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A former White House immigration official weighs the challenges ahead as the administration prepares for a spike in migrant arrivals.

The Biden administration announced Friday that it’s lifting controversial pandemic-related border restrictions under which the US has expelled thousands of migrants without giving them access to their legal right to apply for asylum.

The so-called Title 42 policy, first enacted by the Trump administration in March 2020 at the outset of the pandemic, will end on May 23. It has allowed the US to expel migrants without a hearing before an immigration judge more than 1.7 million times, with many being caught trying to cross the border multiple times. The policy has been a source of internal strife at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where scientists initially opposed its implementation; it even spurred a senior State Department official, Harold Koh, to rebuke the administration as he left his job.

The CDC says in its Friday order that preventing migrants from entering the US is “no longer necessary to protect the public health,” though public health experts outside the agency have long argued that it was never necessary. It’s a seismic change in US policy for migrants who have been stranded in northern Mexico for years, where they have been targets of violence and extortion.

It also brings challenges for Biden administration officials, who face the enormous task of safely and humanely processing what will likely be a sharp increase in the number of migrants arriving on the southern border in the coming months. The administration is preparing for a worst-case scenario of as many as 18,000 migrants arriving daily after Title 42 is lifted, up from an average of about 5,900 in February. Meanwhile, officials will also have to fend off inevitable attacks from Republicans eager to falsely depict President Joe Biden as an “open borders” Democrat ahead of the midterm elections.

I discussed some of those challenges with Tyler Moran, a senior adviser for migration to Biden who stepped down from her post at the end of January. She previously served as the executive director of the immigrant advocacy group Immigration Hub. Moran is now working as an independent consultant. Our conversation is edited for length and clarity.

How do you anticipate this policy change impacting the number of migrants arriving on the southern border?

First and foremost, people will have the right to ask for asylum. We don’t know what the numbers are going to look like and there is a lot of uncertainty. That is why the administration is planning and gaming out different scenarios at the border and what resources will be needed for each one.

The determination by the CDC that there is no longer a public health justification to expel migrants doesn’t mean that the borders are open. Not everyone is going to seek asylum, and not everyone is going to qualify for asylum. Some people will be processed into the country to await their court date and others will be deported because they either don’t request asylum or don’t qualify for it.

The number of repeat encounters at the border increased significantly due to Title 42, so we should anticipate that those encounters will decrease. On the other hand, cartels and smuggling networks are highly sophisticated and will misrepresent any change in US policy to recruit people. Human trafficking is part of their business model. So there is no doubt that they would use any shift in Title 42 to message that everyone should come.

That’s why the administration has an interagency plan to address any increase in migration. In addition to being prepared now to process people in an orderly way, the administration is also implementing strategies that were put in motion last year, including addressing the push factors that force people to leave their homes, creating more legal channels for people to migrate and working with countries in the region to go after smugglers.

What will need to happen before Title 42 is lifted in order to ensure that immigrants are processed at the border safely and humanely?

There has already been a lot of planning and also lessons learned from last year. The plan includes surging personnel and resources to the border — and having the capacity to decompress a sector to avoid overcrowding in Border Patrol stations and ensure that there can be orderly processing. That means moving people to other sectors of the border and working with other agencies for transportation, health care, sanitation, and other resources.

DHS recently announced a Southwest Border Coordination Center to coordinate planning, operations, and interagency support. Having DHS physically in the room with other agencies makes a huge difference. It allows for real-time troubleshooting. And you can’t underestimate the ways in which the federal government can be siloed without deliberative coordination.

Do you think the administration is giving itself enough time to implement those systems with a May deadline?

I do, because they’ve been planning for months, but it doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to be messy. The White House is very involved in running an interagency process to ensure that it is all hands on deck.

Why do you think this decision to lift Title 42 is coming at this particular moment?

We knew it was going to come at some point. The CDC assesses the order every two months. The president indicated in the State of the Union that, because of the progress made on combating COVID, we are moving back to a more normal routine. That includes taking down mask mandates, people going back to school and work, and that also means that the immigration system returns to normal. The administration is also standing up a vaccination regime for people who will be processed into the country.

There are a lot of public health experts outside the CDC who said that there was never a legitimate public health rationale for Title 42. What do you make of those statements?

That they are speaking from a place of knowledge and have a right to share their medical opinion.

Republicans are already gearing up to make this an electoral issue heading into the midterms, regardless of how things shake out once the policy is lifted. How should Democrats anticipate and respond to those GOP criticisms?

