On Monday, workers at Philadelphia’s Center City Whole Foods voted 130-100 to be represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. It marks the first time an Amazon-owned Whole Foods store has voted to unionize—and it is one of the first major union elections of the second Trump presidency.
The organizing effort, which workers say has been in the works for over a year, went public in November. Workers say it was driven by myriad demands, including a push for increased pay. The base wage at the Center City Whole Foods is $16 per hour. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the living wage for a single person in Philadelphia, without dependents, is over $22 per hour. (Amazon, which has owned Whole Foods since 2017, is worth about two and a half trillion dollars.)
Whole Foods workers told me the low pay means they have to work multiple jobs to manage their bills. Khy Adams, 32, makes $16.50 an hour in the hot foods department but has to work as a culinary instructor on the side. She often logs well over 50 hours per week between her two jobs.
“The union-busting propaganda started happening within weeks.”
Mase Veney, 26, has worked in the produce department for three years. Mostly, he said, that means “lifting heavy boxes” in a freezing cooler. About a year and a half ago, at the end of his shift, Veney emerged to talk to a friend in another department. “I just came out to take a break because I was freezing cold,” he said. But for this small break, he was castigated for wasting time. Then, he said, some of his shifts mysteriously disappeared from the calendar.
After that incident, Veney joined forces with four other workers to figure out how to start a union.
Almost immediately after going public, they faced opposition. Fliers reading “stay whole, vote no” circulated around the store. Managers that Veney and his coworkers were used to working with were transferred to other locations of Whole Foods. “The union-busting propaganda started happening within weeks,” Adams said.
During the first week of January, UFCW 1776 filed an unfair labor practice complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that at least one worker was fired as retaliation for union activity and that “supervisors coercively told employees that they would not be getting wage increases because of their union activities and made promises of wage increases if they did not vote to unionize.” (Amazon disputes these assertions. A Whole Foods representative said that the company will implement a raise when it is legal to do so.)
Strange faces started showing up around the store, workers said, as the unionization vote approached. “They started bringing in people from Texas, people from Florida—a lot of people from New York. There was one person who was there from California,” Adams told Mother Jones.
The new people, who wore “Culture Champion” merchandise, never told her their job title. They were oddly gregarious, Adams remembered. “We’re here to help with anything you need,” she recalls them saying. And the new colleagues were especially eager, Adams recalled, to talk about why unionizing could be harmful to workers. Yet when she tried to assign them tasks, they were nowhere to be found. “On any given day, I would see maybe four or five people that would have ‘Culture Champion’ merch on, but they wouldn’t necessarily be performing a job,” she said.
Meanwhile, her department was chronically understaffed: dishes regularly piled up because too few people were hired to wash them. Adams often tried her best to manage preparing the rotisserie chickens, operating the hot bar, and tending to the soups all at the same time.
On Monday, when the results began to come in, Adams almost could not believe it. “The propaganda machine wanted us to believe that we were isolated, that no one wanted this, that we were just on an island all by ourselves,” she said. “But I’m not the only person who wants this—we aren’t the only group of people who want this.”
In a statement, the company said: “We are disappointed by the outcome of this election, but we are committed to maintaining a positive working environment in our Philly Center City store.”
Now, the challenge for the newly unionized Whole Foods workers is to negotiate with their employers. Amazon has been more than willing to deploy anti-union tactics in the past. In October, the company received a complaint from the NLRB over its refusal to negotiate with unionized delivery drivers employed by a third-party company. And when a Staten Island Amazon warehouse voted to unionize nearly three years ago, the company refused to come to the bargaining table. While refusing to bargain is illegal, the penalties are minimal.
The unionized Whole Foods workers will also be facing a much more anti-union NLRB—just hours after their election, Trump fired former General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who was well-known for going after Amazon.
Now, “we have to certify these votes, to make sure that everything goes through and that Amazon doesn’t try to throw a wrench in that plan, which they are very much known for,” Adams said. During the vote-certification process, Amazon will have a chance to challenge any ballots filed.
“I feel like it’ll make Amazon fight harder, because they know that Trump’s in office,” Veney said. “But we have a lot of people behind us, backing us up, and I think we can make this thing happen.” The unionized workers, knowing they won’t be supported on the federal level by Trump, are looking to local and state-level politicians for backup.
Their first challenge, Veney said, is simple. Earlier this month, the Center City Philadelphia store was reportedly exempted from a region-wide wage increase. Workers said they were told this was because Amazon didn’t want to sway the outcome of the election.
“The vote is now over,” Adams said. “So where are our wage increases that you said you were going to give us?”
