Workers at Healthy Living market locations in Vermont and New York are hoping to form a company-wide union, one of multiple labor organization efforts currently underway at local businesses.
According to employees, though, the family that owns the health-focused grocery stores have responded by bringing in anti-union consultants and labor lawyers.
For months, an organizing committee of hourly employees has sought support among the company’s 300 eligible workers at stores in South Burlington, Williston and Saratoga Springs, N.Y. On April 1, the effort went public when the committee delivered to the owners a letter announcing their’ intent to form a union. Katy Lesser founded the health and community-focused market in 1986 in South Burlington and now runs the company with her children, Eli and Nina Lesser-Goldsmith.
Employees intend to join Workers United, an international union that represents over 86,000 people across multiple industries.
“We ask for you to respect our right to organize and agree to a fair process so that we may work together, democratically, to uphold Healthy Livings’ mission to fuel a passion for great food, health, and well-being, and to be a great place where people are proud to gather, eat, shop, and work together,” the letter said.
Signed by 59 Healthy Living employees, the letter goes on to state that many workers “struggle to live off the wages” they make at the stores. It also cites subpar health benefits, broken equipment, all while “much of the profit from our stores is being poured into opening new stores at our expense.” Healthy Living has announced plans to open a new location in Half Moon, N.Y., sometime this year.
A simple majority of workers expressed support for the effort, and the official vote to form a Healthy Living union is scheduled for April 30.
In interviews, four employees who currently work at the three Healthy Living locations noted poor pay, which they said hovers close to minimum wage, and a lack of transparency around pay as primary reasons for supporting the unionization effort.
Ashley McGrann, who works as a morning baker at the Williston location, said management’s unwillingness to effectively communicate when making key decisions, such as switching point-of-sale software in the stores, contributed to her frustration.
Mae Barron, a wellness associate at the South Burlington location, had previously worked for City Market, where employees are unionized, and said she saw what a difference an organized workforce can make. She noted that they won hazard pay during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and enjoyed greater transparency when it came to pay.
For Craig Knef, a deli worker and dishwasher who has worked at the Saratoga Springs location for more than a decade, something as simple as lowering the employee discount for the hot food bar from half-off to 20 percent off contributed to mounting frustrations around pay and poor communication from management.
The workers asked Healthy Living owners to agree to 12 “fair election” principles, a standard set of requests Workers United asks owners of prospective unionized businesses to agree to in order to make the process less contentious. They range from recognizing employees’ right to form a union to agreeing not to actively advise employees against forming a union.
According to the workers organizing the union, neither Lesser nor the Lesser-Goldsmiths responded to the letter at all. Neither Lesser nor Eli Lesser-Goldsmith returned a request for comment from Seven Days.
Despite a lack of acknowledgement from owners, employees were able to confirm that consultants from Sparta Solutions, a company that claims to specialize in thwarting unionization campaigns, had been brought in to crack down on the effort. An employee at the Healthy Living in Williston spoke directly with a man who identified himself as a consultant with Sparta and was conducting individual interviews with managers at the store. Sparta did not return a request for comment.
On its website, Sparta boasts of “thousands of victories” won by “teaching staff advanced techniques for union avoidance.” Lawyers from Burlington-based firm Downs Rachlin Martin have also been enlisted in the effort to thwart the union, according to McGrann and others. Workers United confirmed that Downs Rachlin Martin was representing Healthy Living in the union election. The firm did not respond to requests for comment.
McGrann said that, at the Williston store, Sparta consultants have only conducted one-on-one interviews with management, but employees have been told they will all be interviewed eventually. She said that she and other union advocates are being vigilant about resisting any pressure.
“We’re trying to have people be aware of the mannerisms and phrases that these consultants will use because they’re pulling everyone aside one-on-one,” she said. “I think we just want people to be aware of the kind of fear mongering that they might use in those situations.”
Just down the road from Healthy Living’s South Burlington location, 25 workers at the Barnes & Noble off Dorset Street have also scheduled a union election with the labor relations board, which will be held the day prior to the Healthy Living workers’ vote.
Barnes & Noble employee Sebastian Ryder said they’re hoping to gain better protections for workers, as well as more transparency around scheduling and pay. Ryder said an employee was recently coerced into working a 13-hour shift, which is against company policy. When a manager was confronted about this issue, they denied it happened at all, Ryder said.
Five Barnes & Noble locations have successfully unionized and negotiated contracts with the corporate bookseller. They’ve gotten support from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and United Food and Commercial Workers, which is supporting the drive in South Burlington.
“I love Barnes & Noble. If I didn’t love them, I wouldn’t bother,” said Ryder, who has worked there for five years. “It would be a place that I would go for a paycheck. This is loyal opposition on a most profound level, not just for me, but for most of my coworkers.”
In a statement, a Barnes & Noble spokesperson said the company looked forward to engaging with their employees “as they consider unionization with the UFCW.”
In other labor news, about 100 child care providers across the ONE Arts community schools, with five locations in the Burlington area and Berlin, successfully voted to unionize last September. Their employer has voluntarily recognized the union.
“As an organization, we understand that a union can be a great way to create a more formal structure for communication, accountability and shared problem solving, so we want to support that,” said Bobby Riley, the school’s director of education. “And we see it as a structure for strengthening the organization, not as something inherently adversarial or a referendum on a single issue, or who we are or how we operate as an organization, but something that’s good for staff. It’s a safety net, and it’s a care structure, especially for tremendously hard service work.”