It's it's another union episode of VI could happen here in the podcast where we do a lot of things, but one of which is talking about unions, one of which is not doing great intros. It's me and Mia Wong and today I'm here to talk about a union and a strike and a bunch of other stuff. And with me to talk about this is Tyler Fellini, who is an organizer with Portland Childs with Justice and also
a former New Seasons worker. And Alex Gage, who's an organizer in store rep for the New Season's labor union shop in our Berlage.
Yeah.
Both YouTube, Welcome to the show.
Yeah, thanks for having us, happy to be here.
Yeah, I'm glad, glad to talk with you too. So I guess before we get into the sort of current stuff, I wanted to talk a bit about how how the certain New Seasons union was formed and you know what that sort of process looked like and how it's been going since then.
Yeah, I can speak to that.
So, the initial unionizing efforts started at the store that I was working at, Seven Corners, and we actually the first conversation we had was April first, the same day that Amazon labor union went public and won their electional so it was like a really inspiring moment for us. That spurred a conversation on the shop floor with a couple coworkers, which quickly escalated to six of us meeting
in a nearby coworkers backyard. We talked about the issues, and we were all hitting the same things, you know, Like we were all upset with the tenants policy, the way that New Seasons was treating us and had been treating us during COVID.
We were also upset with our pay.
Which is obstein and does not keep up with the cost of living in Portland, organ which is a very expensive city. So and we were also really upset with the healthcare that we have offered and how it's kind of deteriorated over the years, especially for New Seasons as a company that has a lot of people who've been there for years and so there were a lot of people who've seen just the downward decline. So those early
meetings went really well. We talked to coworkers on the floor discreetly, and everybody was resonating with what we were saying. We made a lot of progress really fast, and then we had a meeting at a local bar here in Portland Workers Tap, which huge shout out of them. They are an amazing space for a lot of burgeoning independent
unions to have some of their early meetings. So we met there with more members at our store, the Seven Corners location, and I think we had like thirty people there, which is a huge turnout for a first showing of a meeting.
Yeah.
And then from there we moved pretty fast to getting cards signed for showing of interest, and so in less than two months we were actually filing our petition with the NRB, which is unheard of.
Yeah, that's amazing, especially for a grocery store union. That is wild.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As soon as we went public, workers at all these other stores reached out to us. Our Instagram blew up. People were excited but wanted to figure out how to do it at their store. So we were kind of simultaneously trying to balance the plates of like keeping our
store going and also helping other stores go. And you know, by the end of the summer we rolled into we had our election, I want to say in September, and by the end of the summer there were multiple stores that had gone public and announced and here we are, you know, it's barely been a year since our first election win.
It's barely been a year since.
Then, and we have over nine hundred members, almost one thousand members in this very new union.
That's incredible. That gets into another thing I'm interested about, which is Portland's the city that has been in the last I mean, I would say probably the last five years, but especially in like the last couple of years, it's been really really active in terms of in terms of union organizing, in terms of sort of especially especially independent unions, there's been an enormous number of them. The actual number
of workers be organized is really high. And yeah, I mean you talked about having like having this bar as a sort of space you could do meetings. Has there been any other stuff, I mean from from other independent unions, from other I mean, just from the fact that there's so many like things happening that have like changed the dynamics of how these union organization thrives have been going.
Yeah, so early on, you know, we were weighing our options as far as like did we want to join an existing union or go independent?
Like what did we want to do there?
And a lot of that information is hard to find if you don't know the language that you're looking for.
It's not really accessible to the average worker.
But we found a lot of solidarity in folks who had been involved in other independent union efforts. Specifically, we met with Mark and Luis at a burgerbelt workers union. They offered a top. Yeah, they're great. They were some of the early folks to reach out and help us. We were also able to talk to some of the folks at ILW Local five that represents pals workers and many others and get some support there.
Portland is definitely.
A labor town, uh, And the solidarity that we felt kind of across the board is great, you know, especially like early on when we had a lot of questions and we didn't have any answers and we didn't have many resources to you know, hire a lawyer and ask them.
