Thanksgiving is around the corner, marking the beginning of the busiest grocery shopping season of the year. But behind the turkey, yams, and cranberries are essential grocery workers, gearing up to make sure families across the country can enjoy their holiday meal.
For four years, I’ve worked at Whole Foods in Philadelphia, where I load boxes of produce into massive coolers. Let me paint you a picture: It’s a chilly November morning. I clock in for my shift and head to the warehouse. As my coworker drives huge pallets of produce down from the delivery trucks, it’s my responsibility to load those boxes into the cooler. I move tons of produce — literally. A single pallet could have a hundred boxes on it, and each box can weigh 50 pounds. On an average shift, I move nine pallets into the cooler. By the end of my shift, I’m completely exhausted from stacking hundreds of heavy boxes.
I spend each shift stacking these heavy boxes in a 35 degree cooler. There’s often icy water in these boxes that soaks through my clothes. My fingers and toes are numb by the end of the day. The only way I can get through a shift is by listening to music to try to distract myself from how frozen and tired I am.
Because Whole Foods designs many of our schedules to avoid meeting the minimum threshold required for benefits, I don’t qualify for health insurance or paid sick days. I’ve gotten sick plenty of times from the physical stress of this job, but I have to work through it — or risk getting fired for putting my health first.
We want shoppers to know that the workers behind Whole Foods have worked hard for you to have a special Thanksgiving with your family — and we want to be treated with the same humanity by Whole Foods.
I took this job to help out my mom, but it’s not enough to survive on. That’s why my coworkers and I formed the first ever union at Whole Foods. We were sick of putting our bodies on the line and being treated like we were robots that they could squeeze every ounce from. We deserve to be treated with respect and humanity, just like all working Americans.
Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, which makes hundreds of billions of dollars a year. While workers across the country are struggling to buy groceries and make ends meet, Amazon’s profits are up 38 percent from last year. Whole Foods workers helped Amazon make those record profits, so we deserve our piece of that pie. Right now, Amazon Executive Chair Jeff Bezos is hoarding almost the whole pie. While the average Whole Foods worker in Philadelphia starts at $17 an hour, Jeff Bezos is paid $8,000,000 an hour. Now, I believe hard work should be rewarded, but does Mr. Bezos work 470,588 times harder than me?
In January, when a majority of my coworkers and I voted to form a union, we were proud to exercise our rights and hopeful that Whole Foods would do the right thing and negotiate with us. By negotiating a union contract, like thousands of other grocery stores have done, we can attain fair compensation for our hard work. We’re fighting for a $21 minimum wage to meet the high cost of living, affordable health insurance, and paid sick days.
Since our election, Whole Foods has tried to overturn the results. As the union has alleged in filings with the National Labor Relations Board, the company has fired several of my coworkers who supported the union. They’ve reduced our hours. And they’ve been surveilling us and monitoring who we talk to. We know these tactics just show they’re scared of our power. But we’re not scared — we’re more unified than ever in our vision for a union at Whole Foods.
This union fight has strengthened the bonds between my coworkers. We have each other’s backs. We are determined to win a first union contract at our store and help thousands of our coworkers form unions at Whole Foods across the country. So, while Jeff Bezos celebrates Thanksgiving in one of his 10 mansions, I’m grateful for my coworkers and the union that we’ve built together.
We want shoppers to know that the workers behind Whole Foods have worked hard for you to have a special Thanksgiving with your family — and we want to be treated with the same humanity by Whole Foods.
Mase Veney is a worker at Whole Foods in Philadelphia and a member of Whole Foods Workers United, which is affiliated with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776.
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