Thanks for the advice! We’ve been doing a lot of this stuff, so it seems like we are on the right track.

Not to be too confident, but we just did a count of hard yes supporters and I think we got this.

Yeah, this was understood to everyone in the OC. There were a few factors that made us trigger the vote prematurely. Our efforts got leaked early which made it more difficult than usual to assess people, since anti’s would narc us out immediately, and the management was on a firing spree. In the last three months we’ve lost 10 people out of a workplace of about 90. Many of which we had gotten to sign cards or were in the OC from the start. The ones who got fired didn’t want to fight it, the people who quit were burnt out by the job or felt unsafe working there and couldn’t take it anymore, and several more people are ready to quit and are only sticking around so they can vote yes. It was kind of either now or risk losing people through attrition.

That plus Trump doing who the fuck knows what in the near future. It’s been an unusual campaign from the start, from what we’ve been told.

Your response a lot of the time will be “that will be decided in contract negotiations” or “that will be a democratc decision made by all of us”. Make it clear that the stool pigeons don’t want your coworkers to negotiate. They don’t want your coworkers to have a choice. They and the company want to dictate the rules to you and your only choice is to obey or quit. Your union wants to have actual negotiations with the company and for everyone to have a say, even the people who aren’t pro union. Your coworkers need to know that anti-union propaganda is an attempt to restrict them.

Hell yeah, exactly what I was looking for. That’s a great way to frame it. Thank you.

They are generally well liked enough by people who don’t deal with them a lot, but I think their shitty behavior turns people off who work with them on a regular basis. Not sure suggesting kickbacks for work, but everyone knows the one person has management ambitions and has basically been in a management position for months now. We couldn’t kick them out of the bargaining unit because their job title is technically not management. If we are successful I would expect them to try and sabatoge negotiations if they see an opportunity.

Thank you!

We are almost at an agreement with the list of eligable employees. The union people think were in a good place, but we still have some convincing to do. A lot of people were caught by surprise, including our GM who hasn’t made a public comment in a week. Looks like the vote will take place in about three weeks.

Thanks! That seems to be how it’s lining up. Anyone close to upper management is a hard sell, although a few people are coming to meetings. We’ve been writing off a lot of people who have management aspirations and don’t seem to even have a good idea of what a union is and don’t care, and they also seem to think the solution is to get better people as managers.

There is definitely a perception among people we haven’t talked to that a union is an outside organization taking over that we are trying to stress is not the case. Thankfully we have a couple pretty good union organizers working with us who have been great at handling this stuff.

We just had our busiest union meeting ever tonight. Even though a few people who attended aren’t 100%, we’ve had good interactions.

Everything is public now, and it’s trickling out to local news. Our GM just hired an incredibly expensive out of state law firm, and right now they are trying to exlude team leads and include people from finance and others who work close to the GM. The board agent found that unusual, lol.

Hopefully this will pay off and we’ll have a better place to work as a result. I’m hopeful but we also live in hell, so…

Thanks, and yeah, I contacted EWOC and they helped a lot, and we have been working with competent organizers in the union we are trying to join. We are pretty well prepped for the next few weeks. We’ve been inviting people to meetings for the past several months to try and talk to as many people as we could before managment says anything, and have been fairly successful, but we will be opening up to everybody soon when we file cards for an election.

We’ve been trying to be discreet because a lot of people have been targetted for reasons that look like union busting, so we didn’t want to invite reprisals on anyone. When we are public we are hoping to sway enough people to get a majority. I think we are almost at a majority of people who signed cards now, but we want to win with a stronger showing than 51%.

I was just wondering if you ran into any significant brainworms that stood out. Currently some people are treated really well, and some are treated like garbage. So we’ve run into the occasional “the leapords won’t eat MY face” type bullshit. There’s always gonna be those types of people so what can you do?

Any advice for the speaking to people on the fence before the vote?

That’s great. There is another store similar to our in my state that went with the teamsters and they are having a hell of a time for some reason. I’m not sure if management is just throwing a fit or the teamsters don’t have enough experience in those types of stores. We passed on the teamsters because the local police station is unionized through them and we didn’t want to be associated with cops.

That’s awesome! It’s crazy how difficult it can be to just do something good for people.

Thank you!

Thank you!

How has your experience been with the teamsters so far?

The Boeing corporation, well known for their honesty and forthrightness.

My medical profits!

Yeah, a wholesome progressive company. Rainbow flags everywhere. Cute character branding. And then they slash hours while we’re doing record business and make people rush through moving tons of freight on icy floors and around puddles and wet floors from improperly calibrated cooling units, and then shake their heads and tsk-tsk us when injuries pile up. “Make sure to stretch!”. I’ve worked shitty fast food places that were managed more humanely.

Hell yeah, Thank you!

We have been instructed to take notes about everything, and plan on doing that. I think our state requires consent for recording, so I’ll suggest making sure we get their refusal to be recorded on record. I’ve been punished for following their verbal instructions, and then had them plead ignorance when I stood up for myself several times at this point. They have also shown a wreckless disregard for labor laws so we want to be prepared for shenanigans.

One of our first meetings was doing list work and mapping the store. Thanks to the employee who was recently fired we are pretty far ahead, and we are citing their firing as an example of why we need a union. We are encouraging them to file a ULP, but they are a bit burnt out from all this and they were planning on quitting before the union drive started. Only hung around to help out with that, so there might not be much motivation to take action. According to the organizers we are working with, they have 6 months to file, so we’ll see. After how they’ve treated us I don’t want to show them any grace and will never trust them to behave like a decent people again.

Thank you!

It’s long overdue.

I’ve been reading news articles and researching other co-ops that unionized, and the complaints staff had are almost completely identical. Using their “locally owned, friendly co-op” marketing while the upper management abuses staff. All adopting the same worker hostile policies while upper management lines their pockets. They must be getting the same advice from the national grocery co-op or something. It’s kind of depressing what a scam these places can turn out to be.

Amazing. Do managers for these places all attend training on how to be abusive when they get hired?