PHILADELPHIA — At Whole Foods’ flagship location in the city of brotherly love, management tried to lure workers away from a union rally on Monday by offering up no-cost hoagies and bags of chips. Just outside, however, their colleagues — joined by about a dozen elected officials — warned that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
“We work here and can’t even shop here,” Mase Veney, a Whole Foods employee, said just steps from his employer’s front door. Flanked by legislators and organizers with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776, including dozens of rank-and-file members marching up and down the sidewalk, Veney and other workers argued that parent company Amazon — which reported a net income of $15.3 billion in its last reported quarter, up more than 50% from the year before — can afford more than just the occasional treats.
Last November, a majority of workers at this sprawling Whole Foods location, as much an Amazon delivery hub as a grocery store, expressed interest in forming a union. An election is now scheduled to take place on Jan. 27. If the UFCW campaign is successful, it will be the first Whole Foods in the country where employees will be represented by a union.
Amazon, which acquired Whole Foods Market in 2017 for about $13.7 billion, is not relying on carrots (or other treats) alone. Pro-union workers — motivated in part by a desire to push back against Amazon’s imposition of warehouse-style metrics — said they have faced intimidation tactics since going public with their organizing drive, the company having multiple sticks at its disposal.
Leeya Girmay said she can’t pay her bills with free snacks. She and other workers were recently denied a raise that Whole Foods had offered to staff at other regional locations — federal labor law allows Amazon to do so, in part to avoid the appearance of influencing an upcoming election — and the company, she said, has not been subtle about what it wants to happen later this month.
“Let me tell you, Amazon has this union-busting process down to a science,” Girmay said. There’s the “free food and fake smiles,” she said, but it’s paired with an air of menace: “They’re posting anti-union propaganda on every inch of wall space in the store backroom; they replaced all our store leadership and team leads with Whole Foods union-busting pros; [and] are using strangers to monitor us and incite fear.”
State Sen. Nikil Saval addresses workers at a Whole Foods in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Charles Davis)The anti-union campaign has included team meetings at work and even text messages received after hours, Girmay said, speaking as members of Whole Foods’ security team ― their faces concealed by balaclavas — guarded the store’s entryway.
Other workers said that some of their pro-union colleagues have been terminated in recent weeks, seemingly in retaliation for their outspokenness. One employee, offering only her first name, Piper, said she had worked at the location for three years and seen it become progressively worse, from a workers’ rights perspective. That, she said, has brought workers together.
“I’ve seen that my struggles are not just mine alone,” she said. “[There are] countless stories of unfair treatment, unrealistic expectations and pushing us harder and harder every day,” she continued, urging her fellow workers to be skeptical of any kindness ― including strategically deployed junk food — the company offers between now and election day.
“I encourage workers to ask themselves, ‘Why is leadership so friendly, out of nowhere?’” she said, and to remember that snacks cannot make up for a lack of living wages and adequate health care. “It’s insulting to think that this is what we want,” she said. “We want a union.”
Whole Foods did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Last year, however, a spokesperson told Salon that the grocer is “committed to listening to our Team Members, making changes based on their feedback, and treating all our Team Members fairly in a safe, inclusive working environment.”
Philadelphia elected officials appear united in skepticism, the broad coalition that came out in support of Whole Foods workers on Monday a testament to the power of organized labor in the city: among the dozen or so politicians in attendance were progressives, like Councilmember Jamie Gauthier and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, as well as state Rep. Amen Brown, a conservative-leaning Democrat who has raised tens of thousands of dollars from groups linked to Jeffrey Yass, a Republican mega-donor and ally of President-elect Donald Trump.
State Sen. Nikil Saval, representing the left flank of the Democratic Party, urged workers to stay strong in the face of management’s intimidation, portraying the fight as part of a large battle for democracy in the workplace and indeed the country as a whole.
“It is the fundamental cornerstone of our democracy, and I’m so grateful to you for fighting for that,” Saval said. “They’re going to take you into rooms and try to tell you that this isn’t worth it; that this is hurting things … And do you what that is? That is bulls**t, right? Total bulls**t.”
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