Grocery Update #35: A Union Organizer At Whole Foods Market Speaks Out.

Also, Demystifying Unions For Y'all.

Discontents: 1. Demystifying Unions. 2. Political Economic Context for the Whole Foods Philly Union Filing. 3. Ed Dupree: Produce Clerk, Union Organizer. 4. Tunes.

1. Demystifying Unions.

So what is it about trade unions that make them so appealing, particularly for the 74% of Americans aged 18 to 24 who would join a union if they could?

First, a labor union is not a business. It is its own legal entity, a 501(c)(5) tax exempt organization and files no articles of incorporation. A union is an association of workers that promotes and protects the welfare, interests and rights of its members, primarily through collective bargaining. It is created by and for workers, who also have the power to decertify it through a majority vote. Unions are a product of their members, built of and for their members.

Next, this right to organize is fundamental. The formation of unions was enabled by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) signed in 1935 by FDR under pressure from a depression-era labor movement. This act also established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The creation of a union is initiated by employees who file a petition with the NLRB showing that at least 30% of employees wish to organize. The NLRA makes it illegal for employers to intimidate workers from trying to form a union or threaten to close down businesses where unions form. Coincidentally, a number of companies that do exactly these things on a regular basis, such as Amazon, Tesla and Starbucks are suing to make the NLRB unconstitutional.

However, labor law is rarely enforced, considering what many companies get away with to disrupt union campaigns. This is also why the 2022’s NLRB petitions for injunctive relief and reinstatement of Buffalo Starbucks workers was so profound and timely. The initial goal for newly unionized workers is the ratification of a collective bargaining agreement, so that they have a collective say in the terms of their employment, including pay scales, schedules, grievance policies and workplace safety. And unions also wield the power of strikes, which have been an effective tool recently, with over 129,000 workers involved in strikes in 2022 539,000 in 2023.

Unions, despite now only representing 11% of American workers, have had an indelible impact on daily life for anyone who takes a paycheck. Unions are the reason for the federal minimum wage, Social Security, child labor laws, occupational health and safety laws, unemployment insurance, worker’s comp, the 40 hour work week and the weekend. Yes, the weekend.

Declining unionization, on the other hand, has been directly linked to rising inequality, a shrinking middle class and the rise of far right populism targeting immigrants, LGBTQ folks and people who don’t buy into old school gender roles.

Social progress was therefore not inevitable, nor was it due to the guiding hand of benevolent, enlightened elites. Working people made it happen and the elites got on board when it was advantageous.

The paychecks prove this. Unionized workers earn 10% more than non-union peers, have better benefits and collectively raise wages across their respective sectors, even benefitting their non-union peers in many cases. Unions have also lowered racial and gender pay gaps, with Black unionized workers earning 17% more, Latin/Hispanic workers earning 23% more and Asian workers 14% more than their unorganized peers, And unionized women earn 52% more that non-union women in the service sector. And while there are plenty of companies that do right by their employees, unions provide what investors would refer to as downside protection for members. Legally binding contracts ensure workers’ needs are prioritized during downturns, bankruptcies or other tough spots in company business cycles.

Unions are also more than just a vehicle for communication between workers and management. They are about having an equal seat at the table and about redistributing power, so that employees are not on their own when asking for a raise or safer working conditions. Union members have Weingarten Rights, where they can request the presence of a union representative during disciplinary conversations with supervisors. Or a case in point is Amazon, whose CEO can unironically claim, "It is much harder when you have a union to have a direct relationship with your manager and to get things done quickly”. Yet former Amazon supervisor Chris Smalls was fired in April 2020 after directly and quickly expressing concerns about unsafe COVID working conditions at his Amazon warehouse. So it’s not about communication. It is about power.

This is also why union campaigns can be brutal for workers. Three quarters of private sector workers face union avoidance consultants and captive audience meetings. And up to 1 in 5 unions organizers are fired for their activities and 34% of employers fire workers during organizing campaigns. Yet unions are more popular than ever and even historically non-union companies like Whole Foods are seeing renewed interest in unionization by employees.

2. Political Economic Context for the Whole Foods Philly Union Filing

On November 22, Whole Foods Market employees in Philadelphia declared their intention to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1776 and filed papers with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). If successful, this would be the first unionized Whole Foods Market store in the company. Past unionization campaigns that occurred before the 2017 Amazon takeover, such as in Madison, Wisconsin and Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, succumbed to captive audience trainings and other effective union avoidance techniques. Whole Foods Market’s founder and former CEO once even likened unions to herpes. But the company’s industry leading pay, culture and benefits also deterred employees from unionizing. At least until now.

