Memo To: Clients From: Rick Berman Date: April 20, 2020 The article below (edited for brevity) suggests there is some new leveraging by unions off of current employee insecurities. The UFCW as well as the SEIU are of potential concern for food companies from the “farm to the plate”. Some points to consider while you are being distracted by financial/ operations issues: • • • • • This is the first time since the early 1980's where I sense significant interest by employees in “collective action” and "3rd party representation”. Gallup polling in 2019 shows the 18-34 demographic has a 69% approval of unions. In 2017, 76% of those joining unions were younger than 35. Employees who feel they will be exposed to co-workers or customers who have the virus are communicating on Facebook and other platforms about their jointly held concerns Union organizers have access to these conversations and are making themselves available to help. Most current HR professionals have no history in dealing with a partial workforce rebellion. This will most likely happen in individual companies or it could be a wider industry movement in a city or region. The good news is that most unions do not have competent union organizing staff that are skilled in managing this opportunity. However, any attempt even if poorly executed, to organize any part of your company brings inevitable disruption, employee suspicion of co-workers, distrust of management, and a loss of productivity. Our company history includes us working with major law firms and others to deny the Teamsters, SEIU, UNITE HERE, UFCW and the UAW the opening to unionize employees who do not have a full understanding of the liabilities. Our third party education outreach provides effective messaging not available to company HR or communication departments. We also maintain websites that are customized for particular unions as well as our award winning umbrella site www.unionfacts.com. Let me know if we can provide early help with any difficulties. For our friends in retail, I suggest you read the second short article below on Barista organizing over wages and more traditional grievances. --Rick Virus-Inspired Worker Uprisings May Have Lasting Impact Law360 By Braden Campbell (April 14, 2020, 10:09 PM EDT) -- A dearth of protections for fast food workers, subway operators and other essential workers who continue to toil on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak has triggered a wave of strikes and walk-offs that experts say will not only persist through the pandemic but also have long-term reverberations. The recent reported firings of two white-collar Amazon workers who spoke out about conditions in the company’s warehouses follow weeks of actions by package sorters, McDonald’s cashiers and others seeking masks, site closures and other protections from COVID-19. And the uptick in workers banding together to improve their lot isn’t expected to taper off anytime soon. “I think we’re going to continue to see this, and perhaps even more,” said Steven Suflas, a Ballard Spahr LLP partner who advises businesses on labor relations. The early days of the pandemic were marked by relative peace between workers and their employers. But as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases swelled in late March, unrest grew. On March 30, a worker in Amazon’s Staten Island distribution center staged a walkout to protest the retailer’s handling of the pandemic after a colleague fell ill. The worker demanded that the company close and sanitize the facility and provide workers paid time off when they have virus symptoms, not just when they have a confirmed case of COVID-19 or have been in direct contact with someone who does, as the company started offering last month. About 25 workers took part in the protest and another 50 or so watched, said organizer Chris Smalls, whom Amazon later fired, ostensibly for going to the facility after having direct contact with his sick colleague. That same day, a subset of grocery couriers with gig-economy company Instacart refused to make deliveries without hazard pay and safety gear, and Whole Foods organizing group Whole Worker called on employees of the Amazon-owned grocer to skip work to demand hazard pay and paid leave for workers who self-quarantine. Several more protests have followed in the weeks since, including a strike by hundreds of workers across more than 50 California fast food restaurants after workers in Los Angeles tested positive for COVID-19. Some employers have met workers’ demands, to an extent. This surge in worker activity comes in the absence of a federal mandate for employers to shield most workers from the novel coronavirus. A few unions have staged actions, such as the North Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters, which told workers to stop working effective April 6 “until it is safe to do so.” But unionized workers have in many cases secured protections without having to take dramatic action. As nonunion workers struggle to win similar protections, some are reaching out to unions. Samuelsen, whose union also represents rail and airline workers, said TWU has lately been fielding inquiries from transit workers in the South, where few workers are in unions. Other union presidents told Law360 they've similarly seen an uptick in interest. “This [pandemic] has brought extreme clarity to the fact that the workers that, on a day-to-day basis, advance American society, are blue-collar workers,” Samuelsen said. “In the aftermath of COVID-19, there’s going to be an organizing boom.” The Service Employees International Union and its Fight for $15 wage advocacy offshoot have tried to focus this fervor through their newly launched Protect All Workers campaign. The group has issued a long list of demands, ranging from layoff protections for airline workers and other industry-specific wants, to more sweeping changes such as full wage replacement for all displaced workers. The group has staged