On May 27, Starbucks Workers United won its one hundredth National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union election, at the Eastlake store in the company’s hometown of Seattle. Since the first elections in Buffalo last December, the campaign has spread quicker than anyone expected. Over recent weeks, the union has won almost daily victories across the country, including in states where union victories are rare.

One hundred wins is an arbitrary milestone, but it makes the union campaign one of the most successful ever at a “superstar” corporation. In a system that exacts an incredibly high price on workers seeking union representation, every victory at a company as wealthy and as anti-union as Starbucks is a minor miracle.

But the initial victories at the company were critical to developing the momentum that has allowed the campaign to spread. These victories highlighted many of the characteristics that have contributed to the campaign’s stunning success: the worker-to-worker organizing within and across stores; the contributions of intrepid young lead organizers, many of whom have had no previous experience with unions; the training of new lead organizers and organizing committees by Zoom; the training of lead organizers to be “partners on point,” responsible for new stores organizing in their region; the often-key role of influential shift supervisors, many of whom have served as lead organizers; the coordinating of responses across stores to anti-union talking points in group and individual captive meetings; the remarkable traditional and social media coverage of the first set of victories, which was crucial to how workers across the country learned about the campaign and then reached out to it; and workers, who enjoyed a strong sense of camaraderie prior to the union campaign, often supporting unionization as a bloc, resulting in many overwhelming victories.