Co-op Insider Tells All

Think you know what’s going on inside Duluth’s Whole Foods Co-op right now? You don’t.

But I’m going to tell you, from my subjective vantage point as a 28-year employee. I am also a member of our union, the UFCW 1189. I am not speaking for the Co-op or the union. Telling you this stuff is a tricky balancing act because I have to not get in trouble with my employer or my union; I need both of them. So, I can’t do a document dump of work product, and I can’t use names or say anything stupid; that might create a hostile work environment or whatever, if anyone I work with reads this. But I do want to be blunt, as in, direct. I recognize that anybody taking exception to what I write here on my own time could still go to HR if it made working with me weird. So this is just me explaining it all conversationally like I would explain it anywhere in a neutral tone. If I were then to get in trubs anyway, I would need the union in my corner — but, if my fellow organized workers get pissed at me for writing this, then the union might lift my veil of protection — the union president himself warned me of such things. But I think I know where the line is, and I have to thread the needle. This is an extraordinary moment in Minnesota co-op history. Member-owners of the Co-op and the general community legitimately want to know WTH is going on, and I am well-positioned to spill the bulk organic tea, haha.

Full Disclosure

I’m also a longtime member-owner of the Co-op, and a core shopper. That’s right, I am a hippy freak devoted to expanding organic agriculture, a major front against the environmental crisis. I know it makes me uncool, but I unironically believe in the mission of this non-corporate-structure green business owned by your friends and neighbors.

In case you don’t know, Whole Foods Co-op has nothing to do with Whole Foods Market except the similar name, which Whole Foods Co-op had first. Whole Foods Market is a giant evil global corporation, and Whole Foods Co-op is an independent two-store community cooperative punching above its weight. Among the Co-op Principles is cooperation between co-ops, and so the Co-op is part of a “virtual chain” of cooperative cooperatives across the country. As a non-corporate business model, natural food co-ops represent a people-powered generational struggle to reform agriculture and the food system. All these co-ops cooperate based on the principle of cooperation.

Part of my job interview 28 years ago was a discussion about the environmental benefits the Co-op strives for as a fundamental part of its mission. I said, “Let’s save the world,” and got the job — the same buyer job I hold today. I’m not sure that direct ecological connection is explicitly drawn anymore in the hiring process, because many feel it’s just a job. And it is just a job. And maybe we can’t even save the world. But, I care that our jobs translate into more organic acreage over time, keeping tons of pesticides out of the water, growing small family farms and local food networks, and fostering climate resilience. I have quietly devoted my life to this co-op, and I’ve spent 100% of my grocery dollar here even when they weren’t paying me enough. There is not another game in town, the other stores carry organics for profit but the Co-op carries them on principle. I don’t go around preaching except now I feel I have to say this so the reader knows my bias: the environment.

I’m lucky to have a job that matches my lifestyle, beliefs, and politics. No one is to the left of me, I am here for the great socialist revolution, and I vote for the political candidates most likely to help raise the federal minimum wage to a living wage. And when I vote in elections for the Co-op’s Board of Directors, I vote for anyone who mentions the union and labor relations. When the staff unionized, it passed by a single vote, and one of those votes was mine. Don’t forget that the history of Minnesota is, in part, the history of co-ops in America. Not specific to Minnesota, but co-ops are a profoundly Minnesotan thing. And the history of unionizing our co-ops is part of union history. I have had a front row seat for a good deal of it. Here in Duluth, we noticed when Co-op Partners Warehouse unionized in the cities, and we knew it meant the Wedge would unionize soon, and all the dominoes would fall after that. The dominoes are still falling. We’re not just slinging groceries.

