How Unions Can Protect Trans Rights

people from public life. And the day that I'm writing this, President Trump just issued an executive order aiming to ban gender affirming health care for everyone below the age of nineteen in the United States, with promises to weaponize the Justice Department and alter the national Health guidelines for gender affirming care. And unfortunately this is just the start. But this won't be a wallowing in the Doom and Gloom episode, nor will I be laying out the fool proof solution

to get us out of this predicament. Instead, we'll be hearing from two people who are trying to do something

to affect change in the physical world. Last month, Mia and I talked with Neha and Cassie, who are organizers and baristas with Starbucks workers Unite It, and they also co facilitate that union's trans rights action committee called Track And specifically the topic of this episode is how to use union organizing as a way to fight for trans rights and secure access to gender affirming healthcare, which is

unfortunately an increasingly critical issue. We've already had conservative states like Tennessee pressuring private insurance companies to drop covering gender affirming care by blocking insurers from contracting with the state's medicaid program, basically holding it hostage, and now with the federal government threatening gender affirming care and seemingly more and

more restrictions kind of on the horizon. Working outside the state and not relying on government programs like Medicare and Medicaid will only become more necessary, and union organizing is one way to do that. A union contract, union infrastructure, and the collective resources of you and your fellow union workers can help protect trans people in the workplace and get us the things we need. If you already have a union at your workplace, you can get more involved

and fight to prioritize trans rights. And if you don't have a union, you can work to secure access to gender affirm and care through unionizing your workplace and having healthcare protections as a core part of your contract. For more on that topic, I'm going to play the conversation between my fellow union member Mia and Neha and Cassie from Starbucks Workers United, and I'll occasionally pop back in to provide some context. Here's Cassie.

On Tuesday, a judge temporarily halted the order, and on Wednesday, the White House revoked the directive. But this clearly demonstrates what the new priorities are for the conservative government, and they will most certainly try this again, probably in a

more targeted discriminatory fashion to limit the general backlash. But even as the government starts openly allowing discrimination or even encouraging it, discrimination protections is still something that unions can write into their contract.

arbitration procedure. Right, that's sort of, you know, the critical in addition to obviously all the kind of actions you can perform. And you know, we can talk about what things might look like without the NLRA, but for now we have grievance and arbitration procedures still. And even in states where there are legal protections against employment discrimination for trans people, like here in California, the bar to defending yourself legally is obviously a lot higher, including financially than

defending yourself through a grievance procedure at a union job. Right, a grievance procedure at a union job is way more accessible to the average working person than hiring a lawyer and going through a legal system that is totally stacked against you and in favor of the wealthy. Having a union to defend you, you know, with the collective resources of your union that you're part of, and having your shop steward or you be a shop steward and filing

those grievances yourself. It's so much more accessible for regular workers to get enforcement when they are discriminated against. And that's obviously not only relevant for trans people, but it is certainly relevant for trans people.

for more information and a bit of encouragement. In twenty twenty three, Neha co founded TRACK the Trans Rights Action Committee, which is a subcommittee of the Starbucks union that was started to help advocate for trans rights within the union and share information about the challenges trans workers were experiencing. We asked Neha about the process of getting this focus on securing trans healthcare through your union to be something that the union collectively fights for.

more like staff and other organizers. I talked about these issues again, and one thing led to another thing, and they ended up encouraging me to form a subcommittee with their union for trans workers to kind of like build community for us and connect us, but also hear more stories from trans workers about the struggles that they were facing, specifically in accessing healthcare. And so that's kind of how

TRACKS started. And it's been really moving to see how over the past like two three years, this went from like an issue that was affecting like a minority of a minority of workers, right, Like, it's not like every single work at Starbucks is trying to like have facial comminization surgery or anything like that.

and the encouragement to start track. You know, we have to be part of it, I think is on some level, you know, the most basic prerequisite for everything that came after is because trans people have been involved with this campaign from the beginning. We do have so much support and solidarity from our coworkers and from our fellow union comrades, regardless of whether they're SIS or trans, And I think part of that is because we've really showed up and

done the work. This again goes to that kind of like false narrative of there's like some kind of contention between workers rights and trans rights. It's like trans people have been super motivated to get involved in this campaign and for the rights and benefits for every worker at Starbucks. Other workers have seen that, seen the way we've been involved and dedicated, and that's given them the sympathy and solidarity to stand by us for an issue that affects us.