Republicans were screaming open borders when Title 42 was in place and a million people were expelled. So their posturing isn’t based on facts; it’s just an electoral strategy. I will note that in the 2018 midterms, many Republicans ran on a “caravan” of migrants coming to the border and lost their races.

It is important for Democrats to articulate to the American public where they stand, which is for a well-managed border and a fair, orderly system. Most of the public supports this approach. If Democrats don’t say anything, it puts them at a disadvantage because Republicans are able to fill the void.

The administration can do a lot to fix the immigration system but there is a need for legislative action to update immigration laws, to fund [US Citizenship and Immigration Services] to be able to adjudicate asylum claims efficiently and fairly and to create an earned path to citizenship for those that are here. But Republicans have blocked those efforts.

Looking ahead, migration at the southern border has typically subsided during the hot summer months in previous years. But do you think that migration patterns have changed?

If you just look at last year, seasonal trends are a thing of the past. There has been a very significant shift in migration, both in sending countries and the composition of people.

In 2014, it was largely people from the Northern Triangle of Central America who were fleeing because of violence. Now, we have massive movement across the Western Hemisphere attributed to corruption and instability, but also because of Covid economies and climate change.

The administration’s approach acknowledges that these challenges cannot be solved through border policy alone — or even US policy. We have to work with partners in the region to develop a hemispheric strategy. That means other countries taking in refugees, bolstering their asylum systems, creating more legal channels for people to be able to work or be reunited with family, and targeting cartels and smugglers who are preying on people’s hope.

While the US must have a robust asylum policy, we also need to acknowledge that not everyone coming to our border is seeking asylum and we need better solutions to address the other reasons that forced them to migrate.

What’s your assessment of the progress that the administration has been making on its regional approach to migration?

There is a strong commitment to creating new legal channels, protection in the region, and expanding refugee numbers, but this is all going to take time.

I’ll give you one example. The administration reinstated the Central American Minors (CAM), which provides unaccompanied children with a safer, legal pathway to migrate.

The Trump administration shut the program down and it took time to put systems back in place; the program depends on the same refugee resettlement system that the former administration also gutted and that was working to resettle Afghan allies; and Covid forced embassies to work at reduced capacity. So the current administration had to start from scratch in a pandemic.

Now that the infrastructure has been rebuilt, we should see many more children processed under the CAM program this year.

You come from the immigrant advocacy world, but you also served in the administration, which has at times been at odds with immigrant advocates on border policy. How do you reconcile the interests on both sides?

None of these challenges are easy. I think there’s common ground on figuring out the future of asylum processing. Our asylum system simply wasn’t built for the number of people who are seeking protection and there is a need for legal services to help people navigate the system. There also needs to be collective thinking about solutions for the people who are migrating for economic reasons and/or climate change.

There is alignment on the legislative changes that are desperately needed. There just aren’t enough visas — or the right kind of visas — to meet the demand for employment or family reunification, but Congress has not updated immigration law in 30 years.

Republicans who are complaining about the border have a responsibility to do their job so employers have the workers that they need and it doesn’t take 20 years to reunite with a family member. They also need to ensure that [US Citizenship and Immigration Services] has enough funding to clear the backlog, process visas, and adjudicate asylum claims. Without this, the administration is working with one hand behind its back.

The administration can do a lot, but they can’t fix the immigration system on their own.

The Fifth Circuit’s opinion, moreover, is so broadly worded that it could potentially strip any leader of any major protest of their First Amendment rights.

Recall that, under the Fifth Circuit’s opinion, a protest leader is potentially stripped of their constitutional rights if they authorize, direct, or ratify any illegal activity by protesters. This could be illegal activity central to an act of civil disobedience — say, protesters who oppose mask mandates enter a government building maskless, in defiance of a local ordinance — or it could potentially be something only tangentially related. A protest leader could potentially lose their First Amendment rights if they advise a bus carrying protesters to drive slightly above the speed limit in order to make it to the protest on time. Or if they advise a protester to park their car in a no-parking zone.

Indeed, under the traditional common law rule, someone who sets foot on another person’s land without their permission has typically committed the tort of trespass. So a protest leader could potentially lose their First Amendment rights if they encourage protesters to walk in a wide formation where a few of them occasionally spill over from the streets onto private property.

To be clear, a protest leader is still responsible for their own actions. Someone who defies a mask mandate could potentially be prosecuted for refusing to wear a mask, for example. But, under Claiborne, a protest organizer’s decision to violate one law does not normally permit them to be held liable for someone else’s decision to violate a completely different law.

