Over 20 workers at Feast BBQ and over 15 workers at Royals Hot Chicken voted to join UFCW Local 227 on Dec. 21 and Jan. 11. The workers, who are employed as front and back of house service crew, dishwashers, cooks, and shift leaders, voted to join UFCW Local 227 because they were concerned about insufficient wages and scheduling, and treatment by management.

Feast BBQ and Royals Hot Chicken are owned by the same restaurant group and many of the workers know each other. The campaign to organize these workers included holding meetings with workers from both restaurants and having a shared discord channel. The local also relied heavily on the Prompt texting platform to inoculate workers against the restaurant group’s anti-union campaign and keep them informed about the process of unionizing.

“We are excited to welcome workers from Feast BBQ and Royals Hot Chicken to the labor movement,” said UFCW Local 227 President Bob Blair. “Despite stall tactics from their employer, these workers stood together and won their union. Together, we will negotiate a great union contract that will help to raise restaurant industry standards for workers in our city.”

Politics and Prose (Washington DC) – UFCW Local 400

Workers at Politics and Prose in Washington DC made history as the first ever Washington DC bookstore to unionize as they joined UFCW Local 400.

More than 50 workers across the three P&P bookstore locations voted to unionize in order to to negotiate a contract that secures higher wages, a standardized pay scale, and pay transparency.

 “We are proud to join the growing movement of booksellers and baristas across the country who have unionized their workplaces,” said the P&P organizing committee. 

Read UFCW Local 400 statement here.

Half Price Books (Minnesota) – UFCW Local 663 & 1189

In December 2021, workers from three Half Price Books locations in Twin Cities, Minnesota won union recognition from a National Labor Relations Board election, making this the first union at the national chain Half Price Books. 

Workers unionized with UFCW Locals 663 and 1189 to secure livable wages, better working conditions and a voice in their workplace.

Stores in Coon Rapids, Roseville and St. Paul filed for union election mid-October of last year. Ballots were sent to workers by the U.S. Mail and a certified election count was scheduled for Thursday, December 16 at 2 p.m. All three locations voted to unionize.

On January 6, 2022, workers from the St. Louis Park location at Half Price Books won union recognition from a NLRB election, making it the fourth store to unionize with the national chain.

Read UFCW Local 663 statement here.

Greenlight Bookstore and Yours Truly (New York City, NY) – RWDSU/UFCW

About 40 workers at Greenlight Bookstores and Yours Truly stationery stores in Brooklyn, N.Y., joined the RWDSU/UFCW last summer. The workers in the bargaining unit handle sales, stocking, and information services in the stores.

In addition to Greenlight Bookstore and Yours Truly, the RWDSU also represents workers at book and stationery stores across New York City including McNally Jackson, Goods for the Study, and Book Culture.

“We’re proud to welcome the workers of Greenlight Bookstores and Yours Truly stationery stores into our union,” said RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum. “Together, they won recognition from their employer, and showed that the best way for working people to protect themselves and their families is to join together in a union.”

Read RWDSU statement here.

Are you a bookstore worker who would like to enjoy the benefits of a union?

Take the first step towards unionizing!

SALEM, NH – Today, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1445, the union for 12,000 New England essential workers in grocery, healthcare, and other frontline industries across the region, announced that New Hampshire retail workers at Bull Moose in Salem voted unanimously to unionize with UFCW Local 1445. The union vote comes after Bull Moose fired workers in May 2021 for speaking out about COVID-19 safety risks on the job after the store removed its mask mandate. Customers and the local community stood with workers unjustly fired and Bull Moose responded to the backlash by offering to rehire these workers the week of June 5, 2021. Bull Moose workers also cited workplace harassment as one of the major reasons for unionizing with UFCW Local 1445 to improve working conditions and ensure their voices were heard as they continue to serve their community during the pandemic.

UFCW Local 1445 President Fernando Lemus: “We are excited to welcome Bull Moose workers to our union family and look forward to helping Bull Moose workers secure their first union contract. These workers came to us after management ignored their complaints about workplace safety and harassment. No worker should have to experience this. The past year has demonstrated the value of having a unionized workplace, and we know that a strong union contract will help make Bull Moose a better place for workers, customers, and our community.”