So I want I wanted to go back a little bit to talk about sort of the influence of the sort of influence of the news about the Amazon labor union going wide and how that sort of worked. Have you seen a sort of similar thing with other like not just sort of not not just New Seasons shops, but have you seen other shops that sort of like decided to start organizing after y'all came out.
I think think that there is a general energy among the rank and file, right that some of the old ways that unions are organizing, we're not the most representative of the workers, which is in part you know, the eighties, right, and so kind of why we've seen sort of union representation stagnant. But we're seeing a major shift, right. We've got a lot of educated workers doing low wage jobs, which that condition existed in the nineteen thirties and led
to a major explosion in militant unions. So I think there's a major parallel there. And it's not just Amazon labor unions. Also, you know the Starbucks Workers United, that campaign was huge, right, and those are workers who service workers, restaurant workers historically have been left out of labor or underrepresented,
similar to healthcare workers and just care workers generally. And that I think is kind of the stereotype of like the working class as like a trad white guy in a factory, and we're seeing that severely upended right now, which is really exciting.
Yeah, but that's a that's a that's another dynamic I think is really is really interesting, particularly in Portland is that it seems to be a lot of independent unions. And it seems to be I think partially because even even in the midst of the fact that like very clearly people want to organize, there's been a lot of conservatism on the part of the sort of like larger
distant unions. You don't really want to like throw an enormous amount of money into these organizing drives, which means, you know, if if this stuff is going to happen,
it's it's it's the independent unions. And yeah, I don't know, like I I think I think your point about sort of I think your point about the sort of both both the highly educated workers thing and the way that you know, sort of what's constitutionally considered a worker and what unions are willing to sort of throw money at are tied together, because Yeah, I mean, you know, like the shops that you're working in, the shops are getting organized just aren't the kind of thing that anyone's been
organizing for like ever. It's very at least not since like the eighties.
Yeah, and I think it makes sense why they don't organize.
It's freaking hard.
It's a lot of work and there's a lot of turnover, and you don't see those same faces. That's why we can get from having our first meeting to filing for election in two months, because if it doesn't happen in two months, it's never going to happen.
And we get it done, we get it done fast, and then.
We see all these other like as a grocery store, we get DELIVERI it's from bigger union, you know, drivers and such. And we've seen what's happened with their campaigns where if they're not like totally invested, they can get decertified within a matter of weeks.
But we haven't had any of that yet.
Yeah, which is really impressive. And you know, that's another thing I'm interested and I've been asking a lot of people because turnover is one of the big things that's been sort of you know, it's it's been the wall that the existing units hit and we're like, this is too hard, We're going to go do something else. And I've been I'm wondering how y'all have been dealing with the turnover problem because it's i mean, it is definitely something that's difficult to deal with, but you know, it's
it's it's not something that makes it impossible. It's just hard. And I'm yeah, I'm interested in what your sort of strategies to manage it have been.
I think it's a matter of passion.
I think Tyler is a great example, like is no longer a member, but sees this as like the way that we can move our society forward in general, Like the labor struggle is the struggle, Like there's no war black class war. If we don't do this, what are we doing here? So wait, we stick around and we're doing this for free. We're not getting paid for it.
We're doing it because it's the right thing to do.
When our lodge in Grant Park had their walkouts on Labor Day weekend, there was a customer at Grant Park who called out to us that, you know, we should just go open up our own workers co op. And my response to him was that, you know, if we leave, there's just another batch of workers that are going to go through these conditions. Like the goal is not that, Like I wanted to be great for me, like I
don't even work in new Seasons anymore. I wanted to be great for my former co workers who are still there, and for the people that I don't know who are going to come behind them. And that's that's how you
get around the high turnover. Pieces like the passion and dedication and the drive to make conditions better for the people coming after you, which is really antagonistic to the way capitalism wants us to be very individual like oriented, right, like we just care about ourselves and our day to day. But that's the really great thing with like the worker power, right is that you know, collectively we are so much stronger.
Collectively we can actually stand up to the boss and win, right, And and that means just reorienting how we think about the world, right, Like, like this job sucks. How can I make this job better? I can just quit and go get a better job. But if I change this job, then the people who are still here also get better working conditions.
