Portside

With a rich history stretching back to 1682, Philadelphia boasts the nation’s first library, its first hospital, its first daily newspaper, even its first zoo. Now, a tenacious group of grocery store workers wants to earn the City of Brotherly Love another accomplishment: the nation’s first unionized Whole Foods Market. 

On November 22, Whole Foods Workers United officially declared its intention to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) Local 1776 and filed papers with the National Labor Relations Board. 

Since Amazon bought the company in 2017, Whole Foods has undergone a litany of changes — many, workers say, for the worse. The checkout area is heavily surveilled to account for increased self-checkout (which in some stores includes a palm-scanning biometric option) and as demand for delivery orders has skyrocketed, so has the infrastructure to support it, including bringing in an army of delivery drivers and shoppers who compete with workers and regular customers for aisle space. Amazon has also attempted to integrate its own grocery brands into Whole Foods, and is debuting robot-run ​“mini warehouses” to encourage customers to buy more of its conventional products. Its thirst for profits and quest to dominate the grocery market has led the company to expand at a rapid pace. Meanwhile, workers struggle to keep up.

“The store operates chronically understaffed,” says Piper, who has worked as a customer service operator at Whole Foods for the past three years and asked that her last name be withheld for fear of employer retaliation. ​“I can only speak for my team specifically, but we’re exhausted from trying to meet these unrealistic productivity metrics, especially the Items Per Minute quota for cashiers. We’re told to ring as fast as possible to get customers in and out — as if we’re robots.”

The campaign has been a year in the making, as ​“people come and go due to the churn of working retail and working for Amazon,” explains worker-organizer Ben Lovett, who has been at the Center City location since 2023 in the prepared foods department and as an online order shopper. ​“It slowly built as we mapped all the departments and recruited new organizers. We started collecting cards a couple months ago and reached a majority after about 7 or 8 weeks.”

The organizing committee reached out to several unions over the past year, but ultimately, the the 1.2-million strong UFCW — whose members include 835,000 grocery store workers at major chains like Kroger, Albertsons, Safeway, Stop & Shop and Giant — seemed like the most natural choice, says Lovett. If successful, Whole Foods Workers United will represent 300 workers at the chain’s flagship store in Center City, near verdant Fairmount Park (and not far from, yes, the Rocky statue).

But first they’ll have to overcome the combined antiunion history of Whole Foods and Amazon.

Previous efforts to organize at Whole Foods met steep resistance from the company, even prior to its 2017 sale to the notoriously anti-union Amazon. In 2002, workers at a Madison, Wis., location voted to unionize with UFCW Local 1444. Whole Foods — then led by founder John Mackey — launched a program of anti-union captive audience meetings, fired several worker organizers, and appealed the vote to the National Labor Relations Board. Ultimately, workers filed a petition requesting removal of the union. Mackey celebrated by saying, ​“the company fully expects to put this brief period of unionization behind us.”

Fledgling unionization efforts in Texas and Virginia in 2003 met a similar fate. Between 2010 and 2014, workers at a San Francisco location led a solidarity union campaign with the Industrial Workers of the World that gained public attention but eventually, as one organizer put it, ​“fizzled out.”

In 2018, post-Amazon acquisition, a group of workers sent a mass email to thousands of employees at Whole Foods’ 490 locations to encourage their coworkers to join a cross-regional union organizing committee. Dubbed the Whole Worker Union, their campaign was supported by the UFCW’s Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which represents thousands of grocery store workers in the United States.

Shortly after the email went public, the company responded by rolling out a new ​“Union Awareness” program to train store management to spot and crack down on potential union activity. As one Whole Foods manager told Gizmodo, ​“They told us how as team leaders we are expected to toe the company line and be anti-union.”

Mackey quibbled with the idea that he or Whole Foods were anti-union, but his public comments told their own story. He infamously compared labor unions to an STI, opining that, ​“The union is like having herpes. It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover.” He insisted that Whole Foods was simply ​“beyond unions.”

When Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, it brought its own union-avoidance tactics to bear. Team leaders received a 45-minute video on how to spot union activity. In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the globe, a group of Whole Foods workers partnered with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee to launch a public petition calling on their employers to take workers’ safety seriously. Whole Foods had received positive press for early safety initiatives, but as the pandemic persisted and temporary measures expired, the petition alleged that customers were crowding the store and refusing to wear masks, and that workers had no defined sick policy or ability to quarantine.

“None of us signed up for this,” Megan Murray, a Whole Foods worker in Philadelphia, told The Counter in 2020. ​“It feels like we’ve been drafted into war, in a way. We’re receiving an additional two dollars of pay, but that puts us at $17 an hour. And as grocery store workers are dying, the sense among us team members is that it’s not worth it to potentially risk our lives for $17 an hour.”