Very you know directly and somewhat narrowly compared to a lot of the other things we're fighting for. So yeah, on some level, I think it comes down to unions are a place where trans people can get involved in political life in a way that's hard to do in other parts of American political life, and you get to build that solidarity, and if you're there at the table, you have a chance to highlight the issues that are

important to us. And if you're fighting for everyone else, they're going to want to fight for you too.

As the functioning of the state and the federal government becomes more and more alienated and distant, or in many cases, increasingly hostile to the likes of you and me, one of the few ways we can still exert power over

our lives is through unions. Regardless of whether you live in Portland, Oregon or Oklahoma City, and specifically as access to trans healthcare becomes more and more of a growing issue, this is becoming more of a core issue itself that you can organize around and can actually build a union around.

well as our general shared concerns. And as more and more things get taken away at the level of federal politics and state politics in many places, people will be looking for recourse. It's like, how do I get back the stability, the protections, the dignity, the power that I've lost, Particularly if you know some of these folks are not

super democratically accountable. People will be looking for how they can build power and how they can find security when the state is not providing it and when the state's

actively undermining it. Actually, and unions are one of the truly critical, irreplaceable answers for protecting yourself, for protecting the people you work with, for protecting your community and for taking back some of the things that they're trying to take away from you, whether that's on the job protections, whether that's economic equity, whether that is your access to trans healthcare, whether that's protections from racism or misogynistic discrimination

in your job and harassment, all of these things. If the state steps away, people should and will look to labor organizing as the answer instead.

And I think labor is such a direct way to give people that power back.

people have experienced homelessness in their lives. The national rate is about seven percent, And those numbers are actually very misleading because it's actually much worse than that, because these demographics skew young significantly because of both the shortness of our life expectancy and how often we get killed. And also there's more people who are realizing that they're trans

now than there ever has before. So those homelessness numbers, we are we are racking up a rate of homelessness that is four times higher than the regular rate, and we're doing iticately less years than it takes the cispopulation to rack up these levels of homelessness. So things are extremely bad for trans people. Transfems make like sixty cents on the dollar of like the average American worker.

community that has relatively few opportunities. I mean, if you're talking about eighteen percent unemployment, then you're talking about people who certainly are going to have difficulty getting employer provided healthcare, let alone employer provided healthcare that's going to include gender affirming care, right, And so Starbucks has been held up as an opportunity for that for a lot of people. It's obviously drawn a lot of us to the company.

Many of us started working there for that exact reason, and then you know, have discovered in many cases that it's actually not so accessible. You know, I can say in my case, it's definitely one reason I started working at Starbucks because I heard like, Hey, if you want facial feminization surgery, go work at Starbucks. That was a

community tip. And then it turned out that I made so little money that I qualified for Medicaid, And in California, where I'm lucky enough to live for now, Medicaid covers those things and is more affordable and accessible than the Starbucks healthcare actually was, So I ended up relying on

Medicaid instead. And I think a lot of us have felt and seen that dissonance between coming to this company looking for opportunity, looking for a place that is inclusive and will hire trans workers, it says, and a stense offers trans healthcare, but then finding out where those gaps are and realizing like, actually it's better for me to stay on Medicaid, which is easy to do because I make so little money at this job. It takes that

shine off. And I think, you know, our economic vulnerability as a group is precisely what drove a lot of us to seek improvements here. It's related to our transness, sure, but it's also like just fundamental working class issues. We need better wages, we need better healthcare. You know, that's something everyone benefits from and everyone can relate to.

harder if you are trans. It's unbelievably difficult. And the promise of just like any job that will hire a trans person is a huge deal because you know, otherwise odds are you walk in the door and they take one look at you and like, you know, you're fucked, right, And.

I think it's all gay people, but no, like all of us applied to Starbucks because like, what other options do we have? Right, And again, in my case, I applied to Starbucks because I needed access to gender firming care. And over like the five years that I've worked here, I've realized that while that benefit might look good on paper, in practice, it's hard to actually qualify for that healthcare.