The courts keep treating this case like a hot potato that needs to be passed to someone else

After the Fifth Circuit’s 2019 decision, at least three different courts have had the opportunity to correct this error and restore Mckesson’s constitutional rights. But most of the judges who’ve touched this case refuse to take responsibility for it.

One notable exception is Judge Don Willett, a Trump-appointed judge on the Fifth Circuit, who initially joined Jolly’s opinion inventing a new limit on the First Amendment. Months after the Fifth Circuit’s original decision in Mckesson, Willett published a rare and belated dissent admitting that his initial vote in this case was wrong.

“I disagree with the suggestion that directing any tort would strip a protest organizer of First Amendment protection,” Willett wrote in his new dissent. He added that, had the Fifth Circuit’s rule been in effect in the 1960s, one of its victims would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King’s last protest march was in March 1968, in support of striking Memphis sanitation workers. … Dr. King’s hallmark was nonviolent protest, but as he led marchers down Beale Street, some young men began breaking storefront windows. The police moved in, and violence erupted, harming peaceful demonstrators and youthful looters alike. Had Dr. King been sued, either by injured police or injured protestors, I cannot fathom that the Constitution he praised as “magnificent” — “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” — would countenance his personal liability.

But neither Jolly nor the third judge on the panel, Judge Jennifer Elrod, joined Willett in acknowledging their error. Instead, they issued a longer opinion explaining why they would still strip Mckesson of his First Amendment rights.

Mckesson’s lawyers asked the full Fifth Circuit to hear the case, and effectively toss out Jolly’s decision — using a process known as “en banc” rehearing. But a majority of the court’s active judges must agree to take a case en banc, and the court split 8-8 on whether to do so.

The case then made its way to the Supreme Court, which did hand down a brief decision vacating Jolly’s opinion. But rather than putting the case to bed for good, the Supreme Court merely ordered the Fifth Circuit to seek the Louisiana Supreme Court’s input on whether Louisiana law permits a suit against Mckesson. The Supreme Court avoided the question of whether Mckesson is protected by the First Amendment altogether.

In late March, Louisiana’s justices finally weighed in, with all but one of them concluding that state law does permit the suit against Mckesson to move forward. Justice Piper Griffin, the only Democrat on Louisiana’s highest court, dissented, writing that the majority’s decision “will have a chilling effect on political protests in general as nothing prevents a bad actor from attending an otherwise peaceful protest and committing acts of violence.”

And so, because no court wants to take responsibility for correcting Jolly’s error, Mckesson’s rights remain trapped in limbo. He and his lawyers can look forward to more months or even years of litigation before this case is resolved.

This long, torturous process is unfair to Mckesson. It is unfair to Doe, who deserves to know that his lawsuit cannot prevail under the Constitution. And it is unfair to anyone who exercises their constitutional right to protest.

Starbucks workers rally in Missouri.

Ileen DeVault, professor of Labor History at Cornell University, said it’s unprecedented for a national chain of small food and beverage stores to unionize, and that Starbucks’s efforts could have knock-on effects.

“It’s pretty amazing that a company that large and that present in American consciousness — everybody knows what Starbucks is — is unionizing,” DeVault told Recode.

While unionization is popular and gaining a lot of attention, it’s still incredibly difficult. That means high-profile failures as well. Just last week, an Amazon warehouse in Alabama voted against unionizing. This was union organizers’ second try — the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said the e-commerce giant had violated labor law by giving the impression it was monitoring which workers voted, so ordered a re-vote. But workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island just became part of the first Amazon union in the country — and they did so with a worker-led union much like the one at Starbucks.

For now, the actions at Starbucks provide a case study for how other Americans might try to organize and where the union movement might go from here.

“The scale, the energy, the pace,” said Richard Minter, vice president of the Workers United union. “There’s nothing like it in labor history.”

What it takes to unionize a Starbucks

Workers at the Genesee Street Starbucks in Buffalo were murmuring about starting a union back in 2019. But it wasn’t until the spring of 2021, after the pandemic had laid bare the treacherous situation of food service workers and the Great Resignation had given employees more leverage, that they started getting serious. They reached out to the local chapter of Workers United, a union affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), for guidance and formed a committee of workers from area Buffalo stores.

