This victory of Starbucks employees in Buffalo will reverberate across America | Robert Reich

What occurred at one Starbucks store is part of a much larger pattern - a surge in strikes and labor actions across America

Workers in one Starbucks store, in Buffalo, New York, made history on Thursday by becoming Starbuck's first unionized workplace. It's a watershed for the biggest coffee seller in the world, which operates 8,953 stores in the United States - and which has done everything in its power to keep its workers from forming a union.

The vote itself was tiny. There were 19 baristas and shift supervisors who voted in favor of unionizing, 8 voted against. But it marked a huge victory, nonetheless. Starbucks had waged a massive anti-union campaign in Buffalo - sending out-of-town managers and even executives into stores to discourage unionizing, closing down some stores, and packing remaining stores with new employees in order to dilute pro-union employees' voting power.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com