GreenStar Workers Seek to Unionize with Workers United
Ithaca Times, August 8, 2024
Workers at the GreenStar Food Co-op in Ithaca are pushing for unionization, citing a need for improved workplace democracy and better working conditions. Despite a majority of workers expressing support for unionizing with Workers United, management has opted to hold an election rather than voluntarily recognizing the union.
“It was a disappointment for management not to recognize us voluntarily because we did have a majority of workers on cards,” GreenStar employee Maxwell Bollman said during a recent press conference. “The election process will be democratic, and we’re excited that workers here will be able to exercise that right.”
Bollman said that workers have requested that management sign fair election principles, ensuring equal time for workers and management to discuss the organizing drive. “We’re hoping they sign those because we hope they respect our right to organize,” Bollman added.
In response to questions regarding why management decided against voluntarily recognizing the union, General Manager Jess Bessemer told the Ithaca Times, “Like Ithaca, GreenStar has many passionate staff who have a broad diversity of opinions about this topic. As a democratic organization and having listened to many staff, it is important to our team that everyone has a chance to have their voice heard through an election.”
Bessemer continued saying, “GreenStar supports all workers right to unionize and create better jobs in their community. We congratulate the group of staff who are seeking to form a union at GreenStar for the work they've put in and their contributions to making the Co-op a great place to work.”
According to Bessemer, “Over the past two years we have increased our entry wage from $15.38 to $17.62 and offer great benefits like 2-5+ weeks of paid time off per year plus 5 floating and 2 regular holidays, 80% paid health insurance, vision, dental, staff discount, and more.” He added, “The Co-op has long been a values-driven community institution and no matter the results of the vote we will continue to make the Co-op a great place to work.”
David Meyers, a GreenStar employee, emphasized the need for workplace democracy. “Workplace democracy is my focus. I think it's important to have a voice and be heard, but I think it's also important that we take part in the decisions about the work we're doing.”
Front-end worker Nico Lewis expressed frustration with management’s handling of issues and the lack of support for diverse employees. “They’re not taking care of their more diverse employees and not listening to us when we have problems. We all just really want to start being heard,” Lewis said.
Jessica Marks highlighted the contradiction between GreenStar’s democratic principles and its daily operations. “There’s a lot of talk about being democratic in the co-op, but in the day-to-day operations, different departments are not being run democratically,” she said. “Management is very adamant that they are in charge and don’t want the daily workflow directed by people who actually do that work.”
GreenStar Food Co-Op employees held a press conference on August 8 to discuss their ongoing effots to unionize with Workers United, seeking improved workplace democracy and better working conditions. (Left to Right: Alicia Richard, Jessica Marks, Joe Damiano, Nico Lewis, Aaron Spayth, David Meyers, Maxwell Bollman)
Matt Dougherty
GreenStar is a consumer cooperative, meaning it is owned by its customers rather than its workers. In contrast, a worker cooperative is owned and democratically controlled by its employees. “In a consumer co-op, the workers do not necessarily have any privileged or democratic voice in decision-making whatsoever, other than being one of 14,000 members,” Meyers explained. “Unionizing is a way for us to seek a democratic voice for workers inside a consumer co-op.”
The workers are now pushing for an election to formalize the union, aiming to hold it within a few weeks. “We sent an email saying that [we wanted to hold an election] within two weeks, but I have no idea,” Lewis said. Meyers added, “The letter to management stated it’d be great to have this in two weeks, but the NLRB process might extend it to four weeks.”
Management will be required to recognize the union if the vote to unionize succeeds.
The employees believe that unionizing will benefit their working conditions and enhance the shopping experience for customers. “It will be a better experience for our customers to come in and have a better experience with us,” Lewis said. “I hear the same complaints from hundreds of people every day: the lines are too long, there’s nothing on the shelves. I want a better shopping experience for our customers to make my job a better experience.”
Meyers emphasized that the union effort is part of a broader push for community improvement. “In addition to doing this for ourselves, we see ourselves potentially inspiring other places. If they see somebody unionizing here, they might think, ‘Well, we can do it too,’” Meyers said. “We’re aiming for a more coherent and supportive community.”
