The Starbucks union drive is the most exciting new organizing campaign in the United States.

A mere two months after two Starbucks locations in Buffalo, New York, voted to become the first unionized corporate-operated Starbucks in the country, the unionization push shows no signs of slowing down: more than ninety stores in twenty-six states have now filed for National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union elections. That’s good, since it has a long way to go at a coffee giant that in the United States alone operates nearly nine thousand stores employing some 230,000 people.

The hope, for both Starbucks workers and the broader labor movement, is that enough stores will organize that the union can win new standards for the company’s sprawling workforce. Given Starbucks’s role in the coffee industry, this would have knock-on effects for other workplaces, with the potential to raise standards across the sector. Serious sectoral bargaining, in which higher standards are set and enforced for an entire sector of the economy (say, all fast-food workers), is predicated on such organization.