Feeling that they had strong support among their colleagues and fearing that corporate had gotten wind of their plan, Starbucks workers at three Buffalo stores went public with their plan to organize in August and filed a petition with the NLRB to unionize under Starbucks Workers United. The company immediately pushed back, flooding the stores with support managers who tried to convince the workers they’d be better off without a union. Despite Starbucks’s efforts to stop it, the NLRB approved the union’s request to be able to organize on a store-by-store basis. Since it’s easier to maintain support among smaller groups of people who know one another, this approach was much more feasible than trying to win a regional or national campaign.

On December 9, the Elmwood Buffalo location became the first company-run Starbucks store to form a union, winning the vote 19 to 8. It was quickly followed by the Genesee location, while a third location voted against unionizing. The Elmwood bargaining committee, which includes workers from subsequent Starbucks unions around the country, began negotiations at the end of January, and they’re still ongoing. So far, they’ve presented Starbucks with several proposals, including instituting a “just cause” clause so that management would have to have a fair reason to fire someone, and allowing employees to collect credit card tips (there’s no option to tip by credit card now). They plan to ask for better pay and benefits as well.

As each additional store organizes, it inspires more to do so. Most of the workers we spoke to mentioned getting inbound inquiries from workers at other locations near and far after they went public with their intent to unionize.

Joshua Bessex/AP

Pro-union pins and literature sit on a table during a watch party for Starbucks employees’ union election in Buffalo, New York, on December 9, 2021.

“It seems like every time we win another one, we get tremendous outreach from markets all across the country,” Minter said. He added that after the first Starbucks in Washington, the company’s home state, voted to unionize, Workers United received 30 new contacts from other stores that night.

Each store’s organizing effort is an asset to the next. From these other stores, new organizers learn what works and what doesn’t, not to mention what to expect from corporate and how to respond. They know the company might make misleading claims about the price of unions. They also know the company will hold meetings during their shifts to convince them not to join the union. These are called captive audience meetings, which many workers find intimidating.

“When you connect with [other workers across the country] you get to share your experiences with them and they get to share theirs and guide you through the process,” said Caro Gonzalez, a Starbucks shift supervisor in Austin who’s majoring in advertising at the University of Texas. “That support is really huge.”

Communicating with other stores made employees realize that they have more similarities than differences. It has built an immense feeling of solidarity, so that these small shops, each with roughly 20-30 workers, feel like they’re part of something much bigger.

“Before winning in Buffalo, we didn’t know if it was possible,” Michelle Eisen, 39, a barista at that first unionized Starbucks, told Recode. “I think these stores have that kind of optimism to know that it can be done.”

Members of Socialist Alternative NYC gather for a group photo around a car in a parking lot while holding signs in support of unions and workers. Socialist Alternative NYC

Members of Socialist Alternative NYC came to support Starbucks workers in Brooklyn after a captive audience meeting.

But that doesn’t mean their route will be easier. Eisen added, “These newer stores that are coming on board almost need more courage than we did because they know what they’re about to get involved in, they know what the company is capable of, and they’re still choosing to do this.”

Why unionizing is working at Starbucks

What’s made the Starbucks efforts so successful is what Rebecca Givan, associate professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, calls a “perfect storm” of circumstances, in addition to strategic decisions like organizing by store and communicating with other stores. Those particulars can help guide what will and won’t work elsewhere.

To begin with, Starbucks is a company that espouses progressive values, from single-origin coffee beans to LGBTQ rights. But when those values come up short — claiming that Black Lives Matter while calling the cops on Black customers, offering gender-affirming medical treatment that’s hard to access in practice, and advertising fertility treatment that can cost more than people’s paychecks — it can work against the company.

“Starbucks is quote-unquote ‘progressive,’ ‘woke,’ whatever. They give us decent benefits,” Fagan, a 22-year-old shift supervisor in Rochester, said. “But we’re literally selling our lives and time and bodies to this corporation. Tell me why I don’t deserve a living wage.”

Fagan, who has worked at Starbucks for five years, makes $22 an hour but, like many employees, said she’s had her hours cut back, making the $20-$50 cab ride (she doesn’t drive) to and from work for a six-hour shift unsustainable. Ahead of the first Buffalo union vote, Starbucks announced it would be raising its average wage to nearly $17 an hour by this summer.

But while that pay is much higher than the industry average of about $12 an hour, many of the workers we talked to said it wasn’t enough, especially as they said their hours have been cut back. These cutbacks could jeopardize employees’ access to Starbucks’s health insurance — a rarity in the food service world — since employees need to work at least 20 hours a week to be eligible for those benefits. Others see the cuts in hours as a way to drive out existing employees in order to tamp down union organizing.