With the full “Amazonification” of Whole Foods Market well under way, including self-checkout, increased surveillance, less upward mobility and a draconian attendance policy, organizers feel they have the wind at their back. The unionization effort is happening in the context of protests against Amazon’s working conditions in dozens of countries. The Whole Foods union campaign also bears a striking resemblance to the highly successful Starbucks United effort, where employees in hundreds of stores have voted to unionize in an effort to both improve wages and working conditions but also strengthen the company’s progressive values and culture by having a seat at the table.

3. Ed Dupree: Produce Clerk, Union Organizer

Ed Dupree has been a produce clerk at Whole Foods Market for over 8 years and is a member of the organizing committee.

Errol Schweizer: How long have you been in the grocery industry?

Ed Dupree: I worked in Target for five years prior to working and Whole Foods, and I worked in the grocery department. I've been with Whole Foods for the past eight. I did a short stint working, ironically enough, with Amazon for a year in one of their warehouses.

I typically am doing one of three things. I'm either working like a regular set, which could be like an apple said orange set, you know, taking boxes out of our bag of house, stacking fruit, helping customers, sometimes I'll do the receiving work for our department. We get anywhere from like six to 700 pieces upwards to 1200 pieces.

I try to fill it as much as I can, you know, keep the sales for full we prep, we cut vegetables, we soak them, clean them, and then we stage them in the back of house for the next shift in the morning to come out and fill the sales floor, I'd say maybe two thirds of my shift in either a refrigerated cooler or a freezer,

Sometimes, my hands tend to shake. And I wonder if that's nerve damage from spending so much time in freezers. Because even though we had gloves and those little warmer packs, sometimes my hands are really shaky. So I remember those days your fingers would go kind of numb just working in there for hours.

Errol Schweizer: What's it like working there now?

Ed Dupree: You take on more and more of a workload, there are less team members. If you go just a couple years back towards the pandemic, I think my team had somewhere around 50 people. Previously it was upwards to like 60, 70, so we were well-staffed. Now we're doing more numbers and it's roughly 30 people. So it's like half the workforce and damn near double the work we're doing now.

They have a like a little whiteboard right across from our break room. It shows you the amount we make on a daily basis in the percentage comp. And we're usually plus on most days. I've seen as low as 6% upwards to like 17 to 20% in sales. So we're, we're doing good year to year.

I've had conversations with my team leadership, they'll tell us they’re cutting their budget by 2 to 3%. They're going down bit by bit. They're just chipping away at it. And when we would ask them about it, they'd be like, “Oh, well, you guys have to make sales. And if you push sales, all that stuff goes into your labor budget”. So it's this big run around.

The only real solace is you have your co-workers. It's really stressful. It's very regimented. Store leadership tends to watch people. They micromanage, they're a lot more hostile than they used to be.

We get two kinds of customers. You get the regular customers who may or may not be quirky and weird and interesting. but you also have this new grouping of customers, where not only do you have to help them, but they're being timed. So they gotta move. And if you don't have exactly what they want, you have to go in the back and check. And if you don't have what they have, you have to give them a little QR code that they have to scan.

The workload is hard, so it's hard to keep up. You know, it used to be, when I first started working there, we would be expected to do maybe two sets. If you got one done, that's great. Good job. You know, you get it as full as possible, looks good. But now sometimes we're juggling three to four sets. (A set) is a given table in a department, like the apple table. Or the potato table or the citrus table. Those are your sets. And you'll be given a few of them to complete. But depending on how busy it is and how well or poorly staffed the department is, you'd be lucky if you get 1 or 2 done.

Errol Schweizer: How has this additional workload or work stress impacted your health or your personal life?

Ed Dupree: I'm just tired a lot. And I mean, especially with the organizing thing, it's hard to make time for yourself. And when you do get off of work, you just immediately want to rest.

I developed plantar fasciitis, which is a strain in your arch from doing excessive work. When you get the smallest amount of time off, you just want to not do anything. So that affects your social life, you probably don't get to go out as much

Errol Schweizer: How did this campaign start?

Ed Dupree: I was involved in a previous campaign during the height of the pandemic. It never really went anywhere. I had met a lot of people, and I've been there for a while, so people know me, and one of the guys who was helpful in the past told me, this new kid started talking about a union. And he was like, “Yeah, I told him about you. You gotta be the guy he speaks to”. But it was weird at first, I finally talked to him, and I'm like, I want to fucking organize this place. And from there, we just started talking to other co-workers and building up a base of an organizing committee.

