It has been said before, but now is fit to say again-last week, labor sold its soul to the company store.
Whole Foods, 3313 University Ave., known in Madison as a grocery store offering organic and natural food alternative,broke relations last week with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1444 in a decision resulting from a management-backed petition and highly questionable employee retention practices. The Madison store had been the only unionized Whole Foods in the nation-breaking new ground in modern labor history-and providing an example of positive labor relations otherwise lacking in the highly competitive grocery industry.
Whole Foods was unionized last year as a result of disputes with management over a dress code and appearance policy. Management's policy would have forced some employees to change their lifestyle including adopting natural hair-color, dressing to strict standards and removing tattoos. Refusal to comply with the dress code would have resulted in termination. But thanks to employee effort and the adoption of an employee union, the dress code never went into effect. Lifestyle choices remained free and employees improved their bargaining power with management.
Last week's decision to decertify the worker union, however, was highly questionable. According to UW students employed at Whole Foods, the petition to decertify was passed around the break room of the grocery store itself, often while employees were punched-in and still on store-time. Dan Welch, president of UFCW Local 1444 expressed his concern that \any time management is involved in [petitioning], you have to be suspicious there was some intimidation involved."" In fact, the National Labor Relations Act makes anti-union solicitation illegal during employee work hours and on company grounds.
Further, those who showed approval of the union were quickly fired for minor infractions of store policy or otherwise reprimanded. One employee was fired for eating a day-old pastry, believing because of its age it was available for employee consumption. Another was served with a store infraction nearly a week after arriving late for work, and only after expressing pro-union sentiment. Two were fired after incorrectly mixing a smoothie at the Juice Bar and then sampling the rejected drink. While all of these employees clearly violated store policy, there is, in their cases, a pattern of particular attention and undue retribution; a pattern apparent when one considers that all of these employees supported the union.
More important, management has long taken a hostile attitude toward unions. According to employees at the store, some signed the petition out of fear for their jobs. John Mackey, national president of Whole Foods, expressed his displeasure of unions by comparing them to herpes: ""It doesn't kill you, but it's unpleasant and inconvenient and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover."" Maybe he finds herpes inconvenient, but management's issue with unions is really about cutting store costs at the expense of employees.
Fearing competition from other grocers including Copps, Wal-Mart and the Willy Street Co-Op, management has sought to break unions instead of profits. But here lies the error of their pure-growth philosophy. If the only accounting Whole Foods can provide for the inflated pricing of their groceries is the presence of a union, then they can take satisfaction in having achieved the utmost efficiency of any grocery store in the nation, but not the incentive or justification for the dissolution of a worker union.
The problem of competitive grocers and anti-union sentiment is actually symptomatic of a much larger failing of our economic system. Union membership has dropped by more than half as a percentage of the workforce in the last 40 years. This drop has accelerated in the last four years. While unions provide the organizational power to guarantee worker rights-like the dress-code fiasco at Whole Foods-they do so at the expense of profits only in comparison to non-union grocers.
If Whole Foods cannot compete with the likes of Wal-Mart and other non-union stores, recourse should be in unionizing both Whole Foods and Wal-Mart.
Much of the beginnings of labor law and union protection are rooted in the history of our own University. We can be proud of the tradition of such progressive economists as Professor John Commons.
""We are accustomed to measure prosperity by millions of dollars,"" wrote Commons in 1913, but now ""let us measure it by the thousands of men and women turned out and placed upon the labor market.""
The market is and should remain a capitalist system, he argued. But the market must also take into account social effects and concerns-including the allowance of labor unions.
Clearly there is a social utility in the permission and protection of unions for they often exist as the only stalwart against hostile management. Clearly we must do everything in our power to protect and promote unions. Clearly Whole Foods is just another in a long line of labor losses. In short, with graduation no more than a few years away, and the likelihood of lifetime employment to follow, it is time to ask ourselves, which side are we on?
