Meet the Young Revolutionaries Building the Bay Area Workers’ Movement (Full Interviews)

As a socialist labor activist since the 1970s — and as someone who lived through the depressing 80s, 90s and 00s — I’ve been thrilled to see a new generation of labor organizers get active. But I’ve also wondered: why now? 

A generational change is happening — but what is it based on? In March and April of 2025, I spent hours walking the picket line at Urban Ore and talking with the strikers. I got a new answer to my question — that radical politics plays a key role in the generational shift in  union organizing.

Many believe that organizing unions, strikes, and other kinds of collective action radicalize participants’ political ideas. But speaking with today’s young labor radicals, it has become clear to me that these workers were already radicals before union campaigns and strikes —  their union efforts affected their political views, but mostly by making concrete ideas they already had. Workers’ commitment to unionizing arose from existing political perspectives.

I interviewed six union campaign participants, asking about both the before and the after, focusing not on the initial leaders but on those who stepped forward in the course of the campaign. What they had to say is important and inspiring.

Below are the full, unedited interviews. You can read the short, edited interviews here.

Ricardo F — Worker at Urban Ore

What were the issues in your workplace  that made you want to organize a union?

I think it's the feelings of not being respected and valued at work. I felt that in my other workplaces, too, but the thing is, this is like different because a union it gave us this power to push back and ask for some respect. We had managers that would just come up to workers and just yell and everything like that. I think the Union protects us from like that sort of stuff, just being, like, abused or mistreated.

Were you a radical/troublemaker before the union drive? What got you there?

I was kind of always like that. I think growing up in East Oakland, you see the differences once you go somewhere else. It's just like, yeah, my neighborhood is trashy. There's a lot of police. I'm probably not getting the best education. Then I go to Alameda and I'm like, whoa, everything is like way different, you know? So I think that's where it all comes from, you know? And it’s not just me but also my community and other people who are going through the same thing. I mean, it's just important to fight for the people that don't have much, you know? I think that's what I'm trying to do, I'm just trying to do my part  Hopefully things working out, you know? For all of us, you know, not just like the 1% or whatever.

Did the union drive change your political opinions?

I think it's just like reinforced it. At first, I was scared at doing the strike, but now I'm like, there's a fire in me that I need to do this, you know? We've got to  stick up for what we believe in and it doesn't matter if somebody’s pushing you down, I never expected to go on strike but now that I was a part of something like that it's just it's kind of eye-opening It gave me like a little bit of hope to see all the support that we were getting from community members and union people who really just believed in our cause. And I think that was something really great that I've I felt, you know? A lot of people were thanking me for doing this and I was like, oh, no, I'm going to be reaping the rewards from the strike. But I understand it more. It's just like, once we do this and it gives the ability to other people to start unionizing in other places, they can use us as examples to see that, yes, this actually worked. And I'm proud of what we've done and I'm really grateful for everybody who helped.

Evelyn G — Worker at Orban Ore

What were the issues in your workplace  that made you want to organize a union?

One of the bigger issues was wages, of course, and understaffing, and then just the fact that they refused to acknowledge the union. There's no official book printed out. The management or the owners can just make the rules whenever they want and it doesn't have to be approved by anybody. Someone was fired and of course the owners claimed that it was because this person was tardy all the time as if they didn't do their job but they did their job very well. I've never been in a union before. I've never been involved in any sort of organizing labor, so I had no clue what I was gonna do but going in I was like I'm gonna make myself because I want to be involved. 

Were you a radical/troublemaker before the union drive? What got you there?

I was not raised in a politically open environment but my mom would identify herself as a democrat or a liberal. She came to the States when she was young. Her family assimilated and she has that belief in the American dream. She would be shocked if she knew I was a communist. So I wasn't raised in any sort of union home, but my mom worked very hard from a young age to get a decent job and there's always been a respect for especially blue collar workers and service jobs. My grandmothers had to work service jobs their whole life and I've had to do that too. I think it’s my lived experiences that really influence my politics rather than reading up on it.

 I grew up in a place that's really conservative but I wasn't influenced by that. I was one of the few openly queer kids at my school, so we were protective of each other. I remember 2015 was when gay marriage was legalized nationally. I was in high school when it happened. And it's so crazy when people who are younger than me don't realize that that's very recent. I mean that's something that has totally changed since my childhood. I remember, like seeing all the people rushing through City Hall to get married because they've been together for decades. It makes you realize that change is possible.

