Neha
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Right, and I think we're at a moment where we actually have to like... fight for ourselves, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Again, we're at a point where no one else is going to fight for us. We have to be willing to take that step and fight for ourselves, advocate for ourselves. At this moment, it's up to trans people to get involved, especially with the labor movement when there's so much opportunity to advocate for trans rights, to build up the trans liberation movement in a way that hasn't been done before.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
I think it's so essential for us to... not feel hopeless and see the potential here and get involved. I'm not necessarily telling people that like you should go apply to a Starbucks and like convince them to unionize, but also like I'm not not saying that, you know?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
I think I have to emphasize how achievable that is. Like it is possible. 500 plus stores across the nation have done it in this political environment, right? I'm going to shout out one of my coworkers. She transferred to another store in Oklahoma and And I was jokingly telling her, I was like, well, you're allowed to transfer as long as you unionize your store immediately. And she was like, okay.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And she did it. Within a week of being there, she talked one-on-one with everyone at that store. People who were all already wanting better wages, better healthcare, better staffing. And... through these conversations, she organized that store. And that is so fucking amazing to me.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And it makes me feel so, I don't know, I don't want to sound like patronizing or whatever, but it makes me so proud to like see that, right? To see that she's been able to see how our store has organized. how we've spoken to people, how we've reached out to like her coworkers. And she's been able to take that and replicate that so easily and so quickly.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Like when I say within like a week or two of transferring to the store, I am not exaggerating. She was fucking on top of it. If we can do this in fucking goddamn Oklahoma, we can do this anywhere, right? It is possible. You can do it.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
If you can have a conversation with your coworker, if you can have a conversation with multiple coworkers, if you can develop relationships with them, friendships, if you can establish that you have like a common issue, right? If you can make it clear that like the struggles we're facing at our workplaces have a solution, you can do this.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
All you have to do is actually fucking take that step to make it happen.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Again, we're at such a scary point for trans people. And I know that that's terrifying, but that's also an opportunity to pivot and to actually make meaningful change, right? Again, I can't emphasize enough, we create our own hope for a better future. It has to be on us, right? We can't just, I don't know, depend on other people to do this work for us. We have to show up and do this work.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And I don't know, personally speaking, I am fucking tired of
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
liberals who want to just ignore trans people and pretend we don't exist as like i don't know our tvs are flooded with anti-trans ads i'm tired of depending on people who aren't advocating for me right i'd rather fight for myself through my union so yeah i think that's a good place to close on it is in some sense a cold world that has left us with no one to fight for ourselves but ourselves but if we fucking do it we can win and we can drag everyone else along with us
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
The way that our union started focusing on trans healthcare as one of the core issues we were organizing around, it all started with a conversation with a regional staffer here in Oklahoma. I had a regular check-in call with my staffer, and this was two, two and a half years ago. And he was just asking, what's going on? What are you concerned about?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And I was like, well, I'm having some issues with... accessing healthcare and he not heard like how difficult it was for like trans people to access healthcare at Starbucks he wasn't aware of like how expensive it could be and as I started talking to him he was like hold on let me like set up a meeting with some other people I think they need to hear this too and
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
So then we had like a follow up meeting with more like staff and other organizers. I talked about these issues again. And one thing led to another thing. And they ended up encouraging me to form a subcommittee with their union for trans workers to kind of like build community for us and connect us, but also
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
hear more stories from trans workers about the struggles that they are facing, specifically in accessing healthcare. And so that's kind of how TRACS started. And it's been really moving to see how over the past like two, three years, This went from like an issue that was affecting like a minority of a minority of workers, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Like it's not like every single work at Starbucks is trying to like have facial feminization surgery or anything like that, right? This issue that was affecting like a small subset of us ended up becoming like one of the biggest issues we were organizing around. It makes me really emotional when I think about like how much my community
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
union coworkers and like my comrades, like actually like fucking care about trans people. Right. I was kind of like how tracks started and how we started to organize around trans healthcare specifically.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Our ability to build power in this way is a way that we maintain hope so that we can keep organizing for a better future. I think one of the best tools like these fucking fascist freaks have is making us feel like there's no hope. It's beating us down. It's making us feel like we have no power.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