Yeah, And I think that there's kind of there's a there's a kind of flip side of that too, right, which is that you know, even if you like, you know, like turnover just is inevitable to some extent, even even if you have people who like want to stay and fight, right like, people are just going to have to leave.
But on the other hand, you know, if you're if you're if you're in a unionized workplace, and if you're pecifically if you're if you're if you're in a union that has the sort of militant culture, what you're doing is you're you know, you're changing the actual like class itself, right because you know, like now now you're a worker who like you know, I don't know, is moving to
Arizona or something. Right, they are, they are. They are now also much more militant and have have this sort of experience of organizing that they may that they may not have had before. And this, you know, it's like you're the any any any individual movement you're doing in one place is building up the entire class.
Yeah, and we can see that we've like been attracting people who are interested and becoming involved in a movement. And you know, whether they just graduated from college or they had some sort of distant relative who was in a union, they come to new seasons thinking, oh, I want to get.
In on the beginning of this.
And we've seen like a big push of that recently, and people who leave they want to go, you know, organize their next workplace. You know, regardless if they were fired or whatever. They they want to keep it going.
So and I think to build on that too.
You know, salting is a practice that traditional unions typically do to kind of change a workforce. And when you salt, usually you're paid by the union to go in there. And so you're getting paid by the employer to be there and the union is paying you to organize. But we've seen a shift now where people are voluntarily salting. Right, people come like out that they get a job. They don't need the money motivator. They just want to function up right, They want to change things and like be
antagonistic towards the boss. And I think to me to go back to an earlier thing you asked about, like kind of like why Portland, right, Like, I think one thing about Portland is people in Portland love a protest, right, Like, we don't need much of a motivation to go through.
Some rocks at popped, right. That's kind of in the culture of Portland.
And so there is this this orientation towards struggle that does exist. And right now, that energy, you know, we went through the George Floyd uprising and a lot of energy has been funneled into labor and it's been new voices in labor. It's not the same like you know, ten people now kind of talking. It's all of this
new energy. And for the most part, most of Portland labor is being very accommodating and making room for those people to get in there and be heard because folks recognize that they're on their way out right, you know, Folks in their fifties or sixties, like they're towards retirement, right, And so it's as younger folks coming in that are going to change it, you know.
Yeah, And I think there's an interesting dynamic with this too, which is that, you know, okay, one of the one of the sort of conditions of the last sort of like forty fifty years of capitalism, Like is is this sort of high total turnover rates? And also is this you know, is this thing where you are, like you as an individual worker are shifting jobs really really quickly, and that you know, that's in some sense an issue.
But that also means that like I don't know, like if if you have a bunch of people who you know, spent like spent one hundred days fighting the Feds and you know still still may like have have developed just like the sort of miilited hatred of the cops. And
you know, I've developed sort of and into capitalist politics. Yeah, you get more of the sort of salt stuff you're talking about, because like you know, SCRIWT, Like, you know, if you're gonna be working like a ship job anyways, you might as well like go work one where you're saulting and starting a union, because there's not actually like I don't know, it's not it's not it's not like you're like getting career advancement in the service job, right, And yeah, I mean that seems to be driving like
at least some of the sort of of how this kind of like how the independent United Union organizing in Portland's been moving.
Yeah.
I think I'd also like to point out though that like a lot of people for our union, specifically, New Seasons has always been like the progressive business and it's always had a reputation of like being a great place to work.
They're really inclusive or whatever.
So that's what attracts like a certain crowd of people. And when they get there and they realize that, like they're getting screwed over, just like any other place that they've ever been at that like fosters this new feeling of like, well, I'm vulnerable no matter what I do, Like there's no where I can turn to trust my employer, and how do I preserve what little.
Dignity that I do have at this workplace?
Because generally speaking, like our jobs are pretty okay minus like the corporate business side of things, Like most people enjoy going to work, maybe, but.
They they want to enjoy going to work.
So having that like kind of double edged sword has been a catalyst for us.
Just built on what Alex said too.
