In late January, Whole Foods workers at your facility held a union election that won by 130 to 100. This is the first Whole Foods facility to unionize since it has been owned by Amazon. What were the most mobilizing demands, and why did so many people feel ready to organize despite the obvious risks?

Mase: Over the years, we’ve all noticed that things were getting worse. They were squeezing us dry, giving us as little as they could. They started firing full-time members and hiring part time. The workload became a lot on the body. And we just shared our frustrations, everybody felt that way. It was deeper than fighting for another co-worker. We pulled up connections with these people and built a lot of trust. So I think it was easier for people to get behind wanting to form a union. 

We would talk about it all the time, about how Amazon came in and changed the culture at Whole Foods. Amazon came in and implemented that warehouse style — to do everything by the numbers, no breaks. The e-commerce shoppers were especially treated terribly, as if they were expendable. You’ll see one for a week and then they’ll get rid of them. They wouldn’t even really train them, and everybody saw that. That’s what really pushed people to fight for a union.

Piper: Yeah, agree. I think a lot of us had in common being tired of the mistreatment and also feeling like we were expendable. I think the union offers protection from at-will firing, which is really important. Just being able to get fired because your boss doesn’t like you or has something against you. Most co-workers hear “union” and they also know that it’s a way to get our voice back. It’s a way to get our demands heard, where we can come together and we truly are stronger together. We’re able to bargain for things that otherwise we wouldn’t really be able to get. They gave us a new break room, pizza parties, and things like that. But for something bigger — like livable wages, better health insurance — we’re not going to see that without the union. 

Big ticket items, right? Things that the employer is not going to give up just out of goodwill or because you ask for it. You both mentioned working conditions. In workplaces where there’s no union, there’s a lot of discretion from management: you don’t have many boundaries on what they can direct employees to do. Do you have any anecdotes that demonstrates this?

Piper: I work at customer service and I think a lot of the leadership works on punishment. When you say you don’t want to do that, that’s the next thing you’re going to do. Because they just like to show that they have that authority over you, even if you say, “Hey, that’s not my favorite thing to do,” or “I’m actually having a bad week. Can I do something else?” They will usually say, I hear you, but we do need you to do that. I see a lot of punishing people. You called out because you were sick and they don’t believe that you were sick. When you come back, they give you double workload, or they make you do what you said you didn’t like doing.

Mase: I’ve had a co-worker who has complained about their back. In produce, we get a truck every day, and it’s a lot of lifting. I remember he had told them. My back hurts, I can’t lift it. Next schedule, they put him on produce more than they did before. They had to go through all these problems just to get a doctor’s note. And he’s not a younger guy, so if he says his back hurts, you should listen. He had to go through all that trouble to get a doctor’s note. And he still had to lift boxes throughout the week before he could get the doctor’s note. He did it four times that week, which is wild. I remember he came back the next day and said, “I did the load four days. I can’t do this again today.” And they told him, “Well, we hired you for that. It’s what you need to do.” No, you hired him to do two loads. Nobody should be doing it more than two times a week. So, yeah, I think that’s one of the things, it gets to feel like a dictatorship.

I want to ask you about Whole Foods’s reaction to your union campaign. Employers usually engage in a flurry of anti-union activities when they hear that workers want to unionize. What did Whole Foods do to try to influence the vote? 

Mase: It started with watching everything we were doing. Like looking at you work and making you uncomfortable. And then they started transferring our bosses out. They attacked the bosses that were cool with the workers, bosses who we had a really good relationship with. And then they started bringing in random people all over, people who would come in and try to tell you how to do the work. 

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And then they started holding meetings. They would make it voluntary, because they had to. They would start off with “let’s get to know your new leadership,” and then it will always end in union stuff. “Oh, before we talk about the union, it’s voluntary. You can leave if you want,” but it felt like you couldn’t leave. Then they started excluding me, Piper, Leeya, and Ben and Ed from these meetings. They started telling us we couldn’t come in. One time I tried to go in, I just wanted to hear, and they told me it was full, even though there were a bunch of open seats. So they started trying to push their propaganda on people, letting them hear one side of the story, while trying to deny us to talk. They started singling out people who weren’t as outspoken and not as vocal as other people, and they started telling them lies. They were posting stuff all over the break room about how the union is bad; a lot of misinformation.

Piper: I would say it would be easier to say the things that they didn’t do because they did so much union busting. I mean, just like Mase said, randomly, all of the team leaders from different departments were gone. Regional members, team members coming, just to stop by, for no reason in particular, they are at our store. But then towards the end, it just became really blatant that they were there to union-bust. If you were prepared, if you knew their talking points, it kind of seemed really, really silly, but I do think it was effective for some team members that didn’t have as much information. It was a lot. 

Thankfully they didn’t succeed. You probably did a post-mortem, or some kind of assessment of the union drive and were able to single out a few things that you did right. What would be useful to know for other people who are trying to unionize in their workplaces?