Whitney Villers, Bull Moose worker in Salem: “We believe nobody who works at Bull Moose should have to worry about being fired for simply requesting safety improvements and speaking out against mistreatment. All of us are working hard to care for ourselves, our families, and our customers. What we are asking of management is to help us feel safe at work. We all deserve to have a voice, be heard, and be treated with dignity and respect at work. We’re looking forward to seeing Bull Moose workers across New Hampshire and Maine come together and join us at the negotiating table as we secure a union contract that improves these jobs for all of us.”

Andrew Bove, Bull Moose worker in Salem: “This vote is about justice and security. Before we got fired, we went weeks without adequate staffing or any kind of increased compensation. When we brought up our concerns to management, the company demonstrated that it considered us completely disposable. Our customers and community stood with us in calling on Bull Moose to do the right thing and the company rehired us. While we have seen some improvements, we want to make sure there is the lasting change that comes from a strong union contract. This vote to unionize with UFCW Local 1445 is our first step to create a better workplace where we have a true voice and can negotiate the better pay and benefits we have earned.” 

Kameron Brooksmoore, Bull Moose worker in Salem: “We formed our union in the aftermath of the mass firing of Salem staff in May as a way to ensure something like that could never happen again. Unionizing helps to ensure we have a stronger voice as we work to make this a better and safer place to work. We want to make sure that any future or current employee of Bull Moose feels valued and safe, and that they are being treated with dignity and respect from every member of management. This union is a representation of our bond and our willingness to advocate for each other and our rights.”

BACKGROUND:

On May 21, 2021, workers at Bull Moose Salem were all terminated without a stated reason after voicing collective concerns about the company removing their mask mandate. Following customer and community backlash, Bull Moose offered to rehire these workers the week of June 5, 2021.

Workers at Bull Moose Salem reached out to the UFCW Local 1445 after their complaints about workplace safety and experiencing harassment on the job in the form of racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia, which management continued to ignore.

On Tuesday, September 14, 2021, Bull Moose workers in Salem, NH voted unanimously in favor of joining the UFCW Local 1445. The next step is negotiating for Bull Moose workers’ first union contract between Bull Moose worker bargaining committee members, UFCW L1445 union representatives, and Bull Moose management.

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United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1445 is the union for over 12,000 New England essential workers across a number of industries in the region including grocery, retail, and healthcare. To learn more about UFCW Local 1445, go to ufcwlocal1445.org

Everyday companies across the nation are proving they can afford pay increases. Add your name and demand emergency pay increases for all essential workers here.

Sign the Petition

Zara union workers chose to join UFCW Local 888 because of the UFCW’s leadership as the top retail union in the country representing the men and women in the retail industry. As one of the top retail unions, UFCW organizers were able to connect with these workers about the most important issues they face every day at their workplace, including scheduling and paid time off, and help them build a strategic plan to make lasting improvements.

Often times workers may face issues at their store that they do not realized are tied to larger, company or industry-wide problems. When workers are isolated, they are left to deal with these issues on their own, and may put up with less than they deserve if they believe they are the only ones impacted. Being part of a union helps connect the dots and make it possible to tackle systemic issues head on.

Zara is a global retail company specializing in clothing, accessories, shoes, swimwear, beauty, and perfumes. It is the largest company in the Inditex group, the world’s largest apparel retailer.

Twenty-nine million Americans work in the retail industry, making it the largest private sector-employer in the economy. According to The National Retail Federation, retail supports 42 million jobs and represents $2.6 trillion of annual GDP in the United States. Retail workers who contribute so much to our economy should have good wages and benefits they can build their lives around. The UFCW is committed to a better life for Zara workers, and for all hard working men and women.

“We are excited to welcome Zara Cherry Hill and Freehold to the Local 888 family and we are looking forward to working with all six stores in securing a strong UFCW contract,” said UFCW Local 888 President Max Bruny.

You, and all of our 1.3 million UFCW members, make a real difference in the lives of countless numbers of families all across your communities.