Errol Schweizer: How's the response been from your co-workers?

Ed Dupree: They started all over the place. There has been a very obvious erosion in that kind of culture, in Whole Foods. If you look at the way John Mackey organized things there were a lot of democratic practices, made people's engagement with work, beneficial to them, and how they felt like the community, to take people out to local farms, and providers, so we could learn about the products. There was gain sharing, that was a huge thing. I think all those things slowly going away, and then that Amazon environment coming in, I think it kind of set up the situation where, when we would talk to people, people were frustrated, they felt like leadership didn't really care, or do anything when they had complaints. People were obviously being worked hard so they were exhausted and tired. They'd have really weird situations where leadership would target certain team members. One of my one buddies got his shifts taken away from him because he had finished doing receiving in my department. He broke down our load, and then he was talking to a customer or a cashier, and the leadership saw him, reprimanded him, and then the next day, he noticed two or three of his shifts were taken away, because this is when he had to pick up shifts in other departments.

What you notice is a lot of the newer folks were open to it (unionizing). They're generally more open because they're experiencing the kind of the frustrations of work in a modern day without the benefits that the older folks did. Folks that are around my level of 7, 8 years of tenure, they were like, “Oh, well, yeah. I mean, I support it, but, you know, I don't, I don't know if I really want to, you know, stick my neck out.” They’re not going to want to risk it, understandable. And then there are the folks that were that are, like the OG’s, who were like 10 years,15 years plus, those were like the biggest mixed bag.

Overall, as people started to see and understand that it wasn't just them that were feeling this, they started to generally be more supportive. But it started out with a couple of new folks, and then some of the older folks started getting along once they saw it was actually progressing. But a lot of those conversations were either, “I've been here and I've seen the changes”, or it's people that just started working and they're getting their ass beat with the work. And everybody always talked about how Whole Foods was amazing, and this just feels like any other job now.

I talked to one guy. He was like “I'm supporting the union because I see how they do these workers with the Amazon shopping”. He said he how people come up to him exhausted, exasperated, trying to look for things.

They (management) were doing these not-so captive audience meetings. And they would come and be like, “Oh, well, this is completely voluntary”. So, now it's just a very strong presence of, store leadership, regional Team Member Services, which is like a pseudo HR department.

Then there's just random store leadership from other departments or other stores, and they have these, like, dead eye smiles, and they're like, “Hi, do you need any help?”

One of my coworkers was telling me that one of the regional ladies was reading from a script, their first anti-union screed. It's hilarious. It's about staying whole. It's ridiculous. They're talking about dues and they're talking about their open door policy, like, “Oh, we don't want you to have to pay dues. We don't want you to have to listen to whatever union rules exist. We want to maintain a connection and an open door policy with our team members”. Just this goofy script they're trying to read to people. And then people are asking, “Where do I sign up? Where do I get to sign for a union?”

Errol Schweizer: It looks like you're affiliating with a UFCW local in the Philadelphia area. What attracted you to them?

Ed Dupree: We kind of deliberated about it, as we were building up the O.C., the idea of affiliating. At first it was, do we want to do the independent path? Do we want to do the established path? And we talked about that amongst ourselves. And then once we got to a point of really seriously shopping for an institution, we talked to our O.C., and a lot of people voted on picking an established one because of the obvious hurdles of building a union from the ground up independently. And not like we're fighting some mom and pop shop in Philly. It's Amazon, it's Whole Foods. So, yeah, we were like, let's go with someone, some institution, that's established. And we initially narrowed it down to the UFCW and the Teamsters, oddly enough. And we spoke to the Teamsters, their local rep, He gave a good case, and just seemed ready to fight, which was really, really cool to hear. And this is coming off of the UPS win. We ended up talking to the UFCW, and they definitely seemed a bit more regimented, little bit old school. But they're trying to engage in this more worker-led kind of movement that's happening right now and they're letting us steer the ship, and they're just giving good advice and resources. And when we initially talked to them, I think a lot of people really liked the fact that they're associated with a lot of big stores, like Giant, Kroger, Fresh Grocer. They're associated with the bulk of grocery retailers in the country. So I think because of that understanding of the industry, a lot of people felt comfortable with it, you know. And when we talked to the guys at the local they seemed really willing to work with us and connect us with other people in other stores and anyone they could. A large amount of our O.C. ended up voting for them. Working with them has been really cool, they're super helpful. They try to give us any resources we need, and good suggestions for how to approach things.

Errol Schweizer: What's the response been like from the community?