I think it's really interesting that a lot of the surge in new like independent union stuff has been you know, new seasoned Starbucks to a degree, ARII creator Joe's all these places, these progressive workplaces, right, And what's happened is that so often we've had interactions with customers where they go, wow, I assumed that the prices were so high because your wages were high, And really, dude, most of us can't afford to live in the city, right, most of us
are using yeah, and it's just not it's not true, right, And so you know it's workers who get jobs at these progressive places that drank the similar social kool aid that the customer's drink of assuming that these businesses have good business practices and what's happening is that they're just getting greedy. Right, This is the case everywhere. It just hits a little bit different when your employer pretends your friends and then stabs you in the back.
Yeah. Not all workplaces have this kind of like oh, we're like progressive sort of vibes thing. But I feel like businesses that have that reputation are also more just more vulnerable. It's not just that like their workers like realize how ypocritical it is. It means that they're It means that they're more vulnerable to sort of like damage to their reputation when people find out that, like oh
my god, hold time, you're making how much money? Like yeah, and I think, yeah, I don't know, I'm interested, like how how effective has that been for you? Sort of like leveraging that.
I think it's been really effective, I mean, you know, and not just does. I think a really good example of exactly what we're talking about, right, is the shareholders of Starbucks are holding Howard Schultz accountable because he is wrecking that company. Right, and so with new seasons what it means is that they play a very sneaky game. They fight us in the back room. They make sure it's not public facing. Anything we can do to attack
their public image, like it hurts. I will say too that you know, we're kind of standing on the shoulders of Burgerville Workers Union here where Burgerville was built on this reputation of like local friendly, like we're the alternative to like corporate fast food, and they had security guards and strike busters literally fighting with picketers in the past and it tanked the reputation. And so New Seasons management has clearly looked at what Burgerville management did and been like,
we're not going to do that. It doesn't stop them from being phitty. They're just they're more polite when they're streitty to us. They're still just as shitty. They're just they smile while they stab us in the back.
Yeah, So on the subject just of stabbing us in the back. So there's been a bunch of stuff going on recently. I was wondering if you could talk about like the I don't know, the recent unrest. Question Mark need to figure out a better way to phrase this, but.
Yeah, yeah, so, yeah, we've been building up we have, I mean since day one of bargaining, which started back in like December or January.
It started in January.
Yeah, so we we've known that eventually it's going to get to a point where we're going to need to.
Show some force.
So, you know, we go in there with good faith, and little by little we find out that the smallest ask is going to be impossible, and we find out that they're going to do whatever they can get away
with every time they can. So they started with I mean, they did all kinds of things, but the one catalyst is they changed the attendance policy for non union workers and non union stores to make it more lenient, which was one of the issues that we campaigned on was the attendance policy because it's ridiculous and people get fired all the time. So we demanded the bargain. They didn't have a response.
We brought it up in bargaining at the bargaining table.
They said that they would work on something that we could implement before we ratify the contract.
But they had to put it through their DEI lens and they had to Yeah.
Yeah, and you know all the things that say to delay it and kick the can down the road. So we're Dylan good faith saying like, okay, you know, go ahead.
So then we did.
A petition where all the stores individually had people sign a petition. We got hundreds of signatures, and then we did a march on the boss asking them to sign this MoU that a memorandum of understanding saying you will give us that same policy. We filed a ULP saying like this is illegal, it's obvious discrimination, and then they just kept saying, Okay, we're working on it, We're working on it, We're working on it.
So they never did.
Then we did a rally and we showed up at the headquarters with I don't know, probably two hundred of us Hell yeah, and marched up to the office and chanted and made a scene.
And told them they have one more.
Chance to sign the m OU. They didn't sign it. So then we organized the strikes at the two stores and.
Gave them one more chance to sign the MoU. They didn't sign it. We already knew they weren't going to.
So yeah, we shut down those stores for the rest of the day at Grant Park and for one hour at ourbor Lodge, and it was powerful.
We had a lot of support a lot of people showed up.
Yeah, and to build on that too.
You know, there's things coming up that we can't talk about yet, but I would say that, Alex, do you want to talk about the practice picketing?
