How long have you worked at Whole Foods, and what was your starting pay?

I started at $15. I’ve been there three years, and I’m making $17.75 now. I wanted to switch from Amazon to Whole Foods. My one-year anniversary was coming up and Amazon wanted to combine shopping with Whole Foods—they didn’t want it to be Amazon Shopping and Whole Foods anymore, just Whole Foods Shopping.  I was about a month away from my anniversary when they switched us over, and they told me the clock reset. So the raise I was supposed to get for my first year working didn’t happen. When I told them about it, they were like, "Yeah, it sucks. It happens to a lot of people who switched over, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

What role did you originally start with at Whole Foods, and how has your position evolved over time?

I worked in e-commerce for a little bit, I was doing the shopping for orders. Then I started branching out and working in other departments because they were cutting hours in e-commerce. They were giving, like, 12 hours a week. And I’m like, I can’t do that. So I was like, "What can I do?" I started asking other departments for help. I decided that produce was the fit because produce was going to give me the hours that I wanted without me having to bounce around every department. 

Whole Foods has undergone significant changes in recent years. From pricing to store policies and customer experience, it’s a different store. What shifts have you noticed over the past three years?

They started increasing the workload on us while paying us the same. I noticed that they started firing full-timers and hiring part-timers back. They would fire somebody who was working there five days a week, and then hire somebody that’s only there for one or two days a week. They had me doing the load, which is lifting boxes in the cooler. We started off trying to spread it out among people. They try not to make you do it multiple times a week. And if you do have to do it multiple times, no more than two. I noticed I went from doing it maybe once or twice a week to, like, three or four times a week. And I’m like, “Oh man, this is getting rough.” Then I was doing it for months and months on end. Job dialogues were coming up too, and they were telling people they weren’t giving more than a 5% raise, while also saying, “This is the most money we’ve ever made!”

What’s a job dialogue?

Every year, on your anniversary of being hired, you get something called a job dialogue. They give you a paper—you fill out your job performance, "I feel like I do this well, I do this well, and I do this well. I’ve done this all year." Then you sit down with your boss from your department, and they evaluate the things you do well and the things you do wrong. Even if you’ve been perfect, they gotta find something wrong. They come up with anything, whether it’s, "You could be a little more social"—something. They upped the pay cap from 6% to 8%. I was busting my behind all year, doing the load all year, so I was thinking, "They’re gonna make sure I’m nice, hopefully." And then I was told they weren’t giving more than 5% to workers.  Every day they write on this board how much money we make, and it’s an all-time high. It’s like they were throwing it in our faces and then telling us we can’t get more than 5%. When I said something to my store leadership, "5%? That’s it?" They said, "Yeah, we’re doing it everywhere, and the best bet is to move up." I’m like, so I can only move up? That’s the only way I can get paid more? Not for the hard work I do all year round? 

You took a break from doing the load and you were reprimanded and had your hours reduced. Can you talk about that incident and how it catalyzed you and your coworkers to come together and organize to unionize?

I was working in every department. It was around the busiest time of the year. They didn’t mind me helping. I did a 10-hour shift to close in meats, a department that wasn’t mine at the time. I was cleaning by myself. I think one time I had to work the register. One day—it was summer—it got a little bit slower in the summer; the summer slump. It was rough. The next day, I helped produce do the load. I was working some of the hardest jobs in each department. I did the load, it was cold. It was about 9:50 PM. You clock out at 10 PM. I decided I wanted to talk to a co-worker for a little bit. I’m about to leave, I’m freezing cold—let me get out of the cooler for a little bit. One of the store bosses saw me talking and told my boss. Even though I was working in that department, my boss was e-com, and she told him I was talking. He pulled me to the side and told me that I was talking. I'm like, “I'm getting in trouble for talking?” And he was like, “Yeah, they don’t want you working in other departments. “ So I’m like, “Now that the store is slower, it’s a problem. But when we were busy and I was working other departments and killing myself, it was fine? “ He told me he didn’t want me working in other departments, but you’re not allowed to delete anybody’s shifts without talking to them first. If you’re scheduled for shifts, you gotta work them unless they talk to you first and you sign something. So, even though they didn’t want me working in other departments, I was still scheduled to work in other departments. His thing was, I was supposed to work my shifts out and then, after a three-week span—because you get your schedule three weeks in advance—he said, “If you do good, hopefully, they’ll let you start working in other departments again after your shifts.” I go to check my schedule. I saw that I worked in produce and meat, and I check my schedule all the time. I woke up the next day—gone. They were gone. I had no shifts for the whole week. I spoke to my boss and I said, “I had these shifts, and they got deleted.” He checked and said, “Yeah, your shifts did get deleted.” I said, “Do you know who did it? Can you see who did it?” They said, “Yeah, we can check.” I said, “Who did it? Who deleted my shifts? This is wrong.” They said, “Oh, we don’t know,” giving me the runaround. So I decided to go to TMS because I felt like they were trying to bully me.