The union’s demands focus on giving workers a real voice in their workplace. “Organizing in the grocery industry is like having a bunch of little workplaces collaborating, and so the issues are diverse and vary from department to department,” Bollman explained. “Overall, we’re organizing so that workers can voice their grievances and collaborate on best practices. It’s about workplace democracy and being able to participate in decisions affecting us.”
GreenStar employee Aaron Spayth emphasized the importance of being heard without fear of retribution. “In many workplaces, it’s hard to voice grievances and have them heard and dealt with. That’s not something we’ve been short of at GreenStar, and having the voice to go to management without fear of being brushed off or gaslit is crucial,” Spayth said. “Empowering us to feel comfortable and safe to voice our concerns makes a huge difference.”
Rich Troche, manager of Everybody’s Coffee in Uptown, knows everything about the shop’s medium-roast “Coffee of the Month” – who roasted it, where it was grown, how it was processed and even what different processes do to the beans.
In March the featured coffee came from the San Ignacio farm in Peru and was roasted by the Metropolis Coffee Company in Chicago. The coffee has a tangy lemon undertone and is served in purple ceramic mugs.
Alternative rock plays unobtrusively throughout the large, open space at the cafe. Baristas serve specialty drinks to customers who are chatting or working on laptops amid stacks of books. To care for both its patrons and the farmers who grow the beans, Everybody’s Coffee serves fair trade and direct trade coffee from around the world.
According to the Washington-based, nonprofit Fair Trade Federation, fair trade is “an approach to business and development based on dialogue, transparency and respect that seeks to create greater equity in the international trading system.” In a fair trade agreement, farmers and artisans in developing countries negotiate fair prices for their products, which usually result in a better payout.
David Meyers, roasting coffee in Rogers Park, is the mind behind the Chicago Coffee Confederation and Café Chicago. (Megan Kramer/Medill)
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates fair trade labeling, while nonprofits including Fairtrade International and Fair Trade USA certify and set standards and minimum prices for products. Direct trade is similar to fair trade, but buyers negotiate directly with sellers rather than through a fair trade middleman. While some see direct trade as more efficient, there are disadvantages for sellers and consumers if buyers don’t set their standards very high.
Fair trade farmers and artisans also aim to pay their workers a fair wage, avoid sweatshop conditions and child labor and attempt to engage in environmentally friendly practices.
Bringing it home
With the help of Chicago Fair Trade, Chicago became a fair trade city in May 2011, making it the largest such city in the U.S. and the third-largest globally after London and Toronto. Founded in 2006, Chicago Fair Trade comprises 70 member organizations including businesses, nonprofits and universities.
In order to gain fair trade status for the city, Chicago Fair Trade and volunteers created a campaign through Fair Trade Campaigns, a global organization dedicated to increasing consumer awareness about fair trade, and met the required goals. These included reaching out to retailers and community organizations and getting them to offer fair trade products.
Today over 300 outlets sell fair trade goods in Chicago, and Chicago Fair Trade is working to establish fair trade institutions (such as schools, universities and hospitals) in each of the city’s 77 neighborhoods.
In an attempt to offer social justice in a mug, Everybody’s Coffee opened in February 2014 at 935 W. Wilson Ave.
“The idea when we opened was that we could brew coffee that was ethically sourced and bought,” Troche said. “A lot of the coffee we buy is roasted here in Chicago. We work with roasters who buy direct and fair trade coffee and bring it here to the city as a green bean, and then they roast it here.”
The shop offers dark roast and a different medium, single-origin roast each month with the aim of appealing to a range of coffee drinkers’ tastes.
“Someone who just wants a dark roast coffee, like my grandfather, can come in and buy that,” Troche said. “Somebody who enjoys fair trade organic and direct trade coffee, and wants to hear the story of where the coffee came from and how it was processed, can come in as well.”
Everybody’s Coffee opened in Uptown in February 2014 and sells fair trade and direct trade coffee. (Megan Kramer/Medill)
Everybody’s Coffee emphasizes relationships, whether between farmer and roaster, shop and customer, or even customer and customer.