It can be completely unaffordable for a lot of us. Right, Like last year, I made sixteen thousand dollars in total from Starbucks, and like a disproportionate amount of that income was just going towards healthcare, which doesn't even take into an account like rent or bills.

looking at state by state like healthcare vans. Right, I think it's more important than ever to organize and focus on trans writes and our access to healthcare, our wages, our safety at the workplace. Where else are we going to protect ourselves like that?

for benefits, including healthcare. Failure to get enough hours of work scheduled means losing access to your own health care, and this kind of reflects a more subtle form of employment discrimination.

to gender firm and care. And of course this manager was scheduling enough hours for other workers who weren't trans women, right, And so I've been having like protections in a contract that guarantee a certain number of hours that are scheduling. That kind of thing also makes it easier for us to maintain and keep the benefits that we need.

was less than that. For context, one point five percent for most of us is thirty cents. So yeah, after nine months, that was the best they could do. So it wasn't really a serious like counter proposal, I mean, frankly, it was a fucking insult.

more familiar with. A ULP strike refers to a short term strike action directly tied to an unfair labor practice, which is any act by an employer that violates a worker's legal rights, and unlike ongoing strikes, ULP strikes can happen anytime, not just during contract bargaining. In fact, the Starbucks union has utilized ULP strikes the past few years

to address unfair labor practices. Part of the shared agreement to finish the contract before the year's end was to also resolve outstanding unfair labor practices by the end of twenty twenty four, which did not happen and thus the strikes. And this was a super tight turnaround to organize strikes of this scale. By having a representative or delegate from each store in the union present at bargaining, which is hundreds of workers, that provides a direct link to every

store in the campaign. This was how the union was able to pull off a mass mobilization on an extremely tight turnaround. So when it's time to vote to go on strike, there's already workers across hundreds of stores around the country ready to organize their co workers and get the word out. Contacts with union advocacy groups and a network of allies ranging from campus activists to LGBTQ organizations can also help spread the word about these strikes, raise awareness,

and pull more numbers onto the picket line. On more of a big picture note, once you get these sorts of structures and networks from union organizing, you also gain the actual capacity to deploy them quickly in a way that actually lets you do rapid responses to changing situations, and that capacity is something that transadvocacy just hasn't really had in a long time.

negatively impacting trans people. And so I think the kind of organizing that unions are doing right that we've been doing this entire time, right where we're speaking to people directly, where we're getting them organized, getting them involved, is really a helpful starting point for like turning discontent and turning anxiety and fear around issues into like actual action. I think it's like super essential that we have this contract.

Now we're heading into twenty twenty five, We're heading into a frankly pretty fucking scary time for trans people. We need a contract that protects trans healthcare. We need a contract that guarantees better wages. We mean a contract of only for the protections that it guarantees workers in terms of like safety at work and type of terms of making sure that they're not being taken advantage of at work. Right Well, Starbucks offered us again was an insul It wasn't a real counter proposal.

new plan. And this is as good of a plan as I've ever seen, and I think one of the things that we're going to see, we're going to need to see and we're literally we're just going to have to do over the next few years, I mean ideally over the next couple of months, because we don't have we don't have much time until these people take power.

Is more sort of you know, not just intra union coordination of organizing a trans workers, but it is organizing trans workers across different unions and trying to figure out how we leverage our power, like more broadly to you know, protect ourselves and to fight for our rights and fight to be free.

and share in turn what's been working for us. But it is a capacity we want to build out even further because we are going to need that solidarity between and among labor unions in order to form a coherent response. I mean, as you're saying, the response hasn't been working. The kind of problem solving we're seeing from a lot of politicians basically amounts to sidestepping the issue, pretending it

doesn't exist. You know, maybe not throwing trans people under the bus explicitly by actively supporting our elimination from public life, but certainly not standing up and defending us. And unions are one of the only ways that working people can come together in large groups and pool resources for political activity. And we know there are a lot of problems with

how many unions currently do that. But for those of us who are very committed to struggle for equality, that's not going to compromise and throw some group under the bus. We understand that we have to get involved and be part of labor in order to improve how labor does politics in this country. If we want people to stand up and defend trans rights and defend trans healthcare, and defend our ability to exist in public life, then we have to, like we have to be the ones to

do it. We just we have to do it, And getting involved in your union is one of the only accessible ways that trans people are going to be able to build that kind of political capacity and find allies.