TMS?

Team Member Support—they're supposed to be for us. There was this lady; she used to sit in the office, and if we had problems, we went to her. Not too many people came to her with crazy problems like I was, but I wasn’t gonna get bullied. I went to her, and I wanted to see if she was gonna help me. I tell her what happened, and she’s like, “You’re not supposed to get your shifts deleted.” She comes to the store twice a week. She gave me the runaround the first week. She gave me the runaround the second week. So we’re going into the third week of me trying to find her and talk with her about the issue. I see her coming out the office, joking with leadership. I said, “Did you follow up about my shifts getting deleted? What are we gonna do about that?” She said, “Well, they said they don’t really know what happened. You gotta talk to them yourself.” I said, “I gotta talk to them myself? You’re my Team Member Support. I came to you and I told you what happened, and you’re over there making jokes with them instead of telling them?” And when I went in there, they told me, “Well, your shifts got deleted. We could pay you for the four hours of what we see.” I said, “It was more than four hours.” But they said, “Yeah, we’ll give you the four hours of what we see, and that’s what we’re gonna do.” That’s what made me want to unionize; that’s when I realized it was a problem: they have too much power. They deleted my shifts and they went about their day. To me, that was losing money. They didn’t know or care I was trying to make ends meet. They didn’t care if I had to pay for my mom’s medicine or help with bills. The click of a button changed my lifestyle. The click of a button changed my check. And they know regular working people don’t have time or money to sue. They know that. I didn’t have the money to sue. I don’t have it like that to be able to fight this battle, where, at the end of the day, it’s probably not even worth the money they was gonna give. I reached out to a couple of people. I was very frustrated. A couple of people shared some of the same irritations I had, and then we started talking about the union.

Was this the first time you had peeped the type of time Amazon/Whole Foods was on or had you been peeping it?

I never really had a job that long. This is the longest I had a job. I worked jobs here and there, but I was going to school; I was playing football—I thought that’s what I was going to do. I never saw myself working a job. As I got older, I took it a little more seriously. And in my brain, I’m all about loyalty and caring for people. So I thought that they did too. I was always going to be respectful. I’d do what you ask because you’re my boss, but you’re going to respect me as a man. We never had problems with that. I did whatever they asked because I thought it was a clear, respectful thing. And then I realized this is just a business; they don’t really care that much. Because as soon as it was inconvenient for them, they were able to do that to me like it was nothing—no matter how respectful I was, no matter how nice I was, no matter how much I thought they were on my side. These people who work higher up? They’re not your friends. And when I got done like that, something clicked in my head—yeah, this isn't what I thought. This isn’t what I thought. It ain’t all sunshine, everybody ain't your friend. I learned the hard way.

Congratulations on winning the election. Once a contract is secured, what do you want to see change within Whole Foods?

Safe work conditions. People are walking around on eggshells, not knowing if they’re gonna get fired for every little thing. Your job should be secure. You shouldn’t be walking around thinking you’re gonna be fired every day over some little thing. And part-timers and health insurance? Whole Foods has been taking advantage—scheduling people full-time when they need them but then cutting their hours back to part-time so they don’t have to pay for health insurance. If you schedule somebody five days a week for a pay period, then the next week you cut them by a day and a couple of hours, so technically they’re not going over the amount of hours that qualify them for health insurance. I want part-timers to have health insurance. I want Whole Foods to have to pay for it because they’ve been finessing that. They’ve been finessing that for years. And a cost-of-living adjustment, for sure. Getting paid more. Inflation. But they’re still paying workers the same. People are struggling. Nobody should have to work two or three jobs just to live. That’s not a way to live, man. At all. And we’ve normalized that, and that’s not normal. You shouldn’t have to be working six days a week with only a couple of hours to yourself here and there. That is not normal.

In an emailed statement to Reuters , Amazon/Whole Foods said they were “disappointed” by the results of the election and were “committed to maintaining a positive working environment in our Philly Center City store." They also said they had complied with all legal requirements when communicating with employees about unions. Do you think that’s true?