I would still identify as a communist. I think with any ideology there's critiques to be had, but it's certainly better than capitalism. I feel   it's becoming really important for people of my age and younger now just because we've seen the previous generation, we see how hard they work, but also realize that a job doesn't care about you. They don't care if you make a living wage and they don't care if you get laid off or fire you. I think also realizing that people my age are not going to have the same things our parents and grandparents did. I don't think I will ever own a house. So we're organizing to help each other and better our quality of life by fighting for better working conditions. You want your job to be a place you want to stay and you want it to be better for the people who are there after you're gone. 

Did the union drive change your political opinions?

I think it just made me realize you can't do things by yourself, you know? A year ago, it was all theory for me. I wanted to be involved in some sort of organizing. But I'd never been in such spaces and I don't have any of this knowledge. especially historical context. That's something I need to work on. Because, you know, this didn't just happen in my lifetime. This is continuous progress from decades and decades ago.

 People are just trying to fight for what they believe in or what they think is right. I want to continue doing work like that, even if I don't continue to work here. I want to continue not just labour organizing, but organizing in general. I've met a lot of people during a strike who are involved in these circles and it makes me a little more confident to try and be part of it.

Spencer J — Worker at Urban Ore

What were the issues in your workplace  that made you want to organize a union?

I think the primary thing for me in terms of contract goals was getting a just cause standard. There was a pretty dysfunctional leadership structure that in my analysis, was downstream of an excess of undemocratic centralized power at the workplace. and like the result of this was seeing people be disciplined or fired, in ways that were not equally applied across the workplace. There were a couple firings that happened where we put together petitions to management, signed by the vast majority of the staff and asking for people to be reinstated, and it didn't have any effect at all.

Were you a radical/troublemaker before the union drive? What got you there?

Growing up my mom's life was entirely dominated by work. When she was younger, she had a lot of ambitions about what she might do with her life, but it didn't materialize as a result of the immediate financial necessity of raising children. In order to build a stable career she has to work 14 hour days. I'd be in daycare until 8:00 p.m. at night. So I’m seeing the way in which the need to attain financial stability compromises vital parts of your life like being able to have time with your children. I think that watching my mom have to work so hard with so little social support made it very clear to me the inequities and intangible damages that a system that's bereft of social welfare creates. I think I was receptive to socialist thought because it diagnosed that problem very directly. I became exposed to that through, like, reading Zinn in high school and then various other sorts of leftist ideological exposure spurred my interest more. I started banjo when I was 18 and became very invested in the 30’s folk revival, which was extremely radical. So I think that combination of lived experiences of the costs of a capitalist structure and exposure to the sort of historical precedents and historical implications of the development of it in this country, and then engagement with the aesthetic artifacts of leftist thought would probably be like the colliding factors that inspired my sort of political mind.

Did the union drive change your political opinions?

I think it gave me a sort of direct experience of the systematic effects of this economic structure. The process of unionizing and going on strike exposes the repression and authoritarianism that's inherent in the capitalist structure. Like, inherent in this power relationship where people on the bottom have no democratic control over half of their entire life. A huge part of the appeal to me about unionization is that it is a direct challenge to a fundamentally autocratic social structure that by and large America is.

I see a lot of liberal type talk with skepticism about there being a meaningful conflict between labour and capital that plays a huge part in defining our political and economic relations. But the unionization effort was really cool in the sense that you cannot go through it and retain skepticism about the reality of class conflict.

Sarah W — Worker at Good Vibrations 

What were the key issues that made you want to unionize your workplace?

There was this sense of employees being stressed and demoralized, myself included. I saw a lot of new hires who would be good employees getting forced out due to minor infractions.  But what really did it was a coworker had their COVID test results mishandled, which resulted in needless exposures at one of their of the locations. And after that, I realized that something had to be done. I was reached out to about organizing at the beginning stages of the campaign, and I was hesitant to join. I was terrified, and I feel like that does speak to what our workplace was like, that I was so afraid, but after our first town hall, I really did jump in with both feet. 

Were you a radical/troublemaker before the union drive? What got you there?