So, how am I going to tell you what is going on at Whole Foods Co-op right meow without getting in trub-trub? I’m going to do it by pitching it to you as a TV series. This is based on a running joke I have with a friend at work: the Co-op as a sitcom similar to The Office. Many workplaces benefit by being compared to The Office. The Co-op parody version would be called Natural Food Store, about a store named Natural Food Store or NFS (like Whole Foods Co-op is abbreviated WFC). The series collapses several years of fictionalized Co-op history into a small number of seasons:

NFS: The Series

Season One

As the series begins, the store is not unionized yet. The main characters and storylines are introduced including a wacky cast of regular customers and delivery drivers. Some staff characters come and go as they move on to different workplaces or leave the area entirely, but some staff have longer story arcs. There would be a character like me who’s worked there forever but he’s not management, because he is consistently a pain in the ass. There’s one in every co-op. He wouldn’t want to be management anyway;  he sees managers coming in on their days off to cover for staff callouts, which total hundreds of hours per week in the grocery department alone. One thing he never does is come in on his days off, but he’s had perfect attendance for three decades so it’s fine. The store he works at is also his neighborhood grocery store, so if he’s not careful he can just accidentally be there every day for weeks on end. He doesn’t want to live there, so he maintains a strict work-life balance. This is how he has worked one job since 1998 and kept his sanity, such as it is. What the Co-op gets out of him is a know-it-all, short on the social graces, but he can do the job in his sleep and has literally done so.

Meanwhile, some staff do not recognize NFS as a kind of environmental organization like my character does; it is just a job for many. My character has been there, so he gets it. He flashes back to a string of independent retail bakeries he worked in California. He considered them just jobs; in hindsight he is glad he always supported small local businesses with his labor. Over the season, NFS staff grouse more and more about things like micromanaging, working “clopening” shifts, and never knowing their schedules more than a week in advance. Management is portrayed as hapless tragicomic figures. At the end of the last episode, the staff vote to unionize.

Season Two

New characters are introduced, like union representatives dropping by to talk to staff, representing them in disciplinary meetings or what have you. Some of the staff characters from season one have volunteered to become union stewards, trained by the union to know the contract, to help staff, work with the union reps, etc. Micromanaging has dropped precipitously; it is no longer worth it because staff will complain to the union and there will be a hassle. Clopens without mutual consent are gone, and schedules are posted two weeks out. Although the unionization vote was close, staff who had been skeptical come around. The negotiated pay bump was substantial enough that staff make more money than if they hadn’t unionized, even with dues taken out. That’s still how that works.

This season is characterized initially by high staff morale after unionizing. After a few years the mood dips. Management knows they have to get the annual Employee Appreciation event right or they will hear about it. In the community it has been something of a fashion to hate on NFS and some staff are not immune to that. The fact that the business is broadly progressive in nature makes it a sport to poke holes in. NFS can always be charged with not being progressive enough or green enough, even though it is the most progressive, greenest job in town. No one holds Super One, for example, to anything like the standards NFS is judged by. As the union rep characters make their rounds from NFS to other retail businesses, we see they feel guilty — most of the union’s time is spent with the nurses and the doctors. And among the retail stores, NFS is small potatoes. The show portrays scenes inside other regional grocery store chains, and they are always corporate hellscapes where actual oppression occurs. The union reps know co-op staff sometimes can’t name their own union, but staff in the other local grocery stores sometimes don’t even know they’re in a union. And from the Duluth co-op to the co-ops in the cities, union reps know: co-ops are absolutely turned up to 11 all the time.

Staff hijinks ensue as economic anxiety grows internationally. Some stewards scheme to play hardball at the next negotiation. Messages appear on the staff wipe-off board in the break room: RE-NEGOTIATE THE RIGHT TO STRIKE. And REMEMBER YOU DON’T HAVE TO VOTE YES ON A BAD CONTRACT. The contract is nowhere near being negotiated, but the message conveys grievance against the passage of previous contracts, seeding the ground to reject the next one on principle. The series portrays this being talked about at the steward-organized union meetings at Sir Ben’s, sometimes attended by the reps.

In the season finale, what management hoped to be a routine contract negotiation goes off the rails. Before the negotiations are even finished, a Vote No campaign is revealed: one morning most lockers have Vote No flyers taped to them. The staff wipe-off board in the breakroom has been filled in with large all-caps words, “MANAGEMENT IS TRYING TO SILENCE US BY TAKING DOWN FLYERS, IF THIS GETS ERASED IT’S PROOF.” My character writes on the board that the lockers are in fact, still impressively papered with flyers. Immediately two anonymous actionable insults appear against him implying he likes fascism. After weeks of tension, the actual contract vote occurs. For the first time, the staff rejects a contract — by around 80 percent — even though NFS says it’s the best offer they can make. The union negotiating team saw the books too and they agree it’s the best contract this time around. Staff say no anyway. The season ends without a contract, a cliffhanger.

