I’ve been meaning to write a retrospective on my time trying to organize a union at Whole Foods in 2014. I always have a hard time committing myself to writing projects, but upon seeing that Whole Foods workers (along with Amazon, Instacart and other gig workers) were going on strike this coming May 1st, I felt a burst of energy to share my experience. The mix of emotions I feel when I see the endangered, beleaguered, poorly-paid and poorly-treated workers organize is hard to express. I’m at the same time gratified and melancholic, energized and wistful. I wish I could do more to help, to be part of it. Hopefully these posts will be of some benefit, though most of what I share are negative examples to avoid, not of victories that can be easily duplicated.

With six years past and few notes at my disposal I’m going to get some things wrong. I entered the fray in the middle, really on the downturn, of an organizing campaign. I encourage any of my former coworkers to correct anything I get wrong or outright miss. I only have my minor, somewhat clouded perspective. There are others who were much more vital to the beginning of the organizing process who’s experience is needed to fill in mine. Anyway, enough with the preamble, here we go:

At the end of 2013 I was an eager radical fresh off the defeat of the Occupy Wall Street movement working a demeaning data entry job and searching for a place to put my energy. I fashioned myself a socialist of some stripe, a Marxist, I had read 2/3 of Capital (I’m still stuck in the Heavy Machinery chapter) and had looked at union organizer jobs. Occupy Chicago had produced about 100 committed activist-revolutionaries who now formed an unstable social network in the city. At this point, without the Occupy movement holding us together, people were branching off into other projects. A good proportion of former Occupiers were union staffers, usually SEIU (this also says something about the trajectory of the Occupy movement and the current Left) and the Fight for Fifteen movement was gearing up. I of course followed FF15 very closely, and it seemed shockingly successful. I wasn’t naive, I knew SEIU’s reputation (particularly the International leadership). I knew that the strike actions they organized were small, often only a single individual from each store, but it was widespread. Though there wasn’t a heavy concentration at any one shop, there were dozens, then hundreds, and even thousands of low-wage workers who would take part in protests across Chicago. And there were thousands who had signed ‘union cards’ at these shops, though what that signified was not clear. If nothing else, there was a lot of raw material to work with.

There were also several ex-Occupy radicals who were involved in the campaign, as workers, not as staffers. Most notably, there were a handful at a couple Whole Foods stores. There had already been some work trying to organize these stores before FF15 really came onto the scene. With Fight for 15 getting headlines and winning some attention, they were building up some steam. Now, SEIU didn’t really know what to do with them. SEIU really wanted to focus on fast food, but they opened up a Pandora’s Box with these small wild-cats. Suddenly they were getting workers not just from supermarkets, but from convenience stores, small retail outlets, coffee shops – all of them inspired by FF15 and wanting to get some help from a union that seemed to be on the offensive. Again, one of the main problems was that there wasn’t a strong concentration at any of these shops, there were small pockets spread out throughout the entire city, but all of them were low wage retail workers. It’s my understanding SEIU didn’t really want to incorporate the Whole Foods campaign into FF15, but they were overwhelmed by several successful wildcats there and were convinced to bring them on board (at least temporarily). Here’s a link to one of the earliest articles I could find about the strike actions at Whole Foods in Chicago Whole Foods Workers Launch ‘Fight for 15’ Higher Wage Campaign.

For a time, there was a lot of focus on one particular store which seemed to be a ‘hot shop’: the Whole Foods on Halsted and Waveland in Boystown. There were no less than 4 wildcats in the summer and fall of 2013. Now each one didn’t bring out more than 20 workers, but they didn’t face much retaliation (yet) and had won several victories. They had gotten at least one despised manager fired, they won a break room (the management claimed it was under construction, it suddenly appeared open shortly after a strike) and the right for cashiers to some basic comforts, like having access to a water bottle near their work station. What united the workers were generally three basic demands: low pay, the ‘points’ system, and self-respect and dignity. Sexism and racism were rife, this is a quote from the above linked article:

“Women frequently experience sexual harassment, and management does nothing about it, she said.

Bosses once stood by as a customer invited her and three female co-workers to join him in a limo if one performed fellatio on him, she said.

“We can’t tell a creep to go away,” she said. “The second I complained about it, he said I shouldn’t wear the shirt I was wearing.”

The starting wage at Chicago Whole Foods stores was $10 an hour. This was slightly above the minimum wage in the state, but well below the supposed $18 an hour that Whole Foods would say an average worker made at their stores. I have no doubt the average wage was $18/hr, but I am very confident the median age was closer to $10. Embarrassingly, 10 bucks was a higher starting wage than our unionized competitors at Marianos (organized by UFCW, or colloquially, United For Cutting Wages). This would cause problems down the road. And in 2013, 10 bucks an hour, with some expectation to move up if you stick around for a while, it wasn’t seen to be that bad. It was bad. But most retail jobs started below that. What really raised workers’ ire was the points system.

The points system, for those who don’t know, is one of the most ingeniously evil methods of work discipline I’ve ever encountered. Instead of giving workers a set number of sick or personal days that they could spend over the course of a year, a worker starts with some amount of points, at Whole Foods it was six, and every absence or late clock-in deducted from those points. If you needed to take a sudden day off, for whatever reason, you lost 1 point. If you were late (and ‘late’ was defined as clocking in more than 7 minutes after your scheduled start time) you lost half a point. In a calendar year if you lost 6 points you’re fired. It was draconian. If, say, you take three sick days, one personal day and are merely late 4 times over the course of a year you’re fired, no excuses, nothing to say in your defense (actually, we would learn, there was an appeals process, but, lol). There was no such thing as an excused absence. Suffice to say, this was one of our greatest targets to organize around. It would also be one of the strongest cudgels wielded against us.

So, around the winter of 2013 I was approached by some socialist friends of mine to get a job at Whole Foods. A handful of others applied, some got rejected, others were weeded out pretty early. I wasn’t confident I would get hired. I had a little experience in working at supermarkets, I had worked a summer at a Dominicks in the meat department (unbeknownst to me at the time, that minimum wage job was union, another UFCW triumph), but my name was all over Occupy protests. If you googled me the first 5 or so responses were me quoted in various articles about burning down capitalism or whatever. I didn’t think there was any chance I would get the job. But, late December 2013, I got word back and I had an interview, and would start at the Boystown store, what I thought was the hot shop, in January.

I had a bit of a distorted picture of where the organizing was at. It was communicated to me that they had already had about 70 union cards signed (of a store estimated at 200 employees) and an organizing team of 8-10. They were fresh off a stunning victory in November where they won the right to take Thanksgiving off. You can read about it here. We would learn this would be the zenith of the entire campaign. After that, the campaign was battling rearguard actions until it sputtered out. I’ll get to that. While I do believe that some 70 workers signed cards, that was over the course of a year. Their commitment wasn’t strong across the board, and the turnover was so high that many would soon be gone. The 8-10 workers that formed the organizing committee was closer to 5-6, and a couple were soon to leave. The campaign had gotten a ton of publicity and had won some real concessions, but the core wasn’t broadening out much beyond the handful of radicals who started it. Into this maelstrom, I joined the scene.

(end of part I, part II is here https://mikenreich.wordpress.com/2020/04/24/the-life-and-death-of-a-union-campaign/ and part III is here https://mikenreich.wordpress.com/2020/04/26/whole-foods-union-the-denouement/)