Starbucks denied that it’s cutting back hours.

“We always schedule to what we believe the store needs based on customer behaviors,” spokesperson Reggie Borges told Recode. “That may mean a change in the hours available, but to say we are cutting hours wouldn’t be accurate.” The company added that eligibility to health care was measured just twice a year by average hours worked, rather than on a weekly basis, so a short-term cut in hours wouldn’t affect health care eligibility.

In any case, Starbucks’s perceived progressive values often attract young workers who share those values. Many of the Starbucks workers trying to unionize are in their early 20s. They’ve become adults amid huge social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too. They are comfortable with empathy and technology, making them star candidates for a resurgent union movement. In addition to talking to other Starbucks workers across the country on Zoom and social media, they hash out their store strategies over Discord while sharing viral videos about unions on TikTok. On a press call following her Mesa, Arizona, store’s vote to unionize in March, barista Haley Smith called Twitter “the rising star of our campaign.”

Whether on video calls, chat rooms, or social media, these workers seem to land on a common theme: They’re all facing the same inequalities in work and life. The immense unfairness of the world we live in was top of mind for the young people who spoke to Recode. They’ve come into adulthood at a time of heightened inequality in everything from access to broadband to income.

“We’ve been forced into this world where we can’t afford anything, where we can’t afford to live,” said Mercado, 22, who works at a Starbucks in Brooklyn while pursuing a master’s degree in environmental science. “It’s not a difference between generations, it’s just a difference between what you’ve been given and the tools that we can use to make the change.”

For many Starbucks workers and others, the shine has worn off their companies.

“We realized during the pandemic that they didn’t care about us,” said a former Starbucks employee in Rochester who worked for the company for five years and was a main union organizer at his store. He was recently fired for clocking in four minutes before a coworker, meaning he was in the store by himself — an offense he said would have never resulted in firing prior to the union effort. The employee asked to remain anonymous lest this firing jeopardize future employment. (Recode contacted Starbucks about why this was a fireable offense, but the company did not respond in time for publication.)

Working through the pandemic made the situation and worker safety especially acute.

“They’ll call me a partner all they want, but corporate will allow me to die on the floor if it made them money,” said Brandi Alduk, a 22-year-old employee at a Queens Starbucks store, noting that she was exaggerating but with some truth. She said company executives rolled back Covid-19 restrictions “a little too soon and a little too brazenly, considering they were still working at home when they started loosening some of the restrictions.”

One positive aspect of working during the pandemic, many Starbucks employees said, is that they became incredibly close with their coworkers. That’s partly to do with the physical locations Starbucks occupies. Starbucks stores are tight spaces, where workers bump into and talk to each other constantly — valuable circumstances when trying to unionize. (Situations like this are also less likely at workplaces like giant Amazon warehouses.)

Starbucks workers and organizers in Queens stand on the sidewalk and hug in congratulations. Oriana Shulevitz Rosaso

Brandi Alduk (center right) and her coworkers share an embrace along with City Council member Tiffany Cabán and Assembly member Zohran Mamdani after the workers filed a petition to unionize.

In general, the Starbucks union efforts have been very grassroots, driven by the front-line workers themselves. Starbucks employees at unionized locations are the ones bargaining for a contract with company lawyers — not a union rep. While union members typically work with their representatives to decide what they want in their contract, the negotiations themselves are usually left to the union and their lawyers.

“There’s nobody top- down making a decision about which stores should organize or go public. It depends on the workers in each store,” Givan, the Rutgers professor, said. “I think that’s crucial.”

This grassroots movement has even drawn support from Starbucks’s shareholders. Recently, investors representing $3.4 trillion in assets under management asked the company to remain neutral and “swiftly reach fair and timely collective bargains,” should more Starbucks stores vote to unionize.

The challenges ahead

Unionizing in America today is not easy — that’s part of what makes the Starbucks workers’ success so impressive. But experts aren’t sure the extent to which that success could be replicated at other food and beverage chains or in other industries. Despite organizing in new industries like food service and digital media in recent years, union membership overall is still in decline.

Givan said the easiest way forward for the labor movement might be through other progressive brands — especially ones where workers feel the company hasn’t lived up to that progressive ethos. For example, workers at a Manhattan REI store, an outdoor equipment retailer that puts “purpose before profits,” voted to unionize in March, saying the company failed to prioritize their safety. REI employees accused the company of union busting, by spreading misinformation about the unions, holding captive audience meetings, and withholding promotions.

