Meet the Workers Who Could Organize the Only Whole Foods Union
We spoke to the Philadelphia workers who could reverse Amazon’s union-busting playbook.
By Georgia Parke and Ian McKenna, More Perfect Union
Just three years ago, a unionized Amazon workforce seemed unthinkable; the company had been busting organizing drives for more than two decades, including a high-profile campaign in 2021 in Bessemer, Alabama that still hasn’t been resolved.
Today, thousands of Amazon warehouse workers and drivers are unionized or in the process of organizing — and their counterparts at Amazon-owned Whole Foods are now on their way as well.
On Nov. 22, workers in Philadelphia announced their intent to organize the first union at Whole Foods in decades. The organic supermarket chain, which was bought by Amazon in 2017, has hundreds of U.S. locations. The 300 employees at a Whole Foods store in Center City have filed to join United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and are awaiting a date for their election from the National Labor Relations Board.
“It is becoming impossible to balance our health, our safety, and our desire to satisfy and delight our customers with the company’s thirst for profits,” the unionizing workers said in a statement. “By forming our union, we aim to be a beacon of hope for every Whole Foods and Amazon worker, all around the world. We can and will fight for what we deserve: fair pay, better working conditions, and a voice for all.”
“They expect us to do so much in so little time. I feel like they don’t care about our health and well-being,” one worker told More Perfect Union. “They care about productivity and numbers, you know. Just—pretty much just get more money in their bank accounts…. And that is why this union is happening.”
The living wage for a single person with no children in Philadelphia is $22.29 an hour, and a recent study showed individuals would need to make twice that to live comfortably — yet workers reported making just $16 an hour at this store.
“They’re bragging in these meetings about how we’re making $1.6 million before the weekend,” another worker told More Perfect Union. “That’s before the three busiest days of the week, and you can’t pay people enough to just be able to enjoy their lives? You can’t pay people enough to at least be able to take a week off? It’s frustrating because you know that money’s going somewhere, and someone’s benefitting from it. It’s not the workers.”
In a statement to More Perfect Union, a Whole Foods Market spokesperson said that the company “remains committed to listening to Team Members,” and pointed to their “open-door policy.”
To win their election, workers will have to contend with Whole Foods’ notorious anti-union approach and Amazon’s illegal playbook of union busting. In 2020, Business Insider first reported that Whole Foods was using a “heat map” to track stores that were most likely to unionize based on factors like OSHA violations, income inequality, and racial diversity.
Whole Foods founder and former CEO John Mackey also once compared unions to having herpes. “It doesn’t kill you, but it’s unpleasant and inconvenient, and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover,” Mackey reportedly said in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, before Amazon bought the company and while Mackey was still CEO, a Whole Foods store in Madison, Wis. briefly unionized with UFCW but de-certified after a year after contract negotiations stalled.
More Perfect Union went to Philadelphia to hear directly from Whole Foods employees, who told us about deteriorating working conditions, a culture of surveillance, and management that boasts high profits as employees are forced to work two jobs to survive. They’re taking on a corporate behemoth to improve those conditions — and like Amazon workers in Staten Island and Starbucks baristas in Buffalo before them, winning could be an earthquake for the labor movement in America.
“I hope people will look at us and use us as an example,” one worker said. “I wish we could be everybody’s first step, to push them to fight for things, too.”