The campaign ​“never got too far,” says Dupree. ​“The main issues persisted and even got worse, particularly pay not keeping up with inflation; cutting of the labor budget creating more exhausting shifts and straining workers; removing healthcare from part timers and getting rid of policies like gainsharing and general practices that made work more engaging. All these things getting worse over time made folks feel the need for a union.”

Some members of the current bargaining committee were a part of that 2020 push for Covid safety, and now they’re ready for round two. 

In addition to staffing levels and safety, the other major issues motivating the union drive, like wages and benefits, will sound familiar to other grocery store workers and most retail workers. Whole Foods may have higher prices and a shinier, more luxe image than, say, Kroger, but that doesn’t change the day-to-day challenges of the people who work there. ​“Sure, we’re a bougie overpriced grocery store, but we do necessary work,” says Ed Dupree, who has worked in the Whole Foods produce department for eight years. ​“We feed the community. We educate the community about the food they consume. Our jobs are important and contribute to society and we deserve a wage that allows us to comfortably live as well as benefits that allow us to be healthy and healthier.”

While Dupree, Lovett, and a number of the other organizing committee members were all-in from the moment they began discussing unionizing, some workers took a bit longer to warm up to the idea. E-commerce shopper Audrey (who asked that her last name be withheld for fear of employer retaliation) was initially indifferent to the union. Originally from Vietnam, she moved to the U.S. eight years ago, and has worked at the Center City location for nearly a year. She thought the job was easy at first, but decided to get involved after seeing the way that the frantic pace they were expected to maintain was impacting her coworkers. ​“I kept seeing other workers get rushed and pushed around to keep up with the UPH [a metric of items per hour that an online order fulfiller ​“picks”] while there is little or no help from the management, to the point that they are stressed out and getting hurt,” she explained. ​“That was when I told Ben that I wanted to get involved more, because I wanted to make changes for my fellow workers.”

Another member of the organizing committee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, emphasized that the union drive isn’t just about improving their own wages and working conditions, it’s also about addressing what they see as an overall decline in the company’s commitment to its customers. ​“Prioritizing maximization of profit over all else has resulted in poor conditions for workers and lower quality products and services for customers,” they say. ​‘If nothing is done it will only continue to get worse. This affects everyone. Our fight is for all — not just for us as employees but for Whole Foods patrons and our local communities as well.”

Whole Foods has not faced a serious unionization effort in several years, so these Philadelphia workers are something of a test case. They do have the advantage of living and working in a heavily pro-union city and organizing with a strong local union, but as both companies have made clear, any effort to organize will be an uphill battle — and then the added stress of dealing with a Trump-controlled NLRB. Whole Foods has been preparing for this moment for years, too, tracking potential union activity with a ​“heat map” of ​“risk factors” that may inspire workers to organize.

“Amazon and Whole Foods have a history of wanting to disempower workers so that the company is in complete control over the workforce,” Lovett explains. ​“I expect this to continue through an anti-union campaign to talk workers out of exercising our right to organize and to realize the power we have.” On Thursday, Lovett says, workers were subject to their first captive audience meeting, in which management shared anti-union talking points.

Reached for comment for this story, a Whole Foods Market spokesperson sent the following statement:

At Whole Foods Market, we remain committed to listening to our Team Members, making changes based on their feedback, and treating all of our Team Members fairly in a safe, inclusive working environment, while providing our Team Members with career advancement opportunities, great benefits, and market competitive compensation. Whole Foods Market recognizes the rights of our Team Members to make an informed decision on whether union representation is right for them. We agree with the overwhelming majority of our Team Members who value our open door policy and our ability to quickly respond to the needs of our workforce. 

The company’s response to their petition will undoubtedly dictate just how tough the next few months will be, but organizing committee member Mase (who asked that his last name be withheld for fear of employer retaliation) believes Whole Foods Workers United are ready for whatever gets thrown at them. ​“I see that there could be a lot of tension, perhaps maybe a mixture of fear, but I hope whichever it is, it sparks change,” he tells In These Times.

What’s more, they’re already in contact with workers at other stores who are looking to them for organizing inspiration. ​“Our store can’t be an island in a sea of unorganized ones for long,” Dupree says. ​“If we want to truly wield power against Whole Foods, we must do it as a bloc. More organized stores means a stronger movement and will result in more concessions from Whole Foods. While one contract in one store is good, a national contract would be great.”

Someone always has to be the first. It’s fitting that Philadelphia — the site of so much revolutionary change, and so many important firsts — is poised to finally push the long effort to unionize Whole Foods over the finish line. ​“We know that our store alone cannot win the raises, benefits and working conditions that we deserve,” Audrey says. ​“We want to show other workers that it is possible to stand up to large companies that want to completely control our work lives and inspire Whole Foods workers, Amazon workers, and all workers to join in!”