind of awkward, like haha, cover my eyes, here's this flyer that I have to hand you kind of thing, and it's just like okay, yeah.
Yeah, it really seems like it is something, you know, okay different. I'm not I'm not going to do my tangent about the infiltration of political parties here.
But yeah, I mean, really, political cults within the Greater Boston area continuously subvert and undermine Union elections are not just elections, but campaigns as well. I won't name examples because these same cults are also incredibly vindictive and they
will try to dox me. But this is also the implicit threat that you know, like if you know, they can't turn a union into their own stupid vanguard, then they will try and push through something that rank and file don't want and try and undermine or tank the campaign.
Yeah, and that's that's something I think like to take to Okay, so to take a little step back. So, yeah, one of the things that's very common in union in sort of like local union spaces is there will be like there'll be like a local of a union or like maybe sometimes its own union that's just run by a cult, and these sort of like these sort of like I don't know, sometimes you're Stalins and under Trotskyites sometimes,
like it depends, the ideology changes to some extent. But because because of like the you know, the because because you can run like a staff union with like five people, right, this is this is a pretty good way for them to sort of like like you know, gain something that looks like political power, and like it's a way for them to bring other people who don't know what's going on into like the influencers of their organization, and they this can get really bad and really dangerous, at least
to the stuff you're talking about, where yeah, they start trying to sabotage campaigns because they're not you know, like these groups aren't actually in this for you know, like they're not they're not in this for class struggles by whatever they you know, will say about it. They're they're in this specifically to expand the influence of their own party. And you know, when you try to like actually do your own thing, this stuff happens.
Yeah, one hundred percent. It's uh, also really telling that despite the fact that you know, some of these groups are like known for undermining campaigns in this way or for harassing staffers that you know, don't play ball with them or whatever, that they continue to do the entriest thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't have any good ideas for how to subvert that, but I'm sure dear listeners will send me many of them.
Yeah. I think also at some point we're going to do the micro We're gonna do the micro sect episode. In Microsect episode to the to like introduce people to the basics of like, hey, you are like the range of tiny political parties in the US that are actually
cults that show up at protests all the time. So yeah, maybe maybe maybe that will help too, because I think a lot of it is people just you know, they're you run into like the World Workers Party, and like, you don't know that this party is a weird cult, right, They're just sort of talking about workers stuff. Yeah, so I think education will help with it too, but the bureaucratic maneuvering stuff is like the only thing they're good at because they're all these like weird micro party formations.
So I don't know, yeah, one hundred percent. I only way that I think might help is you know, horizontalizing the structure somewhat, but then you still run into like the issue of like social capital within that structure. So if you know, somebody is savvy enough, they can still indoctrinate people into a silly cult.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, that's that's just something that you're gonna have to I mean, and we should also mention too, like these thing these groups like they work with larger unions too sometimes, Like so one of the most famous examples of this is Pride at Work which is a really big afl CIO thing, but it's also jointly run with the Party of Socialism Liberation, which is another one of these cults because of a bunch of like long running actions, even though like a bunch
of their really senior staffers unbelief to be transphobic, and you know, there's there's a whole thing there. But yeah, this is something that is not just a problem with independent unions and not just a problem with sort of like random locals. It can and does get into actual like national unions. On the other hand, one way to avoid this is to in fact organize your own union and don't let them be.
So this is actually something that we've thought consciously about with our own union is that on the we sent out a community support forum for people that wanted to show up the data, we announced our campaign, and on the form specifically, we made people tick a box saying that they wouldn't endorse or try to fly, or for or otherwise promote any group that they might have affiliation with, including political parties or you know, otherwise organizations that are
not you know, our specific union. And so far that's worked.
Hell yeah.
I would also say, like in our constitution by laws. I don't know if that if it's in the current ones. We're revising them soon anyways. But the conversation that we've had before also like people in like eyboard positions, what, yeah, what kind of affiliations can they have to outside political parties? Like where where are we drawing the line on that? Like that's something that I think we also considered very early on as well for people in the union.
Yeah, And I think there's another aspect there too, which is like another thing that can happen to your union is that it gets eaten by the Democratic Party machine.
And that's happened to I mean, like this is this is a lot of how like these giant business unions became business unions, is they became basically these like lobbying firms on behalf of like whatever random like local democratic machine is running, Like this happens to Chicago, Like all the time you get these like just like the most important machine like candidates you've ever seen come out of the Democratic Party who are like guys who are like
so comically corrupt that like you know, you're they're like walking down the street and like like bundles of cash are falling out of the suit cases and they're getting endorsed by like the team stars, and it's like, well, you know, okay, I wonder what happened there legally legally legally conjecture, but you.
Know, who's to say, really, yeah, you know, it just so happens that they have these large briefcases full of cash. Nobody can really say where the cash materialized.
Yeah, but amazingly, I was actually going to go on a different rancho political parties, So I'm going to circle back to there to close this out. Which is one of the nice things about independent unions is that, you know, it's something that all three of you were sort of getting at, which is that, like employers have been fighting these sort of large corporate unions business unions for like
one hundred years now, right. They know how they operate, they know how their campaigns work, they know what levers to push against them. On the other hand, they have not been fighting you, specifically, random listener of this show, and you, specifically, random listener of this show, and your coworkers can do things to surprise them and can do
things in ways that they don't understand. And you know, you have we have a moment, like right now, Like in like five years, they'll probably have worked out a
bunch of stuff aboutw to break independent unions. But right now, like literally right now, we have a we have a master strategic advantage because their playbook wasn't written to deal with people who are running these sort of like very low to the ground, very agile, very nimble, very sort of like you know, these spontaneous and creative campaigns, and you can use that to beat the crap out of your boss and get more money from them. So this is the BA endorsement of doing doing fun things with
unions that your bosses don't expect. Hell yeah, yeah, So I think unless there's anything else where where else can people find you, we'll have a link to your link tree in the description. Is there anywhere else like social media stuff where people can find the union?
Yeah, Our social media for Twitter and Instagram is bb I Union and then on TikTok, I believe it is BBIU sixteen. Cool.
We will have that in the description too. Yeah, and thank you all so much for coming on. And yeah, make make Nestlie bleed for us.
Yeah, thanks so much for having us. We can't say how much we appreciate it.
Yeah, I thank you of course, and yeah, this has been naked happened here. You can find us in the usual places, and yeah, you too can also go start your own union and make your bosses suffer from It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources.
Thanks for listening.