Mase: What we did was to build very, very strong connections with each other, and that’s what it takes. It takes trust. You can’t just be doing it for, “Oh yeah, I just want higher pay.” It’s deeper than just myself or my comfort, because fighting for things that you want is gonna be uncomfortable. It’s gonna be scary, but when you trust the people that you do it with, it makes it easier. And I think that was our biggest thing — we trusted each other. A billion dollars can’t buy trust, trust is earned. This was like a family. We got closer, we talked to each other every day. And it brings us closer, because we all fight for the same goal. Through the union busting tactics, they always tried to separate us from each other. They made us fight with each other, within our own group. But we got through that, and we still won despite all that because we trusted each other. 

Did you organize underground for a long time? How did that build up over time? 

Mase: It started with an idea. Some coworkers and I decided to meet at a coffee shop. It started with five of us, a year and a half ago, talking about what we could do. Our coworker Ben really got behind the effort and talked to people. And they had connections with people, and when they reach out to you, people start sharing the same frustrations as you, so then when they start building up, five people turn into ten, and ten turns into twenty. Then what are we gonna do about it? That’s how the union idea started. 

We didn’t know how we were gonna go about it. We just know we had a bunch of people who were pissed off. And Ben had the idea to reach out to the UFCW, and they gave us the cards to sign. So it put a structure in front of us; we had an idea and a goal that we had to work towards. We already had a majority of the workforce at the store who were pissed off. And you start getting them to sign a card and telling them, “Yo, this is how we’re gonna do this, this is how we’re gonna try and make a change.” And then when you look back at that year and a half ago, and it became a reality. It took time. We were a very, very big store, we’ve got like 300 to 400 people working there. And it took time because we were the first store to do it. We had to figure out a lot of things because nobody ever had done it at Whole Foods. 

Piper: It was important that the people you were reaching out to were somebody who you could trust not to tell leadership. We were able to be under the radar up until like the week we went public, because union busting did not start until then. I think it was successful because the leadership didn’t know it was coming. When it came to the card-signing, there was a decision to wait until we had over 50 percent of the store to go public.

Under the new Trump administration, the NLRB is expected to change its composition, and it’s leaning more conservative. Whole Foods and its parent company, Amazon, are leading this change. That’s why, two days ago, they requested the NLRB just ignore the union election results. Can you tell us about that?

Mase: They came out with all these objections. They said we intimidated workers, that we promised certain things. This is only a way to slow us down. They’re gonna make us wait as long as possible. This is just a distraction from the negotiation, because they know they have nothing solid, that they lost fair and square. 

And I don’t even think Trump and Bezos are on the best terms, but if this proves anything to anybody is that the rich people always going to stick together, they’re always gonna have each other’s backs. I think people should take away from this that we need to do the same. There are millions of people like us, and there’s only thousands of people like them. There’s too many of us, and we make the money for them, we gotta take that power back. 

I love that. Working-class power. 

Piper: Yeah, that. But also, we deserve respect. If I tell you, my back hurts, my back truly does hurt. And you deserve the respect of being heard and listened to.

Can you develop this idea that we are the ones who are making everything, who produce everything that’s valuable? And there is this sense that everything we do at our jobs, it’s getting other people more rich. How do you envision workers banding together?

Mase: People who sit at the top make all the money off of us. It is frustrating. I do believe that we should control what we demand and what we need and how we want to be treated in our work conditions. One person shouldn’t be able to dictate a million other people’s lifestyle and what [this person] think[s] they should get and what they deserve. It should be the other way around. We control this, we make the money, we do this. But it’s all about an idea becoming a reality. 130 people scared a billion-dollar company for them to come down and give up all this stuff.

What did they give up?

Mase: Everybody in the Pennsylvania (PA) area was given a base-pay increase from $16.50 to $17.50, and if you made more than $17.50 you got a two-percent increase. They implemented this right after we filed, but they told us that we weren’t gonna be able to get it because, “they didn’t want to sway the vote.” This was a way to scare people and get them to think that they were not gonna get money. We’d received the same pay for years. So, just us wanting something better had gotten the PA stores raises. 

We even heard about getting snacks to other stores, donuts for other stores too. That was with 130 people. Imagine what 500 people could do. Imagine what 1,000 people could do. Imagine what 2,000 people could do. We can ask for whatever we want. These corporations are squeezing us dry, people are broke. It’s very scary to think about organizing, but I think they’re more scared of us coming together. We’re stronger in numbers. 

Piper: It’s so easy to see that their power immediately crumbles. When just a few of us get together and decide, like Mase said, 130 people, that’s all it took for them to realize, “oh, we have to actually start doing something.” Workers coming together and realizing that without us, the store does not run. If there’s nobody there to check people out, nobody to put produce out. It’s not a grocery store without its workers. So, once you realize that, it actually makes you feel like they don’t have a lot of power. 

I have one last question for those who are watching you, following the results of the election and the fight for a contract, which is your big fight ahead now, what can people do to support you?

Mase: Spreading the word is important. You want people to see it, so they know it’s possible and they want to do it too. So anybody, even if you don’t work at Whole Foods, you spread the word. You spread it as far as possible, to as many people as possible, you let them know what we are doing. You let them know that they could join to help too.