What It Took to Form Chipotle’s First Union

Last fall, Atulya Dora-Laskey took a break from his shift at a Chipotle Mexican Grill in Lansing, Michigan, and began thumbing through his copy of Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life. When his co-worker Harper McNamara came along and spotted the book, he “pointed to it and asked, ‘Do you also know Hasan Piker? Do you know Noam Chomsky?’ ” Dora-Laskey told me. “It was the closest you could get to a leftist dog whistle.”

The two burrito slingers quickly bonded over politics. Dora-Laskey, 23, had co-founded the Young Democratic...