PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Unionized workers at the Whole Foods in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood rallied outside the store Monday in hopes of bringing pressure on the company to negotiate a first contract with them.
The crowd of workers was, by design, an inescapable presence for passersby. Union leaders said customers have the most leverage in bringing the company to the table.
“I gotta ask the consumers out there, think about who you want to support,” said United Food and Commercial Workers Union President Wendell Young. “You want to support Jeff Bezos and Amazon to continue behaving like this?”
Employees at the Fairmount location voted to unionize in January, but the Amazon-owned grocery chain has yet to begin negotiating a contract with them, continuing the parent company’s trend of refusing to acknowledge union elections at its facilities.
The union wanted to engage the customer base to help change that.
“When their bottom line is affected by customers’ choices and their perception of how they treat their workers, it becomes an issue,” said worker Ed Dupree, who helped organize the unionization effort.
The company has continued to contest the results of the union election, when workers voted 130-100 in favor of unionization with UFCW Local 1776.
Local politicians said that this is a sign that even a company as massive as Amazon fears unions.
“They understand that when you win, there are going to be Whole Foods, distribution centers, everywhere that Amazon is, they’re going to have people who demand better,” said State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, “and so they get real nervous when you come out here demanding what you deserve.”
The rally was scheduled for the Monday before Thanksgiving, which the union says is one of the busiest shopping days of the year as customers prepare for big family meals on Thursday. But the union says that a living wage in Philadelphia is more than $25 an hour, far above the $17 hourly starting wage at Whole Foods stores.
“There should not be a supermarket where the people who work in the supermarket can’t afford the food in the supermarket,” said state Sen. Sharif Street.
Whole Foods challenged the results of the election, which they lost. An appeal is on hold because President Trump has failed to appoint enough members to the National Labor Relations Board. The five-member board requires three members to issue any rulings, but after the firing of one member and the expiration of another’s term, there is currently only one active board member.