NEW: Over 100 unionized @Starbucks locations launched a one-day strike Thursday, Nov. 17, to demand that the company engage in good faith union negotiations & address understaffing at locations across the country.
Members of @SBWorkersUnited, the national union representing @Starbucks employees, organized the strike for Nov. 17 to coincide with the company’s annual “Red Cup Day” promotion, a major revenue booster for the coffee chain. ↕️ unicornriot.ninja/2022/starbucks…
Participating in the #RedCupRebellion, striking workers on the picket line in #SaltLakeCity told Unicorn Riot that they launched the strike not only in solidarity with other locations but in response to first-hand experience with unfair working conditions & anti-union activity.🧵
Across the country, union members & supporters participated in last week's Starbucks strike, making it the largest organized effort undertaken by the union since its formation in 2021.
Chronic understaffing, unfair workloads and hostile negotiation tactics were among the key complaints of striking Starbucks workers at the Salt Lake City location. 🧵
Last week's Starbucks strike came one day after the National Labor Relations Board filed for injunctive relief against Starbucks in federal court, demanding that the multi-billion dollar company stop firing employees in retaliation for union organizing: unicornriot.ninja/wp-content/upl… ↕️
In 2020 Philly Starbucks workers accused their employer of retaliation after a labor dispute & delivered a NLRB form to the store; workers said they'd faced retaliation for workplace organizing & were told not to discuss their pay or working conditions: unicornriot.ninja/2020/philly-st… ↕️
While the NLRB intervention marks a significant moment in the struggle to unionize Starbucks employees, those on strike say it's not enough.
“We’re going through the proper channels...we’re still being met with illegal activities” said Kit Grob, shift supervisor/union organizer.
Amidst the heightened scrutiny of labor policies & 170+ open NLRB cases against Starbucks for anti-union threats & labor violations since Aug. 2021, workers in Richmond Starbucks protested a supervisor accused of sexual assault being place in store. ↕️ unicornriot.ninja/2022/richmond-…
Starbucks says it has taken “aggressive” measures to engage in union negotiations, but employees at locations across the country have described hostile meetings and repeated delays to scheduled negotiations. [Thread above]
NEW Investigation:
A Unicorn Riot investigation uncovered dossier records from a privately curated database of Romani people in the US, and a web of training programs; many of these have been canceled due to pressure from activists and concerned citizens. unicornriot.ninja/2022/police-us…
Unicorn Riot found a pattern of trainings from multiple law enforcement training academies and police departments, 10 records from a privately maintained database of Romani people, spoke with an Academy Director in Fredericksburg, VA, & activists who monitor anti-Roma bias in USA
A former Illinois police officer, along with a 501c3 nonprofit private national policing organization, has been teaching Law Enforcement Officers to racially profile & think of Romani People in racialized terms, our investigation of two decades of policing trainings has revealed.
NEW: Noisy Philly Counter-Demo Challenges 'TERFs' at Independence Hall [article + video] unicornriot.ninja/2022/noisy-phi…
Unicorn Riot interviewed nearly a dozen hoarse but spirited attendees.
Full video premiering now: Philly Noise Demo Confronts 'TERFs' at Independence Hall [4K] (29min)
On Sunday, November 13, a hundred-plus counter-demonstrators tried to drown out about 30 protesters who were demonstrating against transgender people's access to medical transitions #TransAwarenessWeek
29min video premiering now:
Last month we named the members of the neo-nazi group Patriot Front who vandalized a mural honoring Black tennis champion Arthur Ashe mural in Battery Park, a mostly Black neighborhood in Richmond, VA: unicornriot.ninja/2022/patriot-f…
Yesterday, the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights (@LawyersComm) filed a federal lawsuit against Patriot Front, Nathan Noyce and Thomas Dail (the 2 members seen on leaked video defacing the mural), Patriot Front leaders Thomas Rousseau & Paul Gancarz, and 23 John Doe defendants.
The new civil suit alleges that Noyce, Dail, and Patriot Front as a group committed at least three civil rights violations under the Ku Klux Klan Act and Virginia state laws against “Racial, Religious, or Ethnic Harassment”: lawyerscommittee.org/lawyers-commit…
NEW: Attacks and Collective Punishment, a Cycle of Palestinian-Israeli Conflict 🧵
Featuring stories of this deadly cycle, we watch Israel blowing up the family homes of prisoners in July, a Sept. raid on Jenin targeting the Khazem family & a celebration of the PIJ in Oct. 🎥
2022 has been a deadly year of violence between Israelis and Palestinians with several Palestinian attacks earlier this year, near-daily deadly Israeli raids, a rise in settler violence against Palestinians and a war in August. unicornriot.ninja/2022/attacks-a…
A handful of attacks by Palestinians killed nearly a dozen people inside Israel earlier this year. In retaliation Israeli occupation forces have conducted thousands of deadly raids across the occupied West Bank, killing over 140 Palestinians by September.🎥unicornriot.ninja/2022/over-2200…
On Wednesday morning, animal rights activists Amy Soranno and Nick Schafer were sentenced to 30 days in jail, 12 months of probation, and are required to provide their DNA to the National DNA Data Bank. ➡️unicornriot.ninja/2022/animal-ac…
Soranno and Schafer were able to walk free out of the courthouse, however, because B.C. Supreme Court Justice Frits Verhoeven ruled that they won’t be taken into custody until Oct. 21, 2022, when they will enter the Okanagan Corrections Centre.
In response to the sentencing decision, dozens of animal rights activists descended on Excelsior Hog Farm to demonstrate their opposition to the farm itself, and to the criminalization of Soranno and Schafer whose trial stems from a demonstration at the same farm in 2019.
🆕We just uploaded the raw audio interviews with the striking Alabama prisoners we spoke with at the end of September. Listen to the full recordings of Logical Solutions, Swift Justice, and Kinetik Justice here➡️unicornriot.ninja/2022/alabama-p…
The three of them are just a few of the many prisoners across Alabama who launched a coordinated work stoppage on September 26, refusing to attend their work assignments and essentially shutting down normal operations of the prison system in the state.
The inhumane conditions in AL prisons have been extensively documented. A 2019 Department of Justice report found that the ADOC “does not reasonably protect prisoners from rampant violence” and sexual abuse, and that conditions in Alabama prisons “violate the Constitution.”