Season Three

NFS is in uncharted territory. While the usual laffs are squeezed from the inherently funny day-to-day operations of the store, the union and management wonder what to do. The negotiations will have to be rescheduled and tried again.

Meanwhile details come out about the failed negotiation. The timeline rewinds a little and the failure is dramatized from several points of view. The union/staff negotiating team is composed of a union rep, a couple union stewards, and some staff members. Management’s negotiating team is composed of managers and the store’s lawyer. Over several weekly sessions, each team sits in a different room. The management team sends its starting position over to the staff team. The staff team sends back its reply, batted back and forth like that. Over a few episodes, the staff team is able to improve some benefits and things. But NFS financials are opened up and it isn’t great. NFS is operating at a loss this year with the economy hurting the business as well as epic callouts.

My character’s buddy at Positively 3rd Street Bakery says there’s no callouts there. Granted they only have a baker’s dozen of employees while NFS has like 125. 3rd Street Bakery is also a co-op, but they are a worker-owned one, so they feel a direct connection to the health of their business. If one person starts calling out, everybody starts making less money, and that gets noticed. Staff do not talk about this at NFS, where one can be late 30 times with little consequence. That’s on both the union and NFS, who fairly negotiated those terms together. Now NFS has some of the most lax attendance policies in the National Co-op Grocer’s Association, and by far, the most call-outs in the Midwest corridor.

Management submits a contract proposal that they say is the best they can do this time, and they stick to it. It is a proposal for a three-year contract, with periodic boosts to the starting wage that gets it to 17 bucks an hour in year three. No one is happy about it but the numbers are the numbers.

The union rep has an idea based on long experience: when management is tapped out, and the union has played all its cards, the way to squeeze one last Hail Mary bump out of management is to offer a full committee recommendation. That is, in exchange for better pay, the staff negotiating team offers to unanimously endorse the contract to the employees. In past negotiations, even though the contracts all passed, there were sometimes holdouts on the union team who didn’t like the contract they’d wound up negotiating, and who campaigned against it. Nothing wrong with that, but a full rec is valuable to management — the optics could help the contract pass so NFS moves forward.

But every member of the union negotiating team must agree to it, otherwise management is offering extra money for nothing. The full committee rec is a chess move that essentially extracts a vow from staff negotiating team members to Not Campaign Against the Contract.

The union rep asks them all if they agree to this, and they all say they do. Presented to management, the store lawyer verifies it by asking the staff team members again if they all agree. They all say they do. But the big reveal at the end of the season finale: someone on the staff negotiating team is fighting dirty.

The other members of the staff team, who all negotiated in good faith, are stunned. And management is stunned. Because one of the union stewards on the team, who it turns out is also a member of the union board of directors or whatever, showed the store financials to staff and a steward or two in support of the Vote No campaign. The union has now — theoretically — committed an unfair labor practice.

Season 4

Chaos. The contract is resubmitted and voted down again by similar high margins as last time. The Vote No campaign is shown to have been unnecessary, as the economic anxiety storyline comes to a head; with these numbers the contract would have been voted down even without the Vote No campaign. The staff and the store are holding on by their fingernails. My character looks into what happened during the failed negotiation and it horrifies him. He wants everyone to have a living wage, and, NFS doesn’t have the money. And, the majority of staff digs in their heels: why should they accept a contract they don’t know they can live on? Even if NFS has no money, that’s not their problem.

Ironically, some staff hate the union as much as they hate NFS. They use the union, which allows them to hurt NFS by voting no. But they would just as likely vote to decertify the union. For now, the ball is back in NFS’s court.

In one episode, staff schemes are hatched about how firing managers could free up some money. A steward points out there is no leverage to force that in negotiation, which is a two-way street. The steward is demonized as not having solidarity. According to Reddit, NFS is Ukraine. Some staff say they will “informationally picket,” embarrassing NFS into making a higher offer, but the planned actions fail to occur. The implication is that Vote No is sheerly economic, but the haters have taken it as a broader mandate which actually has shallow support.