several actions in the weeks since its mid-March launch, including the fast food strikes in California and a nationwide health care worker protest calling on President Donald Trump to procure more protective equipment. “People are fed up,” SEIU President Mary Kay Henry said. “Working people are talking to each other and organizing to demand change, both immediate changes and those reaching far past this pandemic.” This surge in worker action appears to have staying power, said Michael Duff, a labor law professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law. Duff, who was a National Labor Relations Board attorney and a union airline ramp worker before entering academia, said the trend reflects the dangers front-line workers now face. Ordinarily, job hazards are baked into compensation. And as demand for essential workers peaks, so does their leverage over employers, Duff said. “This is a little slice of time in history when workers almost intuitively come to understand just how much power they have,” he said. SPoT Coffee Workers Make Union History A brief history of the SPoT Coffee Workers union, the largest union of a caférestaurant chain in the United States. BY MARK VAN STREEFKERK BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE Cover photo courtesy of Jaz Brisack More café and restaurant workers are turning to unions to make a seat at the table, leveraging their collective bargaining power for better working conditions. Gimme! Coffee baristas in Ithaca, N.Y., unionized in 2017, the Washtenaw Area Coffee Workers’ Association in Michigan followed in 2019, and in recent news, all eyes have been on Bay Areabased Tartine Bakery’s union drive. SPoT Coffee is a Buffalo, N.Y.-based coffee chain with locations on the East Coast and Canada, and last August, their workers formed the largest union of a café or restaurant chain in the United States. “When I think about how SPoT workers began with 12 people in a union to upward of 130 SPoT workers in a union, I still feel pretty incredulous,” says Cory Johnson, an employee and organizer at SPoT’s Rochester location. “It confirms a personal assumption of mine, that restaurant workers want unions. This is the largest one so far, but it certainly won’t be that way forever. More restaurant workers are organizing, so I think it’ll only be a matter of time before someone else holds that record.” SPoT Workers United Organizing Committee boycotting last August. Photo courtesy of Richard Bensinger. The journey to unionize started in the spring of 2019 when Cory reached out to Workers United (WU) for help with organizing. “I’ve always worked in the service industry, and I always thought about organizing a union. I think many people in this industry, but also especially of my generation, are seeing unions as meaningful organizations,” he says. Zach Anderson, shift manager at SPoT’s Hertel Avenue location, notes that chronic understaffing at some of the cafés, as well as other grievances, warranted the push to organize. He says, “SPoTters at that time did not have access to things like paid time off or sick pay. We were at-will employees. Given the nature of at-will, we could be terminated for any reason, or no reason at all. We didn’t have an arbitration process in which if a worker was unjustly fired we could contest that and have a neutral party examine the situation.” Once the organizing began, workers sent a letter to SPoT management asking them to sign a set of organizing guidelines, like a corporate code of conduct. SPoT also hired an anti-union law firm to try and discourage the campaign. Workers Philip Kneitinger and Phoenix Cerny of the Buffalo location, along with several other interested employees, called a meeting with Jaz Brisack and Richard Bensinger, Workers United’s lead organizer and senior advisor of the SPoT campaign, respectively. A few days after the meeting, Philip, Phoenix, and a store manager were fired without warning. Reflecting on that time, Zach says, “There was a lot of fear and uncertainty from SPoTters … even [thinking], ‘Oh Phil got fired, the manager at Williamsville got fired, are we gonna be next? Are we gonna be in trouble if we talk about it?’” Elmwood SPoT workers after the contract ratification at the end of last month. Photo courtesy of Richard Bensinger. They called for a SPoT boycott and picketing, which lasted through July 2019. Zach cites the success of the campaign partly because Buffalo is “a very working-class, union-centric city,” and says even N.Y. Sen. Timothy Kennedy supported the boycott. The boycott ended when SPoT signed the Non-Interference Agreement, and agreed to reinstate Philip and Phoenix with back pay. In August 2019, SPoT workers voted 43-6 in favor of unionizing. The negotiations in the months that followed led to a new contract that went into effect on March 2. Zach was part of the negotiation process, and says SPoT management were open and receptive to hearing the demands of the union: “John Lorenzo, our chairman, has even said he’s passionate about social justice, and he wants SPoT Coffee to be the social justice coffee shop. He wants to set a new standard for coffee.” Under the new contract, SPoT employees have significant wage increases, paid sick time, fair staffing levels, and protections from unfair discipline and firings. “People are excited to go to work today. Their attitude and outlook towards working has improved dramatically. People are proud to work for SPoT now. We’ve had a lot of people that want to work for SPoT Coffee because they hear we have a union,” Zach says. Zach Anderson (far right) at SPoT negotiations. Photo courtesy of Richard Bensinger. Now the union’s mission is to increase building solidarity and power among other cafés. “We have an industry strategy in mind,” Cory says. “A few SPoT workers helped Perks café workers win their union election [March 12]. It’s not enough for us to have a union at SPoT—to build power, we need to build with every worker.”