I really, really wish I could say I was a troublemaker prior to unionizing. I was in circles where people were discussing these things and I would say that like I was very, very far left on the political spectrum. However, I was terrified of repercussions and getting fired. I realized I had no job security. I was purely at the whims of management. And I didn't really gather the strength to act until that first town hall, where I did see how many of us turned out, and I realized that they couldn't stop all of us from asking for what we deserve. After hearing other employees' grievances and how scared they were too, I realized that I had the strength to do it because other people needed me to. I just realized all of a sudden that I could because everyone was behind me and not everyone had to do all of the work.

Did the union drive change your political opinions?

Not at all. It confirmed it. I for a long time had this sense that there was this imbalance in the way that, you know, workers were treated. And I had that completely confirmed by what I saw in the workplace and that really motivated me to start acting on that.

Mae V — Worker at Highwire Coffee Roasters

What were the issues in your workplace that made you want to organize a union?

This is the first shop I've worked at that I've met people who want to be career baristas and seeing them want to be in this industry for as long as they could be and not getting the pay they deserve, the respect they deserve for all the work that they do. It just really made me want to organize and made me want to see an actual change. It's really eye-opening how much I have to penny pinch despite getting working at a shop with good hours and good tips. And even on days that I don't have my tips, it's rough to see that I have to scrounge a little bit because I don't have something that should have been included in my base pay anyway. 

Were you a radical/troublemaker before the union drive? What got you there? 

I wasn't a troublemaker. But my boss is definitely knew my name and a lot of that came from me pointing out a lot of things in the workplace that just didn't work or didn't make sense or would cause repetitive stress injuries.I always advertised myself in a workplace as being one of the coworkers who is not afraid to go into the chat and say, hey, why do we do things this way? Or should we consider other options because this thing is not beneficial to us in the long run or it's going to hurt us or it just doesn't make sense. And that's a lot that's where a lot of my organizing background came from. I would just politely raise hell and see where that could take me and if I saw that I was making reasonable demands or reasonable requests and they weren't being met, then I would look at that and say, why not? And they don't really like that question most of the time.  

Did the union drive change your political opinions?

I've been a lot more active in activist spaces of all types, especially those encompassing my identity as a queer Filipino person in the Bay Area. The union campaign definitely opened me up a lot to that side of activism in the world. Labour organizing is just another form of large scale organizing. It's definitely made me look into the history of labour organizing a lot more. I've learned a lot about you know, where we've come from, how far we've come and how far we still have to go.

I'm feeling very positive about the direction we're moving in with our company and the moves that we're able to make. But I'm really positive about how much the union has made a community out of my workspace. Especially for a predominantly queer group, a lot of us do not have the same nuclear family and a lot of us have different sorts of lifestyles, and it makes me really happy to see that this group of formerly strangers wants so badly to see good things for each other. I think that that is the biggest drive in my life right now and it is so important in today's environment. To have each other's back.

Alan N — Worker at Grocery Store

Note: Alan’s name and photo are anonymized due to early-stage organizing effort.

What were the issues in your workplace  that made you want to organize a union?

When I started working for the company,  I started looking up information about [a local grocery store] and I found some contact information for [a grocery store union]. I emailed them a week into my employment. The follow-up happened after I made a connection with one of my coworkers who asked me directly if we would like to get a union started.

There is no one in my organizing committee who has my same reasons for being in the organizing committee. The reasons that I've stayed involved have been the community aspect, and just how wonderful my fellow employees are. But I would be doing this work whether or not. I feel a sense of duty as a worker to do what I can to, you know, swim against the current corporate ownership of labor, of everything. 

Were you a radical/troublemaker before the union drive? What got you there? 

I have been a leftist since I was in high school, a little bit after the 2008 presidential election. I was a supporter as an eighth grader of McCain. And some of my fellow classmates started asking me questions that I found I didn't know the answers to about health care and about poverty and about what the role of government should be and things that I hadn't considered, coming from a Christian conservative background. Through my history in DIY music spaces my views have skewed further left. 

Did the union drive change your political opinions? 

I was always very afraid of using the word communism because of my upbringing. I think that that's probably the main place where I've been radicalized, is just going from a place of mainstream leftism to outright calling myself a communist and to more theory-focused support of Marxist and Leninist doctrine. It's been interesting, you know, being in workplaces my whole adult life, and just having an intuitive understanding of, well, this sucks. And being able to contextualize that and like, put words and higher concepts to these feelings.