A Class Struggle Strategy to Win a Union at Homegrown

“If we’re putting this much pressure on Homegrown just to be recognized as a union – then we are going to win a contract, too.”

Stephan Kimmerle spoke with Ivy Vance and Manya Janowitz

Homegrown, a Pacific Northwest company that owns a chain of restaurants and cafes, and its own food production plants, employs roughly 250 people. Ivy Vance is a restaurant worker for Homegrown; Manya Janowitz works as a delivery driver for the company.

Your organizing campaign at Homegrown is happening in the middle of a bigger wave of unionizations around Starbucks and Amazon. Do you see yourself as part of that?

Manya: Yes, I think so. We are feeling it’s actually possible to win. It matters that we have wind in our sails.

Ivy: Yes, this is a revamping of the labor movement and it includes a lot of young people.

Let’s focus a bit on Homegrown. What’s the problem with your employer? They write on their website: “Food is the liaison between our earth and our community.” And later: “[w]e are responsible for our social and environmental impact as well.” Sounds great!

Manya: [laughs] Where do we start?

We’re not able to sustain ourselves on these jobs, even though they like to talk a big game about being sustainable and being a local progressive company. Most of my coworkers at the distribution center struggle with housing. On the wholesale side of the company, the production facility in Auburn is one of the lowest paid workforces, starting at $16 an hour. It can be really long shifts, but also we don’t get guaranteed 40 hours. It’s really irregular. And from both sides, the wholesale side and especially in the cafes, people really struggle with exhaustion; the workload is too much and we feel burned out at the end of a shift.

We know that the NLRB and all American labor law is not set up for the workers.

We don’t get any vacation time for the entire first year. They count on high turnover. The medical benefits are unaffordable. Especially if you have a family or dependent, you could be paying a thousand dollars or more a month. You don’t actually get healthcare until you work there for seven months. And we could go on …

… and that’s why you decided to unionize. What happened so far in this process?

Ivy: In June, we went public with our demand to management to recognize our union. In the beginning of the year we started slowly recruiting our coworkers and creating a pretty big workers’ committee to form a union. So by June, we felt we had a lot of coverage. There are around 250 people overall, in all the cafes and the distribution and production centers. So we talked about it and we knew we wanted to go public before or during the summer because that’s when Homegrown is the busiest. And it’s also when we were the most exhausted, especially in the cafes because it picks up a lot. Last summer, especially, we had very little support and there was the heat wave and that really rocked us. We decided we’re not gonna sit through another summer without fighting back.

You chose a bit of a different route compared to the Starbucks workers. Starbucks workers filed shop after shop for a union recognition vote with the NLRB. That’s not what you did, right?

Ivy: No. So our plan is to not go through an election process yet, but to demand recognition because we know that the NLRB and the election process and all American labor law is not written for the workers. It’s written for employers to have control over what we want. And we don’t believe that we need an election. If we have a super-majority of our coworkers signed up on union cards, that is a vote, signing a union card is a vote. So we’re asking for the management to accept a card check and recognize us. We have more than 70 percent of the people signed up, that’s enough.

So if it goes through the NLRB process – like the Starbucks workers – you file and months later, the NLRB organizes the vote and then you vote and then you’ve got a year to negotiate a contract – or maybe not. And during that long period, things often fall apart.

So you decided to take a shortcut?

Manya: I wouldn’t call it a shortcut. I think it’s just a different strategy than what you see from the incredible organizing that’s going on at Starbucks right now where the first thing that those workers do when they go public is to file for an election. Many stores have won that, and yet they’re still fighting Starbucks to actually sit down with them at the table and win the changes that we all need in these jobs.

We don’t believe we need an election if we have a super majority of our coworkers signed up.

We’re not fighting for union recognition just because we want a union in name only. We’re fighting for union recognition because this is the vehicle by which we want to build power and win actual changes in our lives.

So you are demanding a card check. And now the management ignores you and they hope that there is a high turnover and the drive collapses.

Ivy: That’s what they want.

Manya: Yes, that’s their plan. Their plan is to wait us out. So our plan is to act and to keep escalating and to get stronger and stronger. And so we’re building towards disruptive actions and also building towards a strike vote and a strike.

Ivy: We turned in our majority petition, we didn’t sleep at all, and then not even 12 hours later, after turning in the petition, we’re at my store picketing with 20 to 30 people for two hours. They didn’t like that at all. Sales were cut in half.

Manya: The boss’s strategy right now is to try to divide us from each other, the different workers from wholesale, from production or from the cafes. They’re trying to divide the committee we formed to organize our unionizing efforts from everybody else. They’re trying to demoralize us. They’re sending emails that are very, very condescending. They’re trying to delay. So they’re trying to force us into an election where they delay the process.