I feel like we could talk about that.
Okay, so we actually can talk about We just filed the ULP, yeah, last night for bad faith bargaining.
Yeahs an unfair labor practice.
Yes, thank you. I get caught up in the jargon. So we just.
Filed that last night for bad faith bargaining yep, because they gave us the most ridiculous policy for attendance. It's basically regressive bargaining, which is totally unfair.
Yeah, do you want to explain what that is?
Basically, the NLRB the National Labor Relations Board. They oversee unions and the relationship between unions and employers. They demand that both sides come in good faith, basically like, don't screw around, don't waste each other's time. The goal is to move towards some sort of compromise and an agreement. And regressive bargaining is when you backpedal and you offer something that is worse than what was offered. The attendance policy is in my opinion, definitely worse. It is no better.
I think Frank takes the shittiest things of the past two policies and put them together. So it seems pretty clear to us that it's regressive. And then we can argue that New Seasons is not acting in good faith. They are acting in bad faith, which is illegal according to the NRB. And so what we are allowed to do is file an unfair labor practice, which basically, you know, it doesn't hold a lot of weight materially, however, symbolically
it looks really bad. And so again going back to like Mia what you were saying about kind of like their image, right, Like these kind of progressive corporations, they don't want to look like the bastards they are, And a UOP makes it pretty clear, Hey, this person's being a jerk, this company is being a jerk. So the more ulps that we get file that, like we win on the bigger case, we can paint that New Seasons is actually being really unfair to us.
Yeah, so then based on that, we're getting strike ready. We're making sure everybody can show up and be ready to assert our stance. We're not going to just lay back and let them take over. So we're going to do some practice pickets. Oh and I'm sure even hearing that a lot, which is great for I mean, and if you want to bring it back to like the higher turnover rate and like, you know, the general apathy that you see in any union. People are just kind
of afraid to be active. So we're looking at practice pickets as a way to get people.
Involved in a really low risk activity.
Can you explain how that works?
Yeah, So what we're going to do is each store will do a picket, but that picket will not be a strike.
That picket will not.
Encourage shoppers to leave or discourage shopping in any way.
We're not calling for a boycott.
We're just simply doing logistically, what does it look like if we do a picket at each store in the most peaceful way possible, and then we do that at every store and we kind of gauge, like, you know, how ready are we.
And by doing that too, it's a show of force to the company.
Right, Yeah, we're not doing anything illegal.
It's effectively an informational picket. So legally, there's nothing that New Seasons can do to any of the workers who participate in it. However, they will absolutely see that we are prepared to do it. The team Staris recently did this for ups. A lot of teachers unions have done similar things. It's a really good show of force to kind of leverage your people power and show the management that you're ready.
Yeah, and it has another It has another effect too, which is something that you know, the kind of basic cultural understanding of you know, what unions are, how they function, what you need to be doing any given scenario, like me just physically, how to like do pickets, what you
logistically need to do. That stuff has all sort of faded from like the height of union sort of culture in like the sixties and seventies, And that's something that you have to rebuild because you know, and and and then and this is this is something that's both both
in terms of the people in the union. That sort of knowledge is tuitional knowledge has to be rebuilt, and it also has to be rebuilt in the public because people sort of just don't you know, like you support for unions is really high, uh, but people don't understand exactly what like you know, people people don't understand exactly what a union is doing any given time or like how it functions and things like that, and you know, then this is this seems like a really good way
to like, you know, like, hey, this is a picket. This is what happens when there's a picket. This is an informational picket. We're gonna give you information. And yes, it seems like a good thing for building up that kind of true on both ends.
And it's a really good opportunity to talk to customers, get them involved. That's the thing that's that you know New Season's kind of tagline as the friendliest store in town, and the way that they built that, Yeah, the way that they built that reputation though, was by really encouraging workers to develop deep relationships with customers. And so we're using that to leverage against the company now and saying like hey, like you.
Know you like me, like you know me by name and I know you by name. You don't know the CEO by name, Like let's talk.