The road might be tougher at more iron-fisted companies like Amazon. Ahead of the first union vote at an Alabama warehouse, the company had mailboxes installed on its grounds, giving workers the impression that the company was monitoring its union votes. In Staten Island, the company fired a warehouse supervisor named Chris Smalls the same day he participated in a protest about unsafe conditions during the pandemic. (Smalls went on to create the Amazon Labor Union which led the successful union drive at the Staten Island warehouse.)

A young Black man in sunglasses and a baseball cap speaks into news outlets’ microphones, backed by supporters with signs reading, “Union rights for all Amazon workers.” Andrea Renault/AFP via Getty Images
Union organizer Christian Smalls speaks following the April 1 vote for the unionization of the Amazon Staten Island warehouse in New York.

Starbucks has also been aggressively fighting the union. The company’s resistance is very apparent to its workers who are organizing. A number of workers told us that they’d been fired or had their hours severely cut back over their association with the union. Workers United has filed nearly 70 unfair labor practices against Starbucks. The NLRB recently dinged the company over more aggressive tactics like illegally penalizing organizers, by suspending an employee and denying another’s scheduling preferences, over their union support. Starbucks fired seven unionizing workers in Memphis after hosting a TV interview about them organizing at the store, but said they were let go for reasons outside the union. Starbucks called any allegations of union busting or firing people over unionizing “categorically false.”

“From the beginning, we’ve been clear in our belief that we are better together as partners, without a union between us, and that conviction has not changed,” Starbucks said in a statement to Recode.

Union organizing is also difficult for reasons beyond pushback from management, including a long and arduous process and labor policy that doesn’t favor workers. And faced with those hurdles, plenty of workers decide to advocate for themselves in other ways, without formally organizing, according to Erica Smiley and Sarita Gupta, authors of The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century. According to Smiley and Gupta, there’s also been an increase in so-called worker standards boards, in which groups of workers take part in decisions and rule-making alongside politicians and employers in a non-union setting. State and local governments have formed standards boards in the past few years to guide everything from compensation to safety.

Fight for $15 and a Union, which is a broader advocacy movement rather than a union, has helped gain benefits and raise the minimum wage for millions of workers in cities and states around the country. Angelica Hernandez, a McDonald’s worker in California who has been working with Fight for $15, went on strike early in March 2020 to protest the unsafe working conditions at her job. She’s not part of a union, but simply walked off the job with a couple of colleagues, and it worked. Thanks to this walkout, she got PPE, sanitizer, and temperature checks at work for her and her colleagues.

Protesters outside a McDonald’s wear shirts that read “Unions for all, fight for $15” and carry signs that read, “McDonald’s: Sexual harassment is unacceptable” and “McDonald’s: Meet with survivors&gt;” Fight for $15 and a Union

Angelica Hernandez protests for better working conditions outside her McDonald’s in California.

Going on strike is risky, and many people can’t afford to lose that pay. That’s why Hernandez is hoping California passes AB 257. The first-of-its-kind bill would standardize wages, hours, and conditions for all fast food workers and cover half a million employees at places like Starbucks and McDonald’s, not just unionized ones.

“We’re all suffering across the board with things like sexual abuse and labor abuse,” Hernandez told Recode through a Fight for $15 translator. “That’s why it’s important for us that it’s not just one or two restaurants, but that all fast food workers have protections.”

The increased propensity for workers to quit and find new jobs in the current tight labor market is another way employees are improving their situation outside unions. Smiley considers the Great Resignation to be a form of worker action, like a strike. “You can’t deny the implications it’s had on the labor force and on labor economics,” she said, referring to how, among other benefits, increased rates of quitting have driven up wages, especially in the lowest-paying sectors.

On a national level, Democrats have put forth a labor bill known as the PRO Act that would make it easier for workers to organize, but it has stalled in the Senate. Perhaps a more promising route is through the NLRB. Jennifer Abruzzo, who was confirmed by the senate as the NLRB’s general counsel last year, told More Perfect Union that she wants to make it harder for employers to intimidate workers who want to unionize. She’s asking the organization to reconsider the Joy Silk Doctrine, which would mean that employers would have to recognize a union based on simple majority support.

All things considered, it’s remarkable that a growing number of Starbucks workers are unionizing right now. And because more locations start their own drives after each new union victory, it’s not hard to imagine as many as 50 unionized Starbucks stores by this summer.

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