WORKERS FIGHT TO ORGANIZE WHOLE FOODS By Deirdre Griswold The Whole Foods Market is not a mom-and-pop establishment. Its web site explains that it is "the world's largest retailer of natural and organic foods, with 143 stores in North America." Since it started in 1980 with one small store in Austin, Texas, the company has grown into a retailing giant with assets of over $1 billion-- $97 million of that in cash, according to a May 7 company news release. Its stock trades on the Nasdaq exchange. Customers are attracted by its wide array of fresh fruits and vegetables, organic meats and poultry, and environment-friendly products. The company views itself as fulfilling a mission of "helping to transform the diet of America, helping people live longer, healthier, more pleasurable lives while responding positively to the challenge of environmental sustainability." But who keep the shelves stocked with fresh produce? Who ring up and bag the groceries? Who move crates of food and sundries in and out of the stores? Who mop the floors and clean out the meat counters? Workers. And many of them have made it clear that they need a union. The company wants them to pay more for health benefits. Wages are not pegged to seniority but to subjective evaluations made by management. A new hire can earn more than a veteran worker. STRUGGLING TO GET A UNION So in July 2002 the employees at the Madison, Wis., store voted in a union--the United Food and Commercial Workers. They are still waiting for contract negotiations, however, which the company has been stalling-- apparently in an effort to force a new election after a year has elapsed. More recently, store workers in Falls Church, Va., have signed union cards, but the National Labor Relations Board halted an election scheduled for this April after the union charged that Whole Foods had packed the store with workers from other locations to influence the vote. Unions around the country have added Whole Foods to their boycott lists. The CEO and chair of Whole Foods, John Mackey, thinks his "team members"- -he doesn't call them workers or even employees--reacted out of "fear" instead of "love" when they voted in a union in Madison. This is what he said about the pro-union vote: "We all make many mistakes in life. It is all part of our growth process because that is how we learn, that is how we grow. When confronted by great stress in life, we have but only 2 choices: 1. Contract into fear. 2. Expand into love." The union members might respond, "Why don't you show some love for us and loosen your grip on some of that $97 million in cash the company is hoarding?" But that would be an exercise in futility. MACKEY SAYS: 'THE UNION IS LIKE HAVING HERPES' Mackey has been open about his anti-union stand for years. "Here's the way I like to think of it. The union is like having herpes. It doesn't kill you, but it's unpleasant and inconvenient and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover," he said when workers in Austin first raised the idea of a union. (Business and Society Review, June 22, 1992) In November 1991, In These Times ran an article about Whole Foods by James Raskin. "Whole Foods keeps up leafy green appearances but makes no apologies for its single-minded devotion to profit and its fierce determination to keep its wages low, its venture-capitalist investors hidden and its workforce young, powerless, and union-free," he wrote. He described the corporation as "pro-New Age in rhetoric, anti-New Deal in practice." The United Farm Workers say that Whole Foods refused to give them any support when they campaigned to get a five-cents-a-pint increase for strawberry pickers. Of the $2.50 or so that customers paid for a pint of strawberries, only 10 cents went to the pickers. In New York City, where a new Whole Foods store has been doing a booming business in Chelsea, leaflets given out by UFCW informational pickets explain that the company is one of the few chain stores in the city to run a non-union shop. Many of the people who shop at Whole Foods probably think they are doing some good for the world while they cater to their picky palate. At least, that's what the company wants them to believe. Which raises an interesting question. Can the world be made a better place by buying and/or investing in companies that claim to have a social mission? BUSINESS IS BUSINESS The struggle at Whole Foods should remind everyone that there are two basic classes in society: the workers and the capitalists. Those who stand in between these two classes hope to be able to soften the conflict between them. They hope that capitalism can be modified to improve its record of brutal disregard of the workers and of trampling over everything in its addiction to profits. Eating fresh, chemical-free foods may be good for the consumer who can afford them, but this doesn't necessarily translate into better conditions for the farm workers or the grocery workers. That's because business is business, and any entrepreneur who wants to expand--and they all do, because if they don't, someone else will take their market-- needs to attract capital. That means paying out generous dividends and/or interest on loans. And where does this money come from? It comes directly out of the labor performed by the company's