FutureUnionEnjoyer

My workplace is voting on a union in two weeks, and we have an unusual amount of people we haven't talked to. It seems like a tossup at moment. I'm hopeful but not at all confident.

Management has officially been nice once the vote was triggered, but it seems a few of our workplace bullies who have carved out priveledged positions, and who don't show respect to other coworkers, have sided firmly on the anti-union side (I wonder why?) and are running around the store talking shit to everyone (and throwing in some transphobic bullshit while they are at it).

Some of them have showed up at our meetings to start sealioning and wasting people's time. Others are posting long screeds in the breakroom lying their asses off and basically acting on behalf of management.

After the first meeting I explained my experience and poured my heart out thinking they were there in good faith and I would be taken seriously, but of course not. Next meeting same fucking questions and pretending no one answered.

Some of it is continueing to ask for specifics we can't give, because it depends on the negotiating process and workplace surveys. All we can say is "It's up to us to decide that during negotiations". Is there a better answer we can give?

Has anybody else dealt with this shit? Any tips?

Our current plan is to not engage with them as as possible and kick them out of the next meeting if they show up.

We are about to make the news, lol. We'll probably be voting in about a month.

It's been six months of work since this all started, and we've got probably 40% of people on our side. We've lost 10 employees in the last couple months. Some retired, some were fired, some quit, including two people in the OC. So it's been a bit of a rollercoaster.

A terrible manager who helped kick off this whole thing by being awful got fired. The old store manager who helped kick this off by backing up the terrible manager retired. We were hoping it would lead to positive changes, but of course not. The new regime has been continuing to harass an injured employee for who knows why, so fuck 'em. We are filing several complaints with L&I and the NLRB, and a couple of us will probably be making enemies for life with some in upper management (although a few of us have already been pegged as troublemakers and they are clearly trying to make us miserable enough to quit), so I hope we succeed.

We haven't been able to sit and talk to about half the store, so it's not exactly where we wanted to be and is kind of risky, but unless everyone else breaks to the anti-union side we should be good. Thankfully we haven't run into a lot of anti-union brainworms, but a lot of people are scared to talk about it or are treated fine so don't see the problem we are trying to address so have been dismissive. Still lots of us are burnt out with the store in general and are only staying to vote on the union, so we figured we should go for it now, before there's another 5 people gone and more new people to talk to. When we drop cards and we can be way more open when talking to people.

I know it's not a very radical union, and the changes we can expect will likely be positive and necessary but mundane, but the people we've worked with in our local UFCW have been awesome and I appreciate their time and effort. I know its' their job and they get paid for it, but they've been taking a four hour round-trip a couple times a week to help get this done.

Praying to Saint Fidel to grant us his luck.

I'm not sure how much detail to give, I don't think anyone involved or in my town browses this website, but I don't want to give any specifics in case someone does a search and this shows up. Using an alt so I this won't be tied to my normal account. I'm probably posting more details than I should, so If you think I should delete something specific let me know.

First off: To anyone thinking of unionizing in the US, and are unsure of where to start, I recommend contacting EWOC. We had followed the typical guidelines of union formation: Stay secret and form an organizing committee from people representing as many areas of the store as you can (we got a signal chat and got consent from everyone before adding new people), map the store and figure out who we should absolutely not talk to, and then gauge support of the unionizing idea by having discreet convos with your coworkers as you feel comfortable, etc.

In our case we had trouble contacting unions, and got no repsonse from a lot of them. EWOC responded immediately and we got assigned a contact who helped us along with good advice and encouragement, and helped us settle on who to go with. They had just unionized an amazon warehouse they worked at, and they helped a lot when we had spent weeks getting frustrated with the lack of any response from unions.

When the time came to choose a union, it came down to a couple choices: UFCW and CWA. CWA doesn't typically unionize our type of workplace but they are branching out, and we've heard mixed things about UFCW so we were hesitant about them. Our contact at EWOC is a socialist and informed us that CWA has been spamming pro-biden/harris ads, while their UFCW local has refused to endorse because of the ongoing genocide. So that made things simple. UFCW it is.

I've worked at a local co-op for almost a decade. I started there thinking "aha! A co-op! This place will be much better than corporate!" and there are a lot of good things about it, but it was one of those co-ops formed by hippies way back when and who basically wanted natural foods and other hokum that tends to go along with that stuff. Basically a community owned whole foods type store. One of the cool things about it was that they were officially strongly pro LGBTQ and it was one of the founding values.

But it's a community co-op, not a workers co-op. Officially democratically run by the member-owners, but absolutely no democratic principles at play when it comes to managing the workforce, and over the years it's become obvious to me and a lot of other employees about how poorly managed it is. Lots of safety issues get ignored until someone gets hurt and the co-op is financially liable, lots of homophobic incidents get swept under the rug, managers are basically unaccountable to anyone underneath them unless they flagrantly violate labor law, etc. Your experience can be a good one if your manager likes you, if you are one of the favorites, but if not they can get away with almost anything and treat you like absolute shit.

Lately their policies have caused numerous injuries and wide swaths of people to be put on disciplinary action for speaking up about working conditions, shockingly incompetent mismanagement, and transphobia in the workplace.

Upper management is tired of our complaints and has decided to crack down hard over the past few months, and that has involved under-staffing the store to a dangerous degree and numerous injuries.

A lot us are fed up with it to the point that we are ready to burn the place to the ground, but since we like our co-workers and our store generally, and so many of the staff are fed up we have taken the more constructive path and started a union drive. We've been trying to keep it as secret as possible, but it becomes harder to maintain a lot of secrecy as you talk to more people. So management knows something is up, but not the extent of support.

There was one person from the organizing committee who was talking up the union and was getting people on board, and they just got fired for taking a long planned vacation. It’s all shady and most likely an unfair labor practice, but they aren’t pursuing action at this time. I wish they would, but they understandably want to just enjoy they time off at the moment. But they were friends with a small local online news reporter, and I guess the reporter decided it was time to publish news about the union because it relates to other drama involving the board of directors that has been making news here.

We really didn't want news of the union reported, and told them so, because with the way they've treated us this past year we were expecting them to go overboard with punishment and threats and didn't want to risk that bullshit yet, but management has taken the opposite approach and are now love-bombing us, LMAO.

Who knows how long it will last until they hire a union buster or something, and revert back to to making shit up to get us in trouble for, but since the news of a union drive is public they can't do anything flagrantly illegal without risk of the union we are working with hitting them with unfair labor practice charges, and since many of us have ongoing L&I claims, they can't retaliate without making it look like they are punishing us for being injured.

They are still in the dark about most of it, so we are sticking to our plan, but now we have the article to allow us to have conversations about the idea of a union with more people. It wasn't what we wanted, but it's going to work out. In the meantime we get the free pizza treatment.

This is a heavily unionized town with a strong majority of democrat to far left demographic. If they add union busting to the list of egregious behavior along with racism and transphobia, they are cooked. There is now also pressure for them to drop Israeli products because of the genocide, so that's something else they have to deal with.

We are absolutely going to win this thing and inshallah we’ll take down the people responsible for all this shit. I am doing everything in my power to make them suffer for it.

edit 1-15-25: removed backstory, we're about to make the news and there was too much identifying info