time of monsters. But I think this means that you know, you, like, literally the people listening to this show, the people on this now, we are going to be the people who define what the trans movement is going to be going forward, right, and we have to because we have no other choice. But this also means that, you know, we are going to be the ones who get to set the tone of what we're doing, get to like strategically decide on

how we're going to do this. And I think we have advantages too in the sense that there are ways in which our economic marginalization is sort of helpful in that, you know, if you look at the sort of independent unions that have been forming recently, right, even more so than in conventional unions, unbelievable numbers of those people are trans, right because you know, okay, you're dealing with the population

where it's very easy to get salts. It's very easy to send people in the unionized stores because no one has jobs anyways, and so the you know, the risk of you losing it is like lower because you're already

taking a low wage job, et cetera, et cetera. And I think I think there's there's things about these movements and the way that we're embedding ourselves in also sort of new movements, like the start unionization thing is not that old, right, I think we're well positioned on the sort of front of a bunch of different changes that are happening in both union organizing and in how the American working class works to build something together that can

actually go back on the offensive for the first time in like a decade.

of the episode or something. Go visit our union's website, get in touch with an organizer, and start organizing. I know it can like sound daunting in theory, like what does it mean to start organizing my workplace? But there is a template, there's a plan. You know, We've done this a bunch, We've done it at over five hundred stores at least five hundred and twelve at this point nationwide, which is pretty incredible, especially to have done all that

without yet having even secured our contract. So we have a good template for how to win. And if you just get in touch, then people will reach out to help you. And that does include professional staff, but it also includes people like us who are workers that will be peer to peer, worker to worker organizers, because that's what this campaign has been built on from the beginning, is workers organizing each other. So yeah, I mean, there's really truly never been a time that's better than now

and also never been more essential. It's never been more needed than now. So this is the time. And if you're not a barista or you can't become a barista, then we still really need people to sign a solidarity pledge with our union and get involved that way as allies, as supporters. You know, community support is always critical to

union struggles. We are bargaining our contract with Starbucks right now, and community support is a huge part of what's going to get us, you know, the contract that does deliver the kind of protections and benefits we're looking for, that does set a precedent for what trans inclusive union organizing and union bargaining can look like in this country. It's kind of a terrifying responsibility sometimes. But the thing about this union is because it is one of the exciting

bright spots in American labor right now. I do think a lot of people are looking to us to figure out, well, what are they doing, what's working, what's going well? And I certainly think, you know, the results we get for trans workers in our union have some precedent setting importance. So it is really critical, even if you're not in this union, even if you don't work at Starbucks, to

support this struggle because it will have ripple effects. There will be ramifications for American labor and for the struggle for transliberation as a consequence of how things turn out with us. So yeah, we could really use your support.

go about it. But something like the Starbucks union is actually a very direct way to do that, especially if you're a barista.

week of being there. She'd like talked one on one with everyone at that store, people who were all already wanting better wages, better healthcare, better staffing, and through these conversations,

she organized that store. And that is so fucking amazing to me, and it makes me feel so I don't know, I don't want to sound like patronizing or whatever, and it makes me so proud to see that, right, to see that she's been able to see how our store has organized, how we've spoken to people, how we've reached out to like her co workers, and she's been able to take that and replicate that so easily, get so quickly.

Like when I say with them like a week or two of transferring to the store, I am not exaggerating, she was fucking on.

Like the idea that you have to hide or diminish yourself, or that because you know your trans or otherwise marginalized, that it's impossible for you to build that solidarity with your coworkers and come together for your common issues, It's just not true. People understand their own economic liberation, even if they don't fully just yet. There's always an intuitive

level you understand you're getting screwed over. You can tell that the system is not set up fairly and it's not set up for you to succeed as a working person, And with the right conversations, with the right information, with the right relationships and solidarity that you build with someone else, people can be brought to understand what the solution is and that the situation you currently live under with shareholders and capitalists stealing all of this value from you is unacceptable,

and that there is a way to fight to get back what you've earned with your labor. So for those of you who are listening. You don't have to hide who you are politically or personally to do that work to bring people along. And in fact, if we do hide who we are, then we're not really going to be getting people all the way to where they need

to go. You know, we're not going to build a movement of people committed to liberation by side stepping issues and hiding piece of who we are and saying that, oh, well, you know, transliberation is not really important. That's not how we're going to build like a durable coalition. I think this is a problem that politicians in our country keep making. It's a mistake they keep making of thinking they can ignore or downplay certain issues tensions within their coalitions to

keep those coalitions together. But when you ignore it you don't address it, it just blows up later in the end. Anyway, Yeah, get involved that you really have nothing to lose and nothing you know, accept your change not to be I mean I just realized halfway through. I was like, well, I might as well finish the quote.