Technically management at this point is allowed to impose a contract, but they don’t want to do that because they need to document to the owners that they are trying everything else first. The union reps don’t think there are enough votes to actually strike, which needs 90%. And in this case, staff would not be financially supported by the union even if a strike vote succeeded. If management were denying human rights, it would be different, but it’s a pay dispute. One of the stewards tells my character, “Some union members would cross a picket line anyway.” Staff are using the union, not the other way around. Even if the union kicked them out for crossing a hypothetical picket line, the purple-state-adjacent politics s do not make that a serious threat. Not in this economy.

The only violence my character fears is violence from the small faction of employees who hate the store as an institution. Presumably it was one of these who wrote the veiled arson threat on the staff wipe-off board in the breakroom, approvingly quoting the West Coast arsonist who burned down his workplace in revenge for not making a living wage. Members of this faction tell the union reps, “We want the store to fail.” They want my character’s job to fail. Do they want expanding organic agriculture and local food networks to fail? At one point one of these nihilists is a steward contributing to hate posts about the store, and contributing to the same Vote No campaign supported by staff which now leaves the union legally exposed in its bad-faith negotiation aspect.

My character reads the union constitution and sees it commands us not to undermine the union, and not to undermine the basic tenets of democracy. He thinks the union has done both, because try as he might with the union president, the union steward-board member faces no accountability for lying to their own negotiating team — union lying to union, not to mention to the NFS lawyer during our otherwise sacrosanct duty to negotiate. My character did not join the union to watch it play dirty against his fellow union members, not to mention against his community co-op. It’s solidarity versus cooperation.

Not only does NFS now have the option to make an unfair labor practice complaint against the union, but the staff negotiating committee can no longer use the offer of full committee recommendation, now effectively ridiculous. Dishonesty in our process removed an arrow from our quiver. Maybe the damage is only cosmetic but it looks terrible. The third round of negotiations is pending as NFS bends over backward instead of filing an unfair labor complaint against a union that coyly winks at dirty tricks.

My character tells the union president, in an email cc’ing all the reps and every union employee, words to the effect of, “I wouldn’t vote for you if you were running for dogcatcher, and let all within the sound of my voice help vote you out for how you have mishandled this situation.” Some reps hold the union president in low esteem over this episode too; the constitution and the bylaws specifically allow him to remove stewards, if not board members — so, why didn’t he send a message by removing steward-status from the person who played dirty, who is still seated on an active negotiating team?

The implication hanging in the air as the season ends is that the union president’s inaction constitutes a low-key union endorsement of dirty tricks against the greenest, most progressive business in town. My character realizes with dread: if NFS can be parodied as a ridiculous Office-style sitcom, the union can be too. The union was supposed to save us, but it is subject to the same problems as NFS is: institutional inertia, the management bubble, and bureaucracy. Is my union screwing up my co-op?

Season 5

Who knows where the writers might take it! My character has a buddy who used to work at NFS, until the union poached him to be a rep among the Twin Cities co-ops. And this guy has a monologue in the first episode this season: “Co-ops tend to have the angriest grocery store employees. Maybe because co-ops hold themselves to a higher standard, so they naturally disappoint the idealists drawn to them? But what happened in the cities is, staff played hardball and forced co-ops to pay higher wages. The co-ops responded with hiring freezes — not replacing staff who matriculate out. Now the staff, reduced to skeleton crews, are furious about that. And the union has fewer dues-paying members than when they started. I don’t know what the solution is.”

Episode two: A union-curious employee goes to a union meeting and finds it’s just bagging on people, and winds up saying, “The shrill vibe is worse than the low pay.” They are later called by a co-worker who literally tells them you’re either for us or against us.

Besides meetings, the only other way staff have to communicate with each other as a union is the steward-moderated Signal chat, with like 30 people on it. But it is haunted by trolls. People who disagree with the trolls about tactics get called “collaborators.” The comedy turns to horror.

The rest of the season is pending.

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An index of Jim Richardson’s essays may be found here.