With organizing at Starbucks once again making the $1, we should brace ourselves for another round of excitement about “new and novel” organizing approaches. These often include media-heavy strategies and attempts at certifying one shop at a time in small units of only a few dozen workers. For those of us who cut our teeth organizing at places like Starbucks, it pays to revisit these previous attempts, to assess their effectiveness, and look at the debates that happened back then. What follows is an in-depth, nuts-and-bolts study of exactly what happened in two previous campaigns, what lessons were learned, and how the organizers involved changed their approach based on what worked and what didn’t.

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