Organizing WinCo: A Counterfactual
by Matty J
This is a continuation of a previous article, where I discussed the nature of the unionization campaign I helped lead at WinCo store #142. In this article I will show how the weaknesses in our strategy manifested and how we could have addressed those weaknesses.
When we filed for an election at WinCo in December of 2023, our rep at Teamsters was resistant since we had only 51% of the shop signing cards and a tenuous 60% favorable support in the shop broadly. The numbers were bad, but the organizing committee had agreed that we would never have more support. All three organizers were burning at both ends to sustain 50% support and we couldn’t afford to lose sections of our base to hour cuts. Eventually I convinced the Teamsters that it was better than it looked on paper because we predicted high absenteeism and an unskilled company response. We were correct on both counts.
After we won, our shallow organizing strategy meant we had to navigate two titanic weaknesses. First, we continued to hemorrhage our base to turnover at the same rate we did before the election, and second, virtually no workers were oriented towards labor action. Unconsciously, we expected the election itself to transform our conditions in a fundamental way that would slow the turnover of our existing support and allow us to methodically move towards a supermajority in the shop. We thought we had won our union and felt entitled to keep it without any more substantial struggle. As a consequence of our naivety, and under the advice of the Teamsters, we took no proactive action for five months. Week by week, sections of our base lost or left their jobs, while others became bitter as they found out that Teamsters could not protect us until we had a contract. Our staffers couldn’t do anything to force WinCo to bargain but file lawsuits in slow moving courts. When the average tenure is 3 months, a 6 month delay is everything. As appeals dragged on, we were encouraged to wait and take no action. Finally, when WinCo refused to bargain, I presented the Teamsters with my plan for a belated strike campaign. They verbally agreed to help where they could, but I never heard from them again. From late June to when I went on medical leave in November, Teamsters did not reach out to me once. Our organizing committee began to put together the initial pieces of a strike effort on our own with admirable successes, but we were starting over from scratch. We’d lost nearly two thirds of the employees who participated in the election itself, and had to go back on our promises that strikes were rare and probably unnecessary. On the other end, management surveilled us constantly, preventing us from organizing on the clock like we used to. This isn’t to say that it was impossible, we had some strong tools at our disposal, but it ended abruptly when I was forced to quit.
In my previous article, I concluded that we could not have changed the broad strokes of our organizing campaign. There are certainly hundreds of moments where better tactics and more developed fundamentals would have improved our success, but the turnover limited our strategy. Additionally, although I’m critical of how the Teamsters overrepresented their involvement and ability, their role could not have been meaningfully different. They can file the paperwork and pay for a lawyer, but workers must do the vast majority of the organizing. The question is, in these conditions, how do we deliver ourselves a contract?
The poison in the well was our shared horizon as organizers, the NLRB election, rather than the actual culmination of organizing a non-union workplace, the first contract fight. Though this might seem abstract at first, I think this simple misalignment had tremendous implications for the shape of the post-election period. As a result of our short-sightedness, we were fearful of directly confronting the question of labor action of any kind pre-election; we even had a tendency to dismiss the strike altogether. It’s also the reason we were ultimately accepting of post-election passivity. If we were properly oriented around the contract instead of the election, we would have understood that embracing and discussing the importance of labor action pre-election, up to and including the strike, is imperative, and that post-election inaction was killing our union.
With this stronger understanding, we could have seamlessly transitioned into the strike campaign, because we would have known and discussed that inevitability. Instead of patiently waiting for the NLRB to deliver our contract on a geologic time scale, we would’ve entered the post-election period with the tools we had managed to assemble and act swiftly. Anyone who’s worked in a retail environment knows how labor lean most shops are, especially post-covid. Deliberate, well executed, rotating labor actions have incredibly high potential with minimal effort and marginal risk, considering even under normal conditions one or two callouts can cripple a department. In the meantime, we could hold forums with all employees to discuss and vote on the contract proposals we would fight for, long before we had even gotten to the table, to concretize our demands into a written contract proposal, such that the workers could imagine what's at stake. It wouldn’t be pretty, it might even be minority action, but we had no business winning the election in the first place. We must, at times, adopt guerilla tactics for asymmetric class warfare in unorganized industries and regions.
The election was a galvanizing moment for action, a democratic mandate for the workers to seize control. It contained tremendous potential energy but was wasted without a catalyst. We even recognized that our forces were the strongest and most organized at the moment we decided to file for the election, but we didn’t see how that analysis would carry into the contract fight. To sit on our hands and wait for bourgeois institutions to hand us our due reward was naive and a disservice to the workers we fought with.