Ed Dupree: I think the public is becoming aware of it, especially folks that shop there, and it's been nice and really encouraging to see we're getting people reaching out from other stores and other cities, even in Pennsylvania, just showing love and support. So that's been really encouraging.

Errol Schweizer: What is it about unionizing that is attracting people to the campaign, and what do you hope to get out of it as a Whole Foods employee?

Ed Dupree: Right now, pay is a big thing. In Philly, it's becoming really expensive. Oddly enough, I hear that this is a one of the cheaper cities to live in, It's just the cost of living has gone up. And a lot of my co-workers are people that are trying to start their lives. They're young people that want to get their own place, or they want to go to school or something, and it's hard to afford those kinds of things. Or maybe they want to get a car. It's hard to afford that stuff getting paid the base rate that Whole Foods offers. Another big thing is benefits. Part timers use to have benefits. I think they stopped that in 2019, right before the pandemic.

They give you a lot less money for healthcare spending now. A lot of coworkers or part timers qualify for Medicaid, state run stuff, they're not getting health care. And the kind of work that they do is really exhausting. A lot of people, they may hurt themselves. People sprint around trying to get these orders and stuff like that.

A lot of people have felt like they've been retaliated against unfairly for things. They've not gotten the support that they've needed. We have a lot of women co-workers that have mentioned harassment from customers, sexual harassment, inappropriate touching and statements to them. And back when I first started working there, they would ban people from the store. Now, they just kind of shoo them away and just kind of calm people down. So there are a lot of weird instances where workers just don't feel like they're safe or protected or cared for. And a union just makes more sense. You know, a lot of benefits from pay to health care to just the work environment that shifts when you have a union in place.

So many people laugh at the open door policy, because every time we look at store leadership's door, it's literally closed, like they've been putting like little sheets on it so you can't even look inside.

We still have them, but they're just useless now, job dialogs, which is like your annual raise program. But if you're a new team member now you, like, your first year, you don't get a job dialog. You get, I think it totals out to 5% you get like, 2 or 3% the first six months, and then the last 6 months, you get another, it totals out to 5. And then, even if you've been with the company for a long time now, the average is 5% and if you were to strive or, say you deserve, you know, 7 or 8%, they have to get approval from store leadership, and then store leadership has to take it up to regional. Some guy that you never see has to approve the raise. So, there's no real merit based raise system, because you're going to get stonewalled by someone at some point.

And people have brought issues to leadership, and they've had these meetings, and they've had these town halls and conversations with workers, and nothing happens. We have this insanely draconian attendance system. It's like a mutation of a point system. It's called UPT, unpaid time off, and it's like a counter, essentially, if you're full time, you get, you get 30 hours of UPT. If you're part time, you get 20 hours of it. And whenever you call out, even if you use paid time off, it comes off that counter. And once you hit zero hours, you're eligible to get fired. And it caps at 60 hours, and it accumulates one hour every, I think it's every 30 hours you work. Some of my co-workers are scared to call out for just like, something simple.

Errol Schweizer: People are in the store handling food, and if you're sick, you shouldn't be at work, and you shouldn't be punished because you caught a cold on public transit or from your kid who's in school.

Ed Dupree: I always heard that back in the day Whole Foods had a culty vibe, because it was so based around the idea of John Mackey and what he believed, values, and a cognitive dissonance that they have that this, like, this isn't the place that you used to be in.

When I've spoken to my older co-workers who've been with the company for a long time, and they've seen that degradation. It's up to us to make a new culture, and that culture has to be rooted in what used to be Whole Foods, but we understand that a union is what makes us strong enough to keep that culture alive. Like all that community building, it's still there in terms of people wanting to be cool and meet very interesting people. I've met so many characters and just wild individuals that I never thought I'd meet in a grocery store, but they work at Whole Foods, and that's still there.

And it's just up to the workers of the company to cultivate something new. And I think that has to come from a union, you know? Because the reality is, Amazon has sucked out all the good stuff from Whole Foods. And like you said, it's a husk. It's this shell of what used to be. It's not Whole Foods. It’s not the same thing. You know what I mean?

I think people should be organizing, whether it's in Whole Foods, whether it's in Trader Joe's, whether it's in Target. I think the union, the idea and concept of the union, is something that we've kind of lost connection with. And I think if working people across this country want to see better conditions, then we should be supporting that. So get educated, get agitated and get to organizing.

4. Tunes

We can’t have a conversation about Philly and not shout out The Roots. And in my humble opinion, Black Thought is the greatest MC of all time.

peace.