Dear Whole Foods Team members,
A year ago, a group of current and former WFM team members and I created an organized labor movement within Whole Foods that we named Whole Worker. We learned that not only had Amazon taken away all forms of profit sharing from store team members, but they had granted in secret full shares of Amazon stock to store team leaders and many associate store team leaders. We felt this was a betrayal of Whole Foods’ core values. We had just witnessed mass layoffs of many of our co-team members including the store graphic artists, and we had been made aware of future layoffs, euphemistically referred to as “restructuring”. We believed that the culture, values and spirit of Whole Foods was dying under Amazon, and we decided to try and do something about it.
We sent out a mass email to stores and launched a Whole Worker Slack community. We wanted to offer team members a way to come together and collectively use our voices to demand higher pay and to improve working conditions. We also collaborated with members of the national media to amplify our shared experiences.
Shortly after our mass email and media blitz, John Mackey confirmed what we exposed about profit sharing and announced a one-time-only stock grant for full time team members above 6,000 service hours. In the following weeks, Whole Worker leaked Amazon’s anti-union training materials (that had been made available to team leaders on Whole Foods’ own Cornerstone) to the media and the Bernie Sanders campaign. This helped pressure Jeff Bezos to implement the $15 minimum wage at Amazon and Whole Foods which happened a short time later. We built a coalition of store, regional, and global team members within Whole Foods and Amazon to give a voice to all workers. We continue to address ongoing issues within our stores today.
I think it is safe to say that most of us are unhappy that our primary job now is simply to push Amazon Prime. A year ago John Mackey, in the team member scoop on VideoFarm, described our relationship with Amazon as “a marriage where both partners will change over time”.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. A marriage is a partnership.
We are Amazon’s subordinates.
When John Mackey talks about our “conscious integration” with Amazon, what he really means is Whole Foods selling out. We may still have our core values and some measure of autonomy from Amazon, but it doesn’t take a genius to see there is no core value at Whole Foods today more important that hawking Amazon Prime to our customers. Literally everything in our business seems to come second to that. Are we really Whole Foods Market, or are we brand ambassadors for Amazon Prime?
Furthermore, inadequate labor budgets continue to go unaddressed. If you are an order writer today it is very likely you still make less than our order writers did at the time they were laid off back in 2015, even after taking into account the minimum wage increase. Since the wage increase, pay tiers have condensed, real profit sharing, gainsharing or bonuses have all been removed, and hours continue to be cut from our paychecks week in and out.
Even at our most difficult quarters back in 2013, 2014 and 2015, Whole Foods was never unprofitable. Today we are not unprofitable. Profitability was never the real issue. The issue was that our profits weren’t growing fast enough to satisfy our investors, and now our profits are not growing fast enough to satisfy Jeff Bezos. It is horrid what our company is willing to do to our hours and paychecks in the name of larger profits.
It is the team members who create all the profit and we not only deserve our share of it, we demand it! Without us, not a single item would be stocked or bagged.
Without us, there is no Whole Foods.
If you work in a Whole Foods store today and you feel that your team is constantly understaffed and you experience your hours being cut almost weekly, know that you are not alone. We have learned that this is the reality of virtually every store in the company.
The demands of our jobs always go up and the resources we are given to do our jobs always go down. And with the prospect of cashierless checkout, automated ordering and auto-replenishment coming in the next year, we can all expect future layoffs and restructuring with only the mere opportunity to reapply for a position at a much lower wage than before. We can expect this because it is precisely what Whole Foods has done time and time again.
Whole Worker’s mission is to improve working conditions, benefits and compensation for all Whole Foods team members. We believe the power dynamics within Whole Foods has to change, and we are using unorthodox means of collective action to accomplish this mission.
Most of us believe that the best way to accomplish our goals is to unionize all Whole Foods stores in North America, but unionizing is a long, complicated and often controversial process. What is not complicated nor controversial, however, is organizing. Organizing is simply coming together to challenge leadership with one voice. Whole Worker believes in unorthodox forms of labor organizing such as social media and mass media.
Whether or not to organize usually boils down to one question:
"Do you trust Whole Foods Global leadership?"
If so, great. If not, we invite you to get involved and help push back.
We want to make it easier for all team members to come together to express their concerns in a community that they can trust and confide in. From this, they can learn to help themselves and their fellow team members. We want team members to realize that they do have a voice, a very loud one, to make significant and important changes in this company. We want to give everyone the tools and the knowledge to stand up for what is right and good for Whole Foods Market, and we want to make that process as private and secure as possible to protect people from retaliation from leadership.
This is why we are launching a new Whole Worker public community today hosted on Telegram, an encrypted, private and non-for-profit messaging service that is used by hundreds of millions of people all around the world. We no longer use Slack simply because we couldn’t guarantee the safety of our members’ personal data. With Telegram this is not a problem.
Some of the things we are fighting for include:
Removing wage caps for long term team members
Removing the PT:FT ratio or re-working it to favor full-time work
Yearly raises that are independent of work performance
Lowering the eligibility requirements for insurance
Embracing the philosophy of added responsibility for added pay
Full-profit sharing for full-time team members
Dramatically increase staffing across the board
To join this community and see what we are all about, all you need to do is go to www.wholeworker.org which will redirect you to the Telegram public channel. You can also download the Telegram smartphone app and join using the url, t.me/wholeworker. Since Telegram is an open-source platform that values privacy, all of your personal information, your location and your phone number is kept hidden and secure. The main Whole Worker channel on Telegram is public and open for anyone to join. We will use the open channel to connect with team members who want to help build the movement and then invite those people into the various closed Telegram groups where we host our organizing committees.
We hope that this will serve as the beginning of the creation of a tight-knit community that all team members are proud to be a part of, by reiterating all of our original core values. We wish to make a better and flourishing work environment for all present and future team members.
Sincerely,
Ty Robertson, Matt, KT, SB, Rahodeb, BC, Glamazon Prime, Endora, Sol, Amazon Crime Customer, Frank Little, Muffin King, FJM and the rest of Whole Worker’s National Organizing Committee
Whole Worker is not a formal labor union as of today. In the past we have collaborated with members of RWDSU, UFCW, IWW and DSA.
Whole Worker is an organization of Whole Foods employees that engages in labor organization and concerted activity on and off the job in the interest of improving team member working conditions.