From grocery and retail to food processing and health care, you help make the holiday season joyous for this entire nation.

And in case you ever doubt it, the community you serve every day truly appreciates your hard work, too.

John Kressaty, who was President of the ICSA when the week began, said “There are two main purposes of National Customer Service Week. It lets you recognize the job that your customer service professionals do 52 weeks a year. The other purpose is to get the message across a wide range of business, government and industry that customer service is very important along with bottom line profit in running a business.”

Today, customer service is more important than ever. According to Forbes, “Today, 89% of companies compete primarily on the basis of customer experience – up from just 36% in 2010.“ As one of the cornerstones of customer experience, customer service is not just an old-fashioned idea that “the customer is always right,” but is what sets companies apart and helps them stand out in a field of ever-evolving retail technology.

Everything old is a new again

In the beginning of the 20^th century, grocery shopping looked very different than it does today. Rather than scour the aisles themselves, customers would hand the grocery clerk a list of the items they were looking for, and the worker would go get the items while the customer waited. But all that changed in 1916 when Clarence Saunders opened the first self-service grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, in Memphis, Tennessee. The new model was advertised as offering more freedom and choice for the customer.

A century later, the same concept of “freedom” to do it yourself has been used to sell other technologies like self-checkout where the customer is expected to do the work that was once done by an employee. And in-store grocery pickup options at places like Kroger, where you can order your groceries online and then an employee will do the shopping for you, aren’t so much a new, revolutionary idea in the industry as they are a return to the way grocery shopping used to work.

Today in Memphis, new technologies are still being tested. Dynasty Brown, a UFCW Local 1529 member, works at Kroger #405 as a picker, one of the workers who shops on a customer’s behalf when the online orders come in. “I like taking the orders out and seeing the smiles on customers faces,” says Brown. A hundred years of progress in technology haven’t changed workers’ pride in providing good customer service, nor shoppers’ appreciation of someone who goes the extra mile for them.

Good technology vs. bad customer experience

As anyone who has ever stood helpless at a self-checkout while it yelled at them about an “unknown item in the baggage area” knows, the “freedom” to do the work yourself isn’t always so free feeling.

A recent article in Gizmodo, “Why Self-Checkout Is and Has Always Been the Worst,” does a pretty great job articulating the difference between good and bad technology, namely that bad technology is the stuff that gets rammed down our throats that no one really wants but we are stuck putting up with anyway:

“For every automated appliance or system that actually makes performing a task easier—dishwashers, ATMs, robotic factory arms, say—there seems to be another one—self-checkout kiosks, automated phone menus, mass email marketing—that actively makes our lives worse.

…

Nobody likes wading through an interminable phone menu to try to address a suspect charge on a phone bill—literally, everyone would rather speak with a customer service rep. But that’s the system we’re stuck with because a corporation decided that the inconvenience to the user is well worth the savings in labor costs.”

But as the article goes on to point out, the promised savings on labor costs for trading out real customer service is often just a long-con by the folks selling the machines.

Customers have been rejecting full automation since 1937

Though the announcement of Amazon Go, Amazon’s grocery store model intended to allow shoppers to enter and exit the store without having to make a single human interaction with anyone, made a big splash when it was announced, the first fully-automated self-service grocery store, Keedoozle, was actually opened in 1937 by the same man who started Piggly Wiggly. Unlike Piggly Wiggly, which still operates today (and where many UFCW members work), Keedoozle was a miserable failure.

Items were kept in separate glass cases so as to be easily seen and never handled. Entering customers received an aluminum “key” with a roll of ticker tape attached. They shopped the product windows as they pleased, slipping their key into slots in the displays and pressing buttons that punched Morse code-like data about their desired products. At the checkout, a shopper handed her key to the clerk, who simultaneously rung up the receipt and transmitted the key’s record to a backroom. There, workers bundled orders and sent them out to customers via conveyer belt. ‘It can’t miss. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever had,’ Saunders told Time magazine. –Americans Have Been Cursing at Automated Checkouts Since 1937

Only it did miss, hard. The last Keedoozle closed in 1949. Saunders wasn’t deterred and went back to work to find even more ways to eliminate more jobs within the grocery store, this time by using an early computer in place of a cashier. Saunders died before the concept got off the ground.

