The Starbucks union wave hits Kansas and Missouri

Siragugal Bricks is a community-owned brick kiln operated by rescued bonded laborers, aiming to rehabilitate and empower them to explore business endeavors and find more sustainable, safer sources of income. Since April 2022, 100 families have worked for Siragugal and local government organizations have helped obtain funding and supplies to facilitate Siragugal’s operations, such as power supplies, a work shed and a borehole for water.

Paying Congressional interns gives lower income students a chance to engage with the legislative process. By bringing increased attention to the lack of paid internships on Capitol Hill, the nonprofit, Pay Our Interns, succeed in pressuring Congress to allocate funds for intern stipends. The funding makes opportunities on the Hill more accessible to those who cannot rely on family financial support to accept an unpaid internship.

After a major fire, labor standards in Bangladesh are improving, but workers must have a voice if these changes are to be sustainable.

The Industrial Commons (TIC) strives to create an inclusive economy based on community between employee-owned social enterprises and industrial cooperatives, creating a more democratized, worker-centric environment. Since 2015, TIC has launched five cooperative businesses, employing more than 100 workers, and is working to grow the number of businesses to 75 by 2025.

As unionization efforts have ramped up in corporate workplaces, employees in less traditional industries have also begun to form independent unions to advocate for their rights. For example, unionization efforts at video game company ZeniMax helped workers secure a pay adjustment, while an independent union formed at the Art Institute of Chicago secured the right for employees to have union representation in disciplinary meetings.

After enduring unfair working conditions, an organizing committee at a Starbucks in Tennessee, later dubbed the Memphis Seven, became the first of the state to attempt, and succeed, to unionize with help from Starbucks Workers United. Their work inspired a nationwide movement, and now over 250 Starbucks are unionized.

Unit of Work, an organization backed by venture capital, helps unions organize and win contracts. Organizers provide free consulting to groups of workers forming unions within their own workplaces. Once a contract is in place, members of the new union can decide to pay Unit of Work a monthly fee — like traditional union dues — to keep providing support.

Liberty Cleaners co-created a curriculum to train immigrant women workers about tech education, green cleaning, and workers’ rights. As the first women-led workers’ hub in the country, the group is organizing and enabling its members with skills that can ensure they receive the fair wages, opportunities, and respect they deserve but are often denied.

A first-of-its-kind worker-led program in Vermont is helping dairy migrant workers to "hold farmers, corporations, and suppliers in the dairy industry accountable for the rights of workers in their supply-chains through a legally-binding agreement." Although not all dairy farm operations have joined in the program as participants, it has been enacted on 64 farms and helped bolster wages and housing situations for migrant farmers.

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) formed the first worker-driven social responsibility program in 1993, and since then they’ve advocated across industries for corporate social responsibility and preventing worker exploitation. The CIW also created the Fair Food Program which has helped add more than $45 million to farm workers’ paychecks.