Janine Jackson interviewed historian Derek Seidman about the Starbucks strike for the December 19, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: News media talk about the strength and influence of corporations, and we certainly hear about consumers pressed by high prices. You might even find dry, data-based acknowledgement that workers' wages haven't kept up with productivity. Maybe there's even a graph.
Where elite media reliably fail is in, No. 1, incorporating the reality that the consumers they evince so much care about are the same people as the workers whose interests are, shall we say, less honored.
And then, bigger picture, showing no sustained interest in asking what forces could be brought to bear against corporate power, and its whims and prejudices. Where power is, who has it, how it's used: That's the emptiness at the center of much of corporate news media's storytelling, and it's where independent reporters start.
We're joined now by writer, researcher and historian Derek Seidman. He's a regular contributor to Little Sis and to Truthout, where I saw his recent piece, “Why Walmart Wants to See the Starbucks Barista Strike Fail.” He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Derek Seidman.
JJ: I have to start with the phrase that's been in my head from Billy Bragg, but obviously not him alone: “There is power in a union.” I wonder if you could start by bringing us up to date. I think listeners will know that Starbucks workers have been on strike, but that it's still happening and growing might be news to people, because it's not really front page anymore.
DS: The union drive at Starbucks has been one of the most energizing things in the labor movement over the past few years. Now I'm lucky enough to be based in Buffalo, where the union drive started, and I've seen it from the very beginning, and it's been really exciting. Yeah, it just started with a couple shops in Buffalo unionizing about four years ago, and it's snowballed now into…. I forget, I don't know the exact number at the moment, because it's always growing, but it's close to 700 shops that have unionized at this point.
But they haven't been able to successfully get a contract from Starbucks. And so the strike that's been happening for about a month now is an unfair labor practice strike that is aiming to, I think, bring Starbucks to the table to negotiate a fair contract. It's a critical union drive, because Starbucks is one of the major private employers in the US, and it's one of the flagship companies around for food service, coffee, beverage service. So to unionize a massive corporation, a mega-chain like Starbucks, would be a significant victory for the labor movement.
JJ: Corporate owners see it as key, too. And that's why your story is about Walmart et al., and their stake in the barista strike, but a lot of that is not visible to us. So talk about what's going on behind the scenes here.
DS: I took a look at the heights of governance at Starbucks, which is its board of directors. And one thing I found out that hasn't been really talked about much is that there are really tight interlocks between Starbucks and Walmart at their heights of power. The new CEO of Starbucks, Brian Niccol, who Starbucks paid $96 million to come in as CEO last year, he's actually on the board of directors of Walmart, while he's also serving as the CEO of Starbucks.
But that's not all. There's another Starbucks board director named Marissa Mayer, who recently came onto Starbucks as director, who also sits on Walmart's board. She's been on Starbucks board since 2012, so for a long time. So in a way, you have a lot of the same people running Starbucks that are also running Walmart.
And we could go deeper into this. So the person who's basically anchoring Starbucks' board of directors for the last 20 years, her name's Mellody Hobson. She just recently left Starbucks’ board. She's also part of the ownership group with the Walton family that owns the NFL's Denver Broncos.
So there's all types of interlocks between Walmart and Starbucks. And the thing that's striking to me about that is, not just that you have these really two powerful corporations that are so closely tied together, but they really do have a shared interest, I think, in trying to bust this union. Because they're both retail powerhouses, and they both have well deserved reputations for being anti-union and for trying to destroy any inkling of a union. And so I think it's really interesting to see how, at the highest heights, they're really interlocked.
JJ: I think many people think, "Well, why does that matter? I always assume that corporate power, that they all go to dinner together…." How is it meaningful, that these folks are so interconnected with one another?
And I just want to add: I feel as though people have kind of accepted, "Oh, you know what, Walmart, they pay their workers so little that a lot of their workers are on public assistance." And people have bought a scheme that, yeah, corporations are all connected, and, yeah, they all are trying to take blood from a stone in terms of workers. And you have to say, "That's wrong, and we can change that. " What are we hoping to do new here?