“Coffee is very much about relationships,” Troche said. “That’s why people go to coffee shops a lot of times, to meet people and talk with people.”
He added that the shop wants be the “third place” for its customers. “The first place is your home, the second is your work and the third place is where you hang out,” he said.
The Café Chicago project
In 2011 the Latino Union of Chicago and the Chicago Coffee Confederation, a group of small-batch coffee roasters, teamed up to create their own fair trade endeavor, Café Chicago, which takes the fair trade model and applies it locally. The company buys coffee beans from La FEM farmers, a farming cooperative in Esteli, Nicaragua, that is run entirely by women and focuses on women’s rights and empowerment.
Café Chicago then roasts, packages and sells the coffee to local restaurants, grocery stores and directly to consumers from its website. All proceeds go to the nonprofit Latino Union of Chicago, which works to improve social and economic conditions for low-income immigrant workers through various programs that address issues including unsafe working conditions, immigration reform and policies, and leadership and other training.
Café Chicago took the fair trade movement a step further not only by helping La FEM farmers and their families in Nicaragua but also by providing jobs for and teaching new skills to immigrant workers in Chicago.
Originally from Mexico City, Alejandro Serrano has worked as a roaster at Café Chicago for the last 18 months and says he is learning a lot on the job.
“We focus on improving our skills, learning every day more about coffee and the coffee roasting business,” he said. “We also focus on sales and on training new members so they can participate in the cooperative.”
Serrano says there are currently five people employed at Café Chicago in North Park and that the leadership of the organization has improved. They are working to expand the business in order to make it self-sufficient and separate from the Latino Union while still supporting it, Serrano said. Café Chicago advertises its coffee on Facebook and other websites.
Not without setbacks
Meanwhile, the Chicago Coffee Confederation has hit a few bumps in its conceptual road. David Meyers founded the confederation in 2009 when his original business venture, Resistance Coffee, started to grow. The group eventually comprised three fair-trade and organic coffee roasters – Grinderman Coffee, Miscellaneous Treats and Resistance Coffee – but is now much smaller.
“CCC is largely merely an idea now,” Meyers said. “Our other coffee roasters, who were great contributors to the development of Café Chicago, have moved to other cities.”
Even though Meyers acknowledges that fair trade as an alternative economic model can be a struggle due to factors like these, he said it can still be a movement for justice by “taking bites out of the capitalist economy and making it more social.”
While smaller fair trade projects can encounter problems, larger-scale fair trade endeavors are no strangers to controversy.
In July 2013 The Christian Science Monitor reported that the Starbucks C.A.F.E. (Coffee and Farmer Equity) Practices program was under fire for false fair trade claims. Reporter Kelsey Timmerman visited coffee growers in El Tablón de Gomez and Nariño, Colombia, where Starbucks was reportedly buying its coffee.
According to the report, very few people in these locations had heard of Starbucks or recognized its logo when he first asked around – even though the company claimed that there were 22,000 farms participating in its program. Timmerman eventually found some faded white C.A.F.E. Practices plaques affixed to the sides of homes, yet people living in them either had not heard of Starbucks or said that they were still waiting for the company’s help.
“Even the farmers who sell knowingly to Starbucks and those who had received assistance prefer to get their beans certified by and sold to Nespresso [the Swiss coffee brand from Nestlé], which pays 28 cents more per kilogram,” Timmerman wrote.
Starbucks still advertises ethical sourcing on its website and cites C.A.F.E Practices as a fundamental program for “[ensuring] coffee quality while promoting social, economic and environmental standards.” The company claims that 95.3 percent of its coffee was ethically sourced in 2013. Starbucks set a goal to reach 100 percent ethically sourced coffee by 2015, but queries to its corporate media relations division about the company’s progress resulted in referrals to the Starbucks website.
To figure out if a specific coffee really is fair trade, Troche suggests getting as close to the “heart” of the product as possible.