workers. At the most basic level, it is human labor that creates all value-- meaning value that commands a price. There is of course a different kind of value in a beautiful sunset or a breath of fresh air. But unless labor is applied to them--like building a device that compresses air for industrial use, for example--these things are free. When you buy something, you're paying for the labor that went into it in all its various stages of manufacture. Capitalism has a very destructive contradiction built right into it. Workers have to compete to sell their labor power for wages. Bosses buy their time at the going rate for that kind of labor. But what determines how much the bosses will pay? Not the value of what the workers produce. A farm worker may get paid only 10 cents for something that sells for $2.50 or $3.00. The minimum wage is determined by how little the bosses can pay and still be assured that the workers they need don't just die of starvation and disease or go elsewhere. The one thing that pulls wages up above subsistence is the organized resistance of the workers themselves. Hospital workers in this country, especially those without technical skills, used to be paid the barest minimum. In 1961, a janitor at Beth- El Hospital in Brooklyn took home $36 for a 50-hour week. Now most of them get a union wage. It took years of struggle, strikes, picket lines and sit-ins to accomplish this. It wasn't just a coincidence that Local 1199, the union that organized hospital workers, used tactics borrowed from the civil rights movement. U.S. bosses have long promoted racism to keep workers in the U.S. divided and their organizations weakened. The super-exploitation of people of color drags down the entire class while the bosses laugh all the way to the bank. Farm workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants and most of whom are people of color, are still struggling to bring their wages above subsistence level. The U.S. government's reactionary immigration laws make it very difficult for them to organize. DOING WHAT CAPITALISTS DO Whole Foods is doing what all capitalist companies do--it is trying to pay the lowest wages possible in order to produce profits for its invest ors and keep its prices low enough to attract more business. This is not unusual. It is how capitalism--green, blue or purple--works. Maybe Mackey began his career as an organic food merchant with great social ideals. Maybe he didn't, and his little speeches are just self- serving rhetoric. In the long run, it doesn't make much difference. If you're in business, you play by the rules of capitalism or you go under-- particularly in times like now, when merchants are finding it harder and harder to sell their products. When slavery was the prevailing mode of production in the South of this country, there were "good" slave masters and "bad" slave masters. Certainly, some were more brutal than others. But as Frederick Douglass and all the Abolitionists pointed out, it didn't matter much. Slavery was a cruel and brutal institution. If a "good" slave master didn't get every ounce of work out of their human property, then eventually they'd fall behind and have to sell their slaves to someone who would. Slavery had to be abolished. Capitalism is a system based upon wage slavery. The shrinking class of owners of the economy exerts control over the vast majority by determining whether they work or not. What once was the natural occupation of all--working for one's livelihood--is now a "privilege" granted by the bosses who monopolize land, industry, transportation, communications, finance, even culture and science. Workers have been alienated from the means of production. For a long time, however, U.S. capitalism gave the appearance of lessening the class contradictions. Everyone was going to become middle class. U.S. capitalism expanded at a tremendous pace after World War II, when its rivals were in ashes. After the scare that the corporate rulers got from the great labor struggles of the 1930s, the rise of a bloc of socialist countries, and the profound national liberation movements in the Third World, they were ready to make concessions to the workers here- -especially if they wanted them to fight for corporate interests in places like Vietnam. The capitalist government intervened, too, with anti-poverty programs aimed at keeping the peace at home in order to better fight the wars abroad. But now it's a whole new ballgame. The class struggle is deepening once again. Capitalist competition is growing on a world scale. Any corporation that can do so is scouring the globe for cheaper labor and raw materials. Instead of creating a big new middle class, the system is widening the chasm between rich and poor like never before. All the utopian or New Age or whatever schemes for a kinder, gentler market-based system are losing their allure. Workers and oppressed peoples have to organize and fight, not just for better wages and benefits, but for the end of wage slavery. That's what a movement for socialism is all about--the right of the working class to take over and run what they have created with their sweat and blood. Want fresh, healthy food for everyone? And a good life for the workers who pick, transport and market it? Fight for socialism.