No. Not at all. Even after the win, it’s still pretty hostile. They’re still being sore losers. Amazon is a sore loser.

Out of 297 in the unit, 230 people voted—130 said yes, 100 said no. This is a two-parter: Were you surprised by the actual numbers? And where did everyone else go?

I think a lot of people got scared. They got intimidated. Amazon did a number on them. It was a long two months. They had two months to put everything they had into intimidating people and just wearing them down. I feel like the people who didn’t vote were scared at the last second, like, 'I hope we get it, but I don’t want to be a part of it. I don’t want to be a part of trying to get it.' And yeah, some people flipped too. Some listened to the propaganda, and they changed sides. I was surprised to a point—I knew it was going to be close. I was a little nervous that we could have lost. I mean, I know we stood strong, but I was surprised that after everything they threw at us—everything they did, the thousands and thousands of dollars they spent trying to break us—we still stayed strong. They did a lot of messed-up stuff. A lot of grimy, dirty stuff.

It was reported that they were giving y’all free food, like Shake Shack, to bribe you—even though they had never given y’all Shake Shack before…

They got TastyKakes from Target! Amazon—Whole Foods—all about the healthy stuff, but suddenly, they had TastyKakes all the way down. They got the store-brand Coca-Cola and Mountain Dews, Doritos. They went everywhere, bringing all this stuff—pizza, Olive Garden, everything. At first, it was nice. But then I saw the shift—when Trump got in office. As soon as Trump got in office, everything changed. It became aggressive. It became blatant. They even started silencing people—me, Ed, Ben. They started watching who we were talking to, telling us we couldn’t go to certain meetings. They were holding meetings and saying they were voluntary—because legally, they had to say that—but really, they were mandatory. At first, they let us in, and we’d ask questions they couldn’t answer. We were exposing them. So, to counter that, they started banning us from those meetings. They’d say, “Oh, you already know your stance. This isn’t for you.” In the beginning, when Biden was still in office, we could go. But toward the end, they straight-up told us we had to leave. After everything they did, we still stayed strong. We won. And a lot of people ask, “What was the difference?” The difference was—we knew each other personally. We cared about each other. We talked about our personal lives. Yeah, you can’t keep up with 200 people, but at least out of everybody, we knew something about each other. We had personal conversations, we chilled outside of work. It wasn’t just about being tired of the job or being treated wrong. It was about trust. I trusted these people and they trusted me. I look at Ed and how he cares. Ed was comfortable, could just keep going about his day, living his life. But Ed cares so much about how everybody else is doing. Even when I told him about my shifts getting deleted, it hurt him deeply.

Are you prepared for this fight? Are you mentally and physically ready for what this is going to require of you?

I am prepared for this fight. Mentally, physically—I know it's going to be difficult, but I know what this means for the future. I know it's deeper than myself. I know people see this, and I know it inspires them. When we started this, I didn't know how big it was going to be. I thought it was just a couple of coworkers trying to do what we had to do to get treated right. But now, when you look around and see the attention it's getting, it's bigger than any of us. It wouldn't be fair to anyone if I gave up just because it got a little hard.

There was a region-wide wage increase, and the Whole Foods Center City, Philadelphia store that you work at didn’t receive it. Union busting is illegal but legally, Amazon/Whole Foods was able to withhold these raises due to laws that allow companies to forgo wage increases during the union election process, as giving the raise could be perceived as trying to influence the outcome of the vote. Amazon/Whole Foods said they were delaying pay bumps until after the election. It’s been eight days since y'all won the vote, they are in the “clear” to give y’all raises. Have y'all got a raise yet?

No.

Have they mentioned a raise at all?

Nobody’s said nothing.

Do you have any words of advice to any workers that might read this and be like, "Damn, I'm working this job. I fucking hate it and I hate how I'm being treated”?

We have learned to accept the things that we don’t have to accept. We don’t have to be treated in these messed-up ways. We make money for these companies. We help these companies run. We do these jobs, and together, we demand how we want to be treated. It’s not the other way around. These companies have gotten too powerful and too rich because we have gotten too comfortable with turning our heads, putting our heads down, and just getting through our day. We are too strong together and together, they have to listen to us. And they will do anything in their power to separate us—whether that be bribe you or whether that be telling you lies to try to get you to turn your back on your fellow co-workers. They’re going to do whatever they can to keep us separate and keep us [only] caring and worrying about ourselves. Together we are strong and we gotta learn to care for each other and trust one another. Together they gotta listen to us. They don’t make their billions and billions of dollars without us. Without you.