Let's talk about like what we're asking for and what you as a customer can do to support us in a way that doesn't feel antagonistic, right like like when we had the when we had the walkouts on Labor Day, weekend.
You know, we did a debrief and.
We're kind of like, how do we, like, how do we engage with people where we can hold onto our values and still feel like we're being effective. And Randy, a worker at our lodge, his solution, instead of calling people who cross the picket line scabs and like you know, harassing them that way, you know, he was like, I just said, like, hey, I'm disappointed in you, and I think that like, like, yeah, like let's just like we're gonna just like if you're going to cross the picket line,
I don't need to hurl insults at you. I'm just gonna guilt trip you and let you know that like I'm disappointed in you, and like you will feel bad as you're shopping. And I think that like that's sort of how we can align the progressive values that attracted people to New Seasons to work there in the first place with how we do actions while still being militant, right, we don't.
Want to be soft. We just got to make sure that like it vibes with what we're about, you know.
Yeah, And and that's that's another you know, I think this this also gets back to the sort of culture part of it, which is like, yeah, like rebuilding the standard of do not cross a picket line is a thing that has to be done because that's again that's
another thing that has sort of faded. And yeah, like guilt tripping people is a good way to do it, because yeah, you know, like sort of especially especially sort of like middle and upper middle class progressive people like really really there are a lot of their politics about wanting to feel good about themselves and you.
Know, make they can see Yeah, I think if they can see themselves in us too, they will relate and they they won't want to.
Go against their own values, which is our.
Values, because that's the culture of Portland generally speaking.
Did you have anything else that you want to make sure to get in before we wrap up.
Yeah, we would love to push our gofund me that can be found at our website, which is really hard to find is but yeah, you have to type it in, you can't just google it.
Okay, Well we'll put it. We'll just we'll just put a link to it in the okay, Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, if anybody you know, we're out here being independent union.
We have no money.
We're just looking for maybe some sort of strike fund for those in need when we are strike ready, and also you know, materials whatever people can donate, it would be amazing.
Final notes I would say too, is that you know when we started this, I mean, we're an independent union of grocery workers, right.
We did all of this in our volunteer time.
None of us are lawyers, none of a lot of us had never been in a union before or had very limited experience. We build this all from the ground up with tons of volunteer hours of our own time after work. And we have gone toe to toe with Ogle Tree Deacons, who is one of the largest anti union law firms in the country. That's who New Seasons has retained. We've gone toe to toe with them. We have a lawyer now who is really graciously kind of letting us write her.
In IOU for the time being.
But even before her we were still able to hold her own against a major anti union law firm.
Right.
There is power in workers coming together collectively. It's not as easy as it should be to find that information, but it is out there and there are people who want to share it. And I would say that, like for me, the labor movement has been a really empowering place to come into. You know, I have a lot of experience with sort of like leftists, like street activism, but I think that for anybody who wants to be involved in the struggle and is also like looking for ways to make.
In rids and develop community like.
Labors where it's at right, I mean, we all work and to a degree, we all hit our jobs and have something to complain about, and like that's a commonality that stretches across the aisle and allows for a lot of solidarity in a way that the culture war really doesn't want and really, like you know, it's by design, right, the capitalists want us fighting against each other, and the labor movement is a way for the working class to unite because it's about class war.
You know.
Yeah, here here, yeah, and you know this this should go without saying. I'm going to say it anyways, you also, listener at home can do this too. There is you know, there there is nothing sort of magical or special about the people who do union organizing other than the fact that they decide to organize a union. So you can
do this too. You can form an independent union and yeah, you can go hand your bosses a fucking ass and get better, you know, get better working conditions and get better things for you and your entire class in the process.
Yeah, I would say Labor Notes is a great resource for early information. The Coalition of Independent Unions is on Instagram and workers from around the country have reached out to them for advice. You know, we're on Instagram. You can ask us questions. Reach out to independent unions and ask them questions. This is a labor movement made up of the workers for the workers. We want more workers to organize.
Yeah, and I think on that note, Yeah, this is this is been naked happen here, Go into the world and fight.
Yeah, thank you, thank you so much.
Maya.
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