It's making us feel completely disconnected from like the government, our workplace, all of these different things that like exert power over us. And I think labor is such a direct way to give people that power back.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
The trans community is disproportionately impoverished. A lot of us are struggling to just pay for rent or our basic needs, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
I think this framing assumes that all trans people are, I don't know, rich, working in tech or some shit like that, which just is not true.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And I mean, I can also attest to the fact that I started at Starbucks five years ago because I needed to have access to gender affirming care. I was coming from a situation where I came out as a teenager. I was disowned and kicked out by my family. I didn't have access to college. I was like basically on my own, right? And I had no idea how I was going to medically transition.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And like older trans women in my life told me to apply to Starbucks. And it was also like one of those things where like, Again, I live in Oklahoma. It's not like there's a ton of employers who are like super excited to hire trans women, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Right. And I think that's how Starbucks kind of like advertises itself to queer and trans workers. Right. And I think this is reflected in the demographic of my store. 99% of my coworkers are queer. A lot of us are trans. There's like a lot of trans women who work at my store and, I actually don't even know if we have a single straight coworker, actually.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
We have like our one token diversity hire, but he literally just transferred. So I think it's all gay people. But no, like all of us apply to Starbucks because like, what other options do we have, right? And again, in my case, I applied to Starbucks because I needed access to gender affirming care. And over like the five years that I've worked here, I've realized that
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
while that benefit might look good on paper, in practice, it's hard to actually qualify for that healthcare. It can be completely unaffordable for a lot of us, right? Like last year, I made $16,000 in total from Starbucks. And like a disproportionate amount of that income was just going towards healthcare, which doesn't even take into account like rent or bills or anything else.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
With the current political climate as it is, it's even scarier. I mean, Cassie was talking about not being able to actually access the Starbucks health care and having to find other ways to pay for gender affirming care. But I mean, we're looking at like a Trump administration that could possibly be trying to make it
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
impossible for anyone to use medicare medicaid to cover gender affirming care we're looking at state by state like health care bans right i think it's more important than ever to organize and focus on trans rights and our access to health care our wages our safety at the workplace where else are we going to protect ourselves like that
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
I can speak to this. I've heard this from many other workers. It is such a struggle just to get the minimum amount of hours to keep your benefits. I was talking to another worker who was telling me about how she had to literally cry and beg her manager to schedule her enough so she didn't lose access to gender-affirming care.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And of course, this manager was scheduling enough hours for other workers who weren't trans women, right? And so I think having protections in a contract that guarantee a certain number of hours, better scheduling, that kind of thing, also makes it easier for us to maintain and keep the benefits that we need.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
So after nine months of bargaining, it's December, we're expecting to finish up contract bargaining. And after like a few months of like delaying and not really giving us a counter on wages or benefits, Starbucks like finally gave us a counter proposal. And I mean like counter proposal. It was literally like a page. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And their counterproposal was basically no changes to benefits whatsoever and a 1.5% raise if non-union stores received a raise that was less than that. And for context, 1.5% for most of us is 30 cents. So yeah, for nine months, that was the best they could do. Yeah. So it wasn't really a serious like counterproposal. I mean, frankly, it was a fucking insult.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
These sites are directly connected to the broader political situation in America, right? I think that a big issue that trans organizing has right now is that there's not a lot of on-the-ground reaching out, connecting to, mobilizing people people who are impacted by these policies that are like negatively impacting trans people.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
And so I think the kind of organizing that unions are doing, right, that we've been doing this entire time, right, where we're speaking to people directly, where we're getting them organized, getting them involved, is really a helpful starting point for like turning discontent and turning anxiety and fear around issues into like actual action.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
I think it's like super essential that we have this contract now. We're heading into 2025. We're heading into a frankly pretty fucking scary time for trans people. We need a contract that protects trans healthcare. We need a contract that guarantees better wages. We need a contract if only for the protections that it guarantees workers in terms of like
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
safety at work in terms of making sure that they're not being taken advantage of at work, right? What Starbucks offered us, again, was an insult. It wasn't a real counterproposal. We're more ready than ever to finish this contract and to have something. But we need movement from Starbucks. We need a serious counterproposal. $0.30 and no changes to benefits isn't going to fucking do it.