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HOW PHILLY WHOLE FOODS WORKERS BEAT BEZOS  
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Eric Blanc
February 3, 2025
Labor Politics
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_ "People need hope and the best place to find it is in your
coworkers" _

Worker leaders from the Philly Whole Foods Union, Labor Politics

 

_Can labor sustain its forward momentum under Trump? The first big
test came last Monday, when Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia voted
on whether to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers
(UFCW). Many in the labor movement were expecting a loss, since MAGA
is now in office and since management — headed by Trump’s new
billionaire buddy Jeff Bezos — went scorched earth against the
nascent union effort. But a multiracial crew of young, self-organized,
left-leaning workers proved the skeptics wrong, as so often has been
the case [[link removed]] since
2021._

_Despite intense management intimidation, workers voted for the union
130-100. Given that Trump’s chaotic power grabs dominated the
headlines last week, it would be easy to underestimate the
momentousness of the result: this was only the second time American
workers have ever defeated Amazon in a union election. (The first was
the Amazon Labor Union’s April 2022 win at the JFK8 warehouse on
Staten Island.) By beating Bezos, these Whole Foods workers have given
the labor movement a much needed shot in the arm._

_To find out how these young workers took on the most powerful
corporation in the world, I spoke with Ed Dupree, an eight-year Whole
Foods employee who helped lead the drive._

Q: CAN YOU DESCRIBE THE MOMENT WHEN YOU REALIZED YOU’D WON THE
ELECTION?

We were crammed into a small conference room to watch the votes get
counted — just a handful of us lead organizers and UFCW reps —
alongside nearly every level of management from our store, corporate,
and even global. I think the Whole Foods vice president and someone
else from higher up were there too. Watching them get increasingly
nervous as more votes came in was an incredible feeling.

When the final votes were counted, it was an overwhelming moment. As
soon as it became clear we’d won, a few of us — me, my buddy Mace,
another organizer Jack, and one or two others — left the office and
headed down to one of our coolers on the main floor to celebrate.

We were high-fiving and cheering and one of my co-workers actually
started crying. After so much stress — being harassed, seeing our
coworkers turned against us — winning felt like a thread of
positivity in the face of so much negativity in the company and in the
country. It was an incredible high.

Q: CAN YOU SHARE A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND AND THE MAIN REASONS
YOU ALL UNIONIZED?

A: I've been working at Whole Foods for eight years in the produce
department. I'm just a regular team member — I work the sales floor,
handling receiving, breaking down pallets, and staging products.

As far as our issues, the main thing everyone felt strongly about was
getting better pay, benefits, health care, and workplace protections,
particularly for older employees and those with disabilities. And
putting an end to coworkers getting harassed so much.

Worker leader Ed Dupree

Q: HOW DID THE ORGANIZING DRIVE BEGIN?

A: It started when a longtime coworker of mine mentioned a new hire,
Ben, who had only been there for two weeks but was already talking
about forming a union. Since I’d been involved in a previous union
campaign during the pandemic and often talked about labor issues, my
coworker suggested I go talk to him.

At first, I was skeptical. I thought, "Who is this guy? He’s coming
in way too hot. Is he a plant from the company?" But when I finally
spoke with Ben, I realized he was serious and sincere. And I thought,
"Hell yeah, let’s do this."

That was about two years ago. We started talking to coworkers, many of
whom already knew me because I’d been around for a long time. Some
of them had also been part of our previous attempt to unionize. With
them, it was just about reconnecting and seeing how they felt about
organizing again.

Then we started by having conversations more broadly with other
co-workers, hearing what their main issues were and gauging their
interest in forming a union. We created a system to track support —
rating the support of our co-workers, with ones being core organizers
involved in our organizing committee and fours being totally
anti-union. Initially, we had about 15-20 percent support, but within
a few months, we were up to 30 percent. Ben was great with charts,
with stuff like Excel, while I was better at talking to people.

Q: SINCE YOU WERE ORGANIZING BEFORE AFFILIATING WITH AN ESTABLISHED
UNION, HOW DID YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO?

A: I had done some door-knocking for the Bernie 2020 campaign and
local political campaigns. I’ve also read some labor history —
Eugene Debs, the Industrial Workers of the World, that sort of thing.
Also, Ben is in Philly Democratic Socialists of America and knew some
EWOC [Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee
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guys. So EWOC gave five of us at the store a training in organizing
fundamentals: they gave us good feedback and resources, organizing
pointers, and a good baseline understanding of how to talk to people
who weren’t already on board, all that.

Q: WAS IT DIFFICULT TO CONVINCE PEOPLE TO SUPPORT THE UNION?

A: Not at first, since I already knew so many people at work, we were
cool. The hardest part was talking to employees I didn’t know well.
Our store has high turnover, and about 10-15 percent of the workforce
just sees it as a real temporary job. When I’d talk to them, at
first, a bunch would be like “What are you talking about, bro?”

But once we hit around 30 percent support, we started working with the
UFCW, and they really wanted us to get at least 70 percent signing
cards before filing for a union election. We didn’t get exactly
there, but by the time we did eventually file, we had almost 60
percent support. So it took a lot of conversations with people, and
lots of the time we’d have to double back to folks we weren’t as
confident about.

