Organizing WinCo: A Timeline
by Matty J
I spent two years building a union at WinCo store #142, where we succeeded in winning our NLRB election, but failed to transform that victory into labor action sufficient to force WinCo to bargain. My involvement was cut short due to unforeseen medical complications this last November. This isn’t to say that effort is over; the union at WinCo is extant and has potential, and maybe in a couple years the Teamsters can deliver some marginal contract wins without being decertified. However, now there aren’t any leaders left from the original organizing committee pushing for a direct labor action against WinCo management.
There were three broad organizing phases during my involvement. The NLRB election campaign (March 2023-Feb 2024), a stagnant period after winning (Feb 2024-June 2024), and the failed strike campaign (June 2024-November 2024). My goal in this article is to reflect on our experience during the NLRB election campaign, identify what choices were overdetermined by the basic elements of the shop and explore the unsophisticated elements of our strategy that led to our ultimate failure. In a subsequent article, I will explore how those weaknesses manifested in stagnation and how we could have adapted to the situation without ignoring the difficulty of the circumstances.
WinCo Store #142 is a low-price, “Employee Owned” grocery store with about 130 workers in the Teamsters 222 bargaining unit. The WinCo worker experience is extremely high turnover, low wages, frequent hour cuts, and uncompromising management. It takes six years to be a full beneficiary of “Employee Ownership”, and as such is not especially important for the vast majority of employees we organized.
During the campaign, the organizing committee was primarily composed of the three people who did the vast majority on the ground organizing work, Elliot, Chazio, and myself. Elliot had some previous salting experience with UFCW which gave us some initial direction, but as the campaign progressed we were mostly improvising. The strategy was simple; we diligently mapped the store every week, met to identify some targets for each of us, and then talked with our targets until they agreed that unionizing sounded like a good idea. We usually didn’t ask employees to help out directly or make any extra commitments and generally approached every conversation as an attempt to make unionizing seem as easy and non-threatening as possible. Our organizing conversations were unstructured, often even covert. We wanted to ambush workers with our intentions and keep them secret for as long as possible. Once we introduced cards (roughly June 2023), the goal was just to get the employee to sign the card; no other concrete asks were made. I imagine this is what most improvised retail organizing campaigns look like, but readers familiar with any kind of “deep organizing” strategy will recognize the weaknesses of this approach. By not asking our coworkers to contribute much to the union effort, they didn’t give much back. It establishes a bureaucratic union culture; a union is something that other people do, not something all workers build themselves.
As I learned more about rank and file organizing strategy, I grew concerned we had fundamentally undermined our base’s perspective, but couldn’t imagine how we could organize more deeply in the context of our greatest obstacle, over 100% annual turnover. Our most consistent and difficult roadblock was the obvious material incentive of nearly all employees at WinCo; to quit immediately and get any of the readily available, higher paid jobs in the area. 70% of employees at WinCo #142 don’t make it 90 days. A deeper organizing strategy was (incidentally) used with more veteran employees, but simply was not possible with the vast majority of WinCo workers. When we asked people to invest in a project like an extended union drive, they were intrigued and positive about the concept, but would almost always just quit a few days later.
A rule of thumb in Jane McAlevey’s deeper organizing strategy is that an organizer spends the majority of their time talking to people who don’t already agree with or support the union. I would say this is maybe one of the only things we did right, but most of the unconvinced workers in our workplace aren't veteran workers in the “biggest, worst” areas of the shop with a preexisting negative understanding of the union, as McAlevey describes. At WinCo, unorganized workers are always the great, constantly changing mass of the store that’s in their first 90 days of employment, likely about to quit, and with no understanding of the union drive. They would only ever care about our union if we could make it easy and fast, since on top of competing with management’s counter-organizing, we were also competing against every grocery job listing in the Salt Lake valley.
This isn’t to say we were consciously applying this analysis and developing a broader strategy to accommodate for what we were lacking; we were improvising in a desperate attempt to get over the finish line. That being said, by taking on the work ourselves and staying shallow to cover more ground, we were able to win the NLRB election in these unfavorable conditions. The margins were not great: We had nearly 40 employees absentee and only won with 42 votes for Teamsters, 27 against; but we had won.
As a result, I would not change much about the general shape of our campaign strategy, because it was probably impossible to win any other way with the tools we had. However, our lack of understanding of the weaknesses we developed meant we couldn’t account for them after the victory. In my next article, I want to explore how these weaknesses manifested, and then speculate on how we could have prepared the shop for an immediate post-election labor action strategy, in the context of my conclusion that a deeper organizing strategy was not possible with most workers.