“Consumers who want to know if their coffee is fair trade or not [should] talk to the roaster,” he said. “If you’re buying roasted coffee, especially specialty coffee, you can ask them where, what co-op, why, how they bought it, how is it fair trade. They would know all these things because they’re the ones who bought it.”
Beyond java
Fair trade is not limited to coffee, however, and the range of products it encompasses is constantly expanding – from fruits and vegetables to clothing and wine. According to a survey done by Fair Trade USA, fair trade produce imports into the U.S. rose 37 percent from 2012 to 2013. Fair trade consumer packaged goods (including wine, sugar, cocoa and spices) imports rose 17.5 percent over the same period. Premiums, or money paid to farmers and artisans who grew/made the fair trade products, rose 5 percent over 2013, totaling nearly $40 million across 70 countries.
When successful, the far reach of the fair trade movement supports development in communities and cultures around the world. The nonprofit ASSIST Society in southwest suburban Evergreen Park, Illinois, was established in January 2013 by CEO and chief fundraiser Shannon Harris. After raising funds for many organizations and philanthropy projects including Save Darfur and Haiti Relief Fund, Harris wanted to create his own.
“I decided to place all of my efforts toward global projects that allowed me to become a greater example of being the change I wanted to see in the world,” he said.
ASSIST works with low-income communities including the Maasai and Samburu peoples in Kenya to preserve and enhance their ways of life through educational programs, resource assistance and self-sufficiency training. One of ASSIST’s main projects is the Sustainable Reinvestment Program, which involves buying and selling fair trade jewelry made by 20 Maasai women.
“We fair trade with the women, so we purchase jewelry at fair trade value – they tell us how much they want,” Harris said. ASSIST then imports the jewelry, sells it and uses the profits to buy useful resources for the Kenyan communities, such as tanks that harness rainwater. The jewelry is sold at local fair trade shows and online to people around the world.
The money the women receive directly from ASSIST for their jewelry is also used to purchase sustainable resources, such as metal roofing and concrete slabs to house their new water tanks. Everything ASSIST buys is discussed with each person or community to better assess what they need and what will be most beneficial.
“Tell us what the community wants, and we’ll do the homework to try and figure out how to get it,” Harris said of the discussions. “And if what you want isn’t sustainable, we’ll help guide you and figure out [what is].
“We’re teaching them how to use some of the things that they are familiar with and educating them on how to save that money and how that money can go toward getting things like water tanks,” he added.
Once women have tanks and can effectively harness rainwater for individual and family consumption, ASSIST teaches them to use the water for gardening and small-scale farming, which provide sustenance and income.
The fair trade proceeds are also used in a “merry-go-round” micro-lending program, in which a group of Maasai women contribute a certain amount at the end of every month, and a different member receives the money.
Encouraging sustainability
Each facet of ASSIST’s programs works toward the goal of sustainability, which has become a buzzword in development circles. McDonald’s billboards claim that “sustainable fish” are used in its Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. Hyundai produced but then quickly retracted its controversial 2013 sustainability commercial in which a man tries to commit suicide by asphyxiating on the tailpipe exhaust of his ix35 Crossover but fails because the car is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell and emits only water. As with the Starbucks C.A.F.E. scenario, questions about true sustainability and what the phrase means can arise.
“Sustainability has become a very pop phrase,” Harris said. “For our organization, it’s not about influencing people to change, or to impact their culture so drastically that they become us. Sustainability to us is inspiring people to see how they themselves have the solution to their own problems. They just need assistance.”
Along with income generation and development, environmental sustainability is also a major focus of the fair trade movement.
“Sustainable would mean knowing that the roasters and the coffee farmers are being taken care of, their farms are being taken care of, their equipment is getting updated,” Troche said. “As we buy and sell coffee that’s more expensive, that means there’s more money for them to use as a farm.”
Ultimately, Harris said, fair trade is “all about survival. And survival is just trying to sustain yourself and your family, your culture and your environment.”
Photo at top: Everybody’s Coffee’s Peruvian “Coffee of the Month” in the shop’s signature ceramic mug. (Megan Kramer/Medill)
