PHILADELPHIA — You don’t have to search long and far to see what workers are complaining about: The first level of Whole Foods' flagship location in the city — a sprawling 62,000 square feet situated about halfway between City Hall and the statue of Rocky Balboa, complete with fast-casual dining options and a bar — contains no food nor anything else available for purchase. Instead, customers are hit with visuals more akin to an Amazon warehouse: a bustling floor of harried employees scrambling to fulfill orders that were placed online, surrounded on both sides by refrigerators filled with bags of groceries waiting to be picked up or delivered.
And if you bought a sweater off Amazon.com and it didn’t fit quite right? You can return that here, too. The actual grocery store requires climbing another flight of stairs.
Ed Dupree’s been working in the produce section since 2016, when the store first opened and a press release emphasized the in-person shopping experience, including a “roving cocktail cart” and a “curated selection” of drinks to imbibe while picking out fruit. Since then the company has been acquired by Amazon — a $13.7 billion acquisition was completed in 2017 — and there was a pandemic that accelerated a shift toward consumers paying other people to pick up and deliver their food.
“I’ve been here for a while,” Dupree said in an interview, “and I’ve seen a lot of changes.”
The sum of those changes has led to this: Dupree and his coworkers trying to join a union. On Nov. 22, the National Labor Relations Board confirmed receipt of a petition seeking to organize some 300 employees at the Whole Foods by Center City, Philadelphia, with NLRB spokesperson Kayla Blado telling Salon that it is currently being processed by the regional office.
An election could happen soon: A rule issued by the Democratic-led NLRB last year slashed the bureaucratic delays between filing such a petition — which requires signatures from at least 30% of a store’s employees — and holding a store-wide vote on whether to form a union, meaning ballots could be cast in the next few months, if not weeks.
If the drive is successful, it would be the first time any workers at a Whole Foods enjoy collective bargaining rights. The demands, per Dupree, are typical: Better pay, benefits and security from a company whose parent reported more than $30 billion in profits last year, as well as accommodations for those who may struggle with the physical demands of the job. (“We have some older coworkers with us who can’t stand all day, they have disabilities and stuff like that, and they give people s**t for just trying to get a chair at the register,” he explained.)
While each employee may have their own reasons for seeking union representation, the ones with the most obvious workplace issues are those who, prior to 2017, would never have worked at Whole Foods: those on the first level, fulfilling online orders for Amazon.
“They work those people like they’re in a warehouse, like it’s a completely different ball game, Dupree said. “They got those people just running, sprinting throughout the store. And if they stop and talk for a second, it’s a problem.”
It’s a problem because of the metrics by which they are judged. As Business Insider reported in 2022, Whole Foods’ parent company is subjecting workers there to the same warehouse-style metrics it employs elsewhere, judging those who fulfill online orders based on how many items they pick up each hour.
“This is one example where we’re starting to see the learnings that were developed in warehouses spill over into other industries,” Beth Gutelius, research director at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois Chicago, told the publication. “Amazon’s main competitive advantage has been its ability to monitor its workforce and prod it to work faster.”
Amazon’s advantage exacts a personal toll, workers say.
“The worst of it goes to the Amazon shoppers,” Frankie Ziegler, who works in customer service at Whole Foods, told Salon. “They’re really held down to this numerical value that they’re assigned. It seems like they’re just constantly worrying about and it’s not good — I don’t think for anybody, for their mental health or anything.”
But they’re not the only ones at Whole Foods now subject to Amazon’s metrics-based assessments. As a cashier, Ziegler said they are judged on the number of items scanned per minute, which eliminates any incentive to go above and beyond for the customer — or even just to talk to them.
“Everybody knows that it’s basically total bulls**t,” Ziegler said. “It doesn’t really give a good idea of cashier performance at all because there’s so many things that can’t be tracked by a number,” they said. “If we’re not busy and I’d like to have a nice conversation with a customer and make a genuine human connection, we’re discouraged from doing that by our [metrics]. That just seems antithetical to the mission of Whole Foods.”