And since June, we are doing the opposite. We bring our coworkers together. We get to know each other outside of the job. We organize protests, pickets, and action. We’re making it public what’s happening at Homegrown. The fact that we can’t sustain ourselves at these jobs. We tell the truth about what’s happening in our jobs. And we’re doing that at pickets and by creating disruption for the company too.

We want respect at the job.

We organized pickets outside of the Homegrown stores. And then we also get to do pickets where we’re picketing the product that is made in wholesale cafes and delivered by me and my coworkers. We’ve been to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Tacoma. We’ve been to St. Ann’s Hospital in Burien. We’ve leafleted at countless independent coffee shops. We’re picketing the product, not the hospital. We just say “Hey, don’t buy Homegrown. Don’t buy Molly’s.”

The challenge is that you have a diverse workforce that the employer tries to divide?

Manya: Yes, I would say the cafe demographic is more similar to the Starbucks workers, a lot younger, at least in Seattle. Then it’s different in wholesale, in the production kitchen. This is a facility in Auburn where it’s basically two lines just like a sandwich factory making pre-packaged sandwiches and food all day. It’s almost all immigrants, mostly older women, particularly from Mexico and El Salvador, so mostly Spanish speaking and many monolingual Spanish speakers.

It’s been really cool to see cafe workers and workers in the production facility connect and meet each other and start to build relationships.

You’ve mentioned the things you want to change. What are your demands?

Manya: We want to increase the floor right now. The lowest paid workers are making $15.50. That floor goes up to $20 and we want equivalent raises, $4.50 raises for all across the board. In the cafes, we want tip transparency, tip lines on all orders. That’s a huge deal. There are DoorDash orders and other apps – often a majority of cafe sales – that aren’t tipped. And so that’s a way that workers are losing out on money. We want real vacation time. And then we want safety and healthcare at the job, immediately. We want safe equipment and safe working conditions. That’s actually a really big deal on the warehouse side, for the drivers, where I work, because our vans are not kept safe and they’re not inspected. And we want minimum staffing levels.

But actually, one of the biggest demands for us is respect at the job. There are managers who harass and talk down to workers. There are managers who don’t take issues of harassment from customers seriously. We want to be listened to when we bring up safety issues and issues about our work, because we’re the experts at our own jobs! And we want to be seen as real people, as more than just sandwich makers.

Usually, employers in an anti-union effort try to present a union as this third party, an alien force coming from the outside. Have you experienced that?

Manya: I can tell you a brief anecdote. A group of my coworkers and I at the Renton distribution facility last week went to our warehouse manager about safety issues that were happening at work. We had a coworker fall in the walk-in freezer because there was ice on the floor that wasn’t taken care of. And we’ve had multiple issues with the vans being unsafe to drive and not being serviced and our safety wasn’t being taken seriously. So we went straight to the boss and we talked about it with her and she was extremely antagonistic. And one thing that she tried to say was, well, if this is about the union then why aren’t they here? And my coworker and I basically shouted in unison, it’s us! We are the union! But they keep trying to do that. And so we keep saying, it’s us, we’re the union.

You’ve mentioned a potential strike vote soon. You have not yet filed for union recognition with the NLRB, but you are preparing more protests?

Manya: Ivy and I, and our coworkers, we cannot wait another year for these changes. Like we can’t keep being this burned out, not having adequate health insurance, barely scraping by. So we’re taking action, as soon as possible. Basically we’re building towards being able to disrupt this company over the next month. Maybe by the time the magazine you are interviewing us for goes to print.

We would love to be out of date! Does this mean that you would never file with the NLRB? Do you actually want a contract and union recognition?

Manya: We want to be recognized as a union. We’re organizing with UNITE HERE, Local 8. So, yes, we want to have the backing and become members of that union, a really powerful union here in the Northwest for food service workers. We want a contract as soon as possible. We want these demands, in writing that the company is going to respect them and that they’re going to respect us.

DSA has played a big part in our public actions and in mobilizing community members to support us.

Ivy: If we’re putting this much pressure on Homegrown just to be recognized, if we’re moving to a strike vote and to strike, if we’re doing actions – multiple actions every week – then we are going to win a contract swiftly because they know what we can do.

You are both also members of Seattle DSA. What is the role of socialists in such a struggle?

Manya: In this campaign in particular, it’s been really important to have the mobilization power of DSA. DSA has continued to play a big part in our public actions and in mobilizing community members to support us, to be part of picket lines.

But then I also think the role of socialists in labor in general is for these movements to be combined. We have to find a way to connect the socialist movement and the labor movement in a way where socialists are playing an active, leading part in their unions, pushing really bold strategies forward. I think that’s our part of this revitalization of labor that’s so desperately needed.

Ivy: And I would hope that other DSA members would see what we’ve done as DSA members, as workers, and we can talk to them and we can help them win their campaigns at their stores. I know there’s a lot of restaurant workers and warehouse workers in DSA and I would like to engage them more. Hopefully, we can build many more labor campaigns out of this.