The invisible human labor behind automation

Data & Society’s report, “The Labor of Integrating New Technologies,” finds that rather than replacing jobs, the role out of new shopping technology actually relies heavily on skilled customer service abilities of workers, but those efforts are often invisible and not compensated:

“We find that retail experiments, like self-checkout or customer-operated scanners, tend to rely on humans to smooth out technology’s rough edges. In other words, the “success” of technologies like self-checkout machines is in large part produced by the human effort necessary to maintain the technologies, from guiding confused customers through the checkout process to fixing the machines when they breakdown to quite literally searching for customers aisle by aisle when GPS systems fail. The impact of these retail technologies has generally not been one of replacing human labor. Rather, they enable employers to place greater pressures on frontline workers to absorb the frontline risks and consequences of cost cutting experiments. Much of the work that employees must do on the ground to facilitate new systems is often invisible and undervalued, even as popular perceptions of automation frame these roles as increasingly obsolete.”

The report even points out that senior employees are often needed with advanced skills in “diffusing anger” to help customers navigate new systems and all the bugs that come along with them. But in all the conversations about new technology, this work is swept to the side and seen as exceptional rather than an integral part of both roll out and continued function of self-service technologies.

The report lines up with first-hand accounts from UFCW members who work in stores where new technologies like Kroger’s Scan, Bag, Go program have been tested. Scan, Bag, Go allows shoppers to use scanners they carry around the store with them to scan products as they shop. Edith Peck, a UFCW Local 1529 member who has worked at Kroger in Memphis for the past nine years and who says providing good customer service is her favorite part of the job, says that for the most part, customers just ignore the scanners.

“I think this whole thing is Kroger’s scheme to eliminate employees to compete with automation, but at that point, why not shop at Walmart?” says Peck. “They need to understand good customer service is what is going to set us apart.”

Customer sentiment towards scan and go shopping is pretty clear in the Scan, Bag, Go app, which has a 1.9 star rating in the Google Play store. Reading the reviews paints a clear picture of why “diffusing anger” would be a skill needed to help transitioning customers.

Genuine interaction with cashiers makes us happier

Beyond just the importance to a business’s bottom line, when we talk about the elimination of customer service jobs, it’s also worth remembering to ask: what is it that we want our lives to look like?

A 2013 study, Is Efficiency Overrated?: Minimal Social Interactions Lead to Belonging and Positive Affect, found that that when people engage with cashiers in a genuine way (with a smile, eye contact, brief conversation, etc.), it lifts their mood and leads to an increased sense of belonging. Although people often report reluctance to have a genuine social interaction with a stranger, those interactions still are ultimately good for us. Surprise, just like exercise or eating healthier food, talking to strangers turns out to be a thing we don’t think we want but that makes our lives better when we go out and do it.

Are we comfortable with creating a society where we only interact with products and rarely with flesh and blood people? And given that the answer from most people is a resounding no, how can we effectively push back against technology and innovation that might cross that line while still embracing technology that does improve our lives? If we are so collectively stressed out that saving a few moments waiting in line at the checkout seems like a good trade for someone’s job or our own mental health, perhaps the solution isn’t in improving the efficiency of the shopping experience. Maybe it’s tackling why we’re all so stressed out to begin with.

In the meantime, thank you to all the hard-working UFCW members out there ready to help customers feel seen and appreciated in whatever ways they can, whether it’s service with a smile or repeatedly coming to our rescue at the self-checkout machines. We need you now more than ever.

The workers joined our union family because they were concerned about low wages, insufficient benefits and workplace favoritism. UFCW Local 655 is focused on helping these workers build on this victory to organize workers at other Goodwill stores throughout the area.

“We could not be more proud to welcome Goodwill employees into the Local 655 family,” said UFCW Local 655 President Dave Cook. “I look forward to helping them bargain the union contract that they deserve so that they can get the wages and benefits they have worked so hard for.”