In a statement, a Whole Foods spokesperson said the company, which employs around 100,000 people at more than 500 stores, is willing to hear out its employees.
“[W]e 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,” the company said. Whole Foods also “recognizes the right of our Team Members to make an informed decision on whether union representation is right for them.”
In person, however, Whole Foods is discouraging its employees from unionizing. At a recent team huddle, at the start of a shift following news of the NLRB petition, a representative from corporate addressed staff.
“They came in and basically were like, ‘Hey guys, we’ve heard about this, but we just want to you all to be quote-unquote ‘informed,’” Spider Basso-Davis, who works as a cashier assistant at Whole Foods, said in an interview. “And then they gave a lot of discouraging facts, and no encouraging facts, while claiming to be neutral. It was very obviously disingenuous and I think a lot of people who were in that meeting felt that way because it got kind of heated.”
Attendance for the anti-union part of the meeting was not mandatory, according to Basso-Davis, which is notable because the NLRB only just this month issued a decision banning employers from holding such “captive audience” events. The reaction he described also suggests, mandatory or not, the talking points are not finding a receptive audience.
From his perspective, working at Whole Foods is not the worst thing in the world: it is a job, which at $16.50 an hour pays more than twice Pennsylvania’s minimum wage of $7.25 (the state’s Democratic-led House voted to raise it to $15 an hour by 2026 but the legislation was blocked by the GOP-controlled Senate). But, like a lot of jobs, it could also be better — for all parties — if workers had more input on their workplace environment and if addressing their concerns was a contractual obligation.
“There’s an insane amount of turnover at this store,” Basso-Davis said. “Lots of people come in and then immediately leave. There’s just not a big enough group of people who are consistently here to make sure the store runs as smoothly as possible and minimize the stress that all the employees are under.”
Enter the United Food and Commerce Workers International Union, Local 1776. Wendell Young IV, the local’s president, told Salon that his union began conversations earlier this year with Whole Foods employees looking to organize, offering them advice along the way. He credits Whole Foods’ parent company with getting the union drive this far.
“I got to give the credit to Amazon and to the workers who have decided they’ve had enough and that it’s not the way people should be treated,” Young said. “Everyone’s pretty much had enough.”
Young, whose union represents workers at several other local grocers, specifically credited Amazon’s warehouse mentality being brought over to its public-facing operations. Workers are being “pushed to accomplish more than is reasonable, realistic or what our bodies are meant to take,” he argued. “There’s a reason their turnover is so high. It’s not the image the company wants to project about being warm and fuzzy and caring and considering and sharing in the huge profits. None of that’s actually true.”
Several workers said their effort to organize was about more than just their own material conditions, but demonstrating that action can still be taken to improve people’s lives, no matter what may or may not be happening at the national level. A union is also a legacy, as they see it; a way to leave a workplace a little bit better than one found it.
“I think about unions as an institution,” Dupree, who works in the produce section at Whole Foods, told Salon. “They’re for working class people and I think for a long time we’ve neglected them. They fall apart. They fall into disarray,” he said. By forming a union, or improving one that already exists, “what you’re doing, in the long run, is leaving a structure for other works so that they aren’t put in bad situations … there can be something for the future so that they don’t have to suffer the way you did.”
For Ziegler, who works in the customer service department, the intent is also to inspire.
“I think a lot of us are doing this, or at least I am, because I want to see more people in more workplaces doing what we’re doing,” they said. “I’ve been working grocery for my entire adult life and it’s never been good — none of the places I’ve worked have been good in the ways that we’re trying to improve Whole Foods. And I just want our little project that we’re doing to start a big wave.”
“I want more workplaces and more grocery stores to be organizing,” Ziegler added. “I think that is the best resistance we can have to people who are trying to exploit us.”
