LETTUCE ORGANIZE
Wilted conditions irk chain’s workers
There is a new locally sourced product in the Whole Foods universe: a worker unionization effort.
Citing job losses and lower pay and benefits since Jeff Bezos’ Amazon bought the upscale grocer more than a year ago, a worker group sent a letter to all employees on Thursday encouraging them to “organize.”
“Layoffs and the consolidation of store-level positions at Whole Foods Market have upset the livelihood of team members, stirred anxiety, and lowered morale within stores,” the workers were told in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.
“If we organize our efforts on a national scale, it will be impossible for Amazon and [Whole Foods] executives to ignore,” according to the group, which calls itself Team WFM’sCross Regional Committee.
The letter charges that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s $13.7 billion deal to sell the 490-store chain to Amazonlast year “came with an agreement to trim hundreds of millions of dollars of labor from our stores.”
Layoffs will continue into “2019 and beyond,” the workers said, as Amazon“expands with new technology and labor models.”
The unionization effort could be a wake-up call for Bezos, who has largely kept unions out of his sprawling ecommerce empire.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union has been in discussions with Whole Foods and Amazon workers for years. Thursday’s move, however, was planned by the workers and not the RWDSU, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
Workers struggling to get enough hours to make ends meet “need a union voice and the RWDSU is that union voice,” said the union’s president, Stuart Appelbaum.
“The effort has a good chance of succeeding,” said retail consultant Burt Flickinger, whose firm Strategic Resources Group has surveyed Whole Foods workers across the country. “In all of the key markets, their workers really feel left behind.”
The effort comes on the heels of proposed legislation by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who Wednesday in- troduced the “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act,” also known as the “Stop BEZOS Act.”
The bill would tax large employers like Walmart and Amazon whose employees receive public assistance including food stamps, public housing and Medicaid.
One out of three Amazon workers in Arizona and 2,400 in Pennsylvania and Ohio depen don food stamps, Sanders said.
Whole Foods has for years resisted unionization efforts, but clampdowns on wages and benefits have intensified since Amazon took over, according to workers.
The most vulnerable jobs, according to the employee group, are department order writers, supervisors, store scanners and customer service team positions.
Whole Foods’ profit sharing plan has since been cut back to only “store leadership and home office positions,” according to the letter, which also calls for lower health care deductibles, 401(k) matching and paid maternity leave.
The letter also invites employees to join a “cross-regional committee” to negotiate for their demands with Amazon.
The company did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.