DS: I think you're right that a lot of people have the sort of common sense, or the intuition, that these corporate powers interlocked, and these corporations, in different ways, are all part of the same big club that we're not part of, to paraphrase George Carlin, right? But I think it's important, for a couple reasons, to make these connections. One is that I don't think we should be so jaded that we don't put in the work and the effort to try to find the relationships, and find the specific people and names and connections. That stuff is important to not only know, but it also can help in terms of movement strategy.
So, for example, it's not just abstract, right? There's a lot of concrete basis, for example, Starbucks workers and Walmart workers, to make common cause, right? They quite literally have common opponents.
And you could point out other things. So, for example, Starbucks just took on to its board of directors a longtime board director of Chevron. And while Starbucks fashions itself as a sort of climate-conscious corporation, taking on a board director who has millions of dollars worth of stock in Chevron doesn't point to that. And so there's common cause, for example, between Starbucks workers and the climate movement.
And I guess one other thing I would say is that the relationships between these corporations also manifest themselves in common lobbying work that they do, how they unify behind industry groups that really carry out the general agenda of corporate power.
So just to give you one example--I talk about this in the article--both Starbucks and Walmart are members of a huge lobbying organization called the Retail Industry Leaders Association. And, in fact, a recent Starbucks board member was the chair of the Retail Industry Leaders Association. This is a group where a lot of retail industry leaders, corporations like Starbucks and Walmart, pool their resources together to more effectively and more powerfully lobby Congress on anti-union legislation, and things like that. So they're working together behind the scenes to advance their agenda, and it's good for us to be able to map that out and know about it.
JJ: Absolutely. And the Retail Industry Leaders Association, I know that a lot of listeners have never heard that name, and I fault media for that. Journalists should be connecting these dots, mainstream media journalists. And that's why we're so grateful for independent media that actually does connect these dots.
And I just want to say, this is why narrative is so key here, because Starbucks, for example, is like the epitome of privilege, you know, pumpkin spice lattes. And Amazon, that we didn't talk about, but we could, well, it's so wonderful. You press a button and it's at your door. There's a lot of media narrative coming at people that is saying, "You're a consumer and you want these things."
And it's a whole separate story, it's on a whole separate page, who the workers are and what's happening to them, right? And I just wonder if you could talk about what you would hope to see from journalism, what you see from good journalism and don't see from bad journalism. Where can reporters fit in this story?
DS: Yeah. I think it's really important for progressive journalists, for bottom-up journalism, grassroots journalism, whatever you want to call it, I think it's important to focus on doing business journalism, focusing on businesses, corporations, the ruling class, trying to understand them, trying to map them out.
Derek Seidman: "We need to be able to look at businesses, look at corporations, look at corporate power, and look at their narratives and say, 'What does this look like from the other side?'"
I think a lot of traditional business journalism, when it looks at something like Starbucks CEO Brian Niccols coming in and getting paid $96 million, and saying that he's going to institute a rule where all baristas have to finish drinks under four minutes, and write a nice handwritten note on them, traditional business journalists might look at that and almost cover it in a celebratory way, like, "Well, he's really coming in and turning things around."
Baristas experienced that as speed-ups and surveillance, and that's the story I think that we need to be able to tell. We need to be able to look at businesses, look at corporations, look at corporate power, and look at their narratives and say, "What does this look like from the other side?"
And we also need to do a better job of just understanding their networks, and what the power structure looks like. That's why, in the work that I do at Truthout, but also with Little Sis, I try to put a lot of emphasis on doing that mapping of corporate power.
JJ: It's so important, and I thank you so much.
We've been speaking with Derek Seidman. You can find the piece we're talking about, “Why Walmart Wants to See the Starbucks Barista Strike Fail,” at Truthout.org. He also writes for Little Sis. Derek Seidman, thank you so much for joining us this week on Counterspin.