Q: IT SEEMS LIKE MANAGEMENT WENT REALLY HARD TO STOP YOU ALL. WHAT DID
THAT LOOK LIKE?

At first, management didn’t take us seriously. But by October
[2024], when they realized how much support we had, things changed.
The good thing for us was that by that time we’d already canvassed
over 50 percent of the store.

For a while in November they tried the "velvet glove" approach—they
were really sweet, offering candy, constantly asking us how we were
doing. Then in late December and early January, they cranked it up to
eleven. Ever since, it’s been wild, just super intense
union-busting. They held [captive audience] team “chats,” where
they’d tell us the most insane anti-union bullshit you could ever
imagine. Just flagrant lies.

They also got rid of most of our team leads [managers] and brought in
new ones from other stores and from out of state to intimidate us.
They brought in some lady from Florida to union bust, she’d always
be surveilling me and dead-on staring at me during my shift, as I’m
literally just stacking apples.

One of the most egregious things they did was fire a strong union
supporter on a bogus pretext even though he was a model employee. They
also started writing people up for tiny infractions, they bribed
anti-union employees, and they set up a big-ass TV near our time clock
just to play anti-union propaganda. In the lead up to the vote, they
started pulling people straight from the sales floor into the team
leads office to tell us to vote No.

Q: WERE YOU PERSONALLY SCARED?

A: I always understood the risks, so I wasn’t scared—more just
baffled by how ridiculous some of their union-busting tactics were.
These guys are clowns, honestly it was kind of surreal. But also they
targeted Ben way more than they targeted me. I think part of that was
because I’d been there so long and had lots of strong relationships
with coworkers. But I also do low-key think it was a bit of a racist
thing — I’m a big black dude, and they didn’t seem to want to
confront me directly. So they didn’t fuck with me, but they would
fuck with Ben. They tried to smear him, there was lots of character
assassination and spreading rumors that he was a paid UFCW plant. But
he wouldn’t let them scare him.

Q: DO YOU SEE THIS AS PART OF A LARGER NATIONAL EFFORT TO UNIONIZE
WHOLE FOODS?

A: Definitely. We took a lot of inspiration from what Starbucks has
done. And we saw the need for militancy from UAW folks like Shawn Fain
as well as what the Teamsters did at UPS to get strike ready. That all
gave us an understanding of the scale we need to be operating on to
get a first contract, and it influenced our decision to go with UFCW
instead of going independent.

We know it’s going to take more than just our store, but winning
this vote has been inspiring for others, and we’re ready to support
them. Some Whole Foods stores were already organizing before last
Monday, and ever since then, we’ve had a bunch more people reach out
to us over our Instagram account
[[link removed]]. We’re talking
to all of them, to give them an understanding of what we did to win,
and also what to expect from management — to inoculate them against
all the bullshit that they’ll throw at them.

We know what management is going to do. And now there are a lot of
Whole Foods workers that want to do what we're doing.

Q: WITH TRUMP NOW IN OFFICE, DO YOU THINK THE MOVEMENT CAN SUSTAIN
ITSELF? LOTS OF PROGRESSIVES SEEM TO HAVE FALLEN INTO DESPAIR.

Like you mentioned, people are at a point of despair and uncertainty,
with a lot of negativity surrounding them. It’s important to remind
them that while the government and electoral politics matter, real
power comes from working-class people organizing — starting in their
own workplaces. At work we have collective power, so that’s where we
need to start turning things around.

Even with a piss-poor NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] coming
into office, history has shown that workers have organized under far
worse conditions, when there was no NLRB at all and when labor
organizers were being killed left and right. Despite the challenges,
people need hope, and the best place to find it is in your coworkers,
the people you spend 20, 30, or 40 hours a week alongside.

Even in difficult and chaotic times, workplace organizing doesn’t
stop. The Amazon union effort began during Trump’s first term, and
the Starbucks union movement emerged during the pandemic, right? We
need to remind people that workplace organizing continues no matter
who's in office and no matter how chaotic things get. Unionization is
the best way we can empower ourselves and our coworkers: even when
things seem bleak, we can reclaim our influence over our lives and
make a real impact. We’ve shown at our store how this can happen.
And anybody else can do it too.

_Author of the books We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker
Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big
[[link removed]] (UC Press
2025), Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and
Working-Class Politics
[[link removed]] (Verso
2019) and Revolutionary Social Democracy: Working-Class Politics
Across the Russian Empire, 1882-1917 
[[link removed]](Brill
2021), ERIC BLANC is an assistant professor of labor studies at
Rutgers University, researching new workplace organizing, strikes,
digital labor activism, and working-class politics._

_You can receive a newsletter of his research here: laborpolitics.com
[[link removed]]_

_His writings have appeared in journals such as Politics & Society,
New Labor Forum, and Labor Studies Journal as well as publications
such as The Nation, The Guardian, and Jacobin._

_A longtime labor activist, Blanc is an organizer trainer in
the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee
[[link removed]], which he helped co-found in March
2020. He directs The Worker to Worker Collaborative
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a center to help unions and rank-and-file groups scale up their
efforts by expanding their members’ involvement and leadership._

_He can be reached at eric.blanc [at] rutgers.edu_

_LABOR POLITICS is a reader-supported publication. To receive new
posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid
subscriber. [[link removed]]_

* Labor
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* organizing
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* Whole Foods
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* unions
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