Whole Foods Workers File for First-Ever Union, Defying Amazon

Since Amazon bought the company in 2017, Whole Foods has undergone a litany of changes — many, workers say, for the worse. The checkout area is heavily surveilled to account for increased self-checkout (which in some stores includes a palm-scanning biometric option) and as demand for delivery orders has skyrocketed, so has the infrastructure to support it, including bringing in an army of delivery drivers and shoppers who compete with workers and regular customers for aisle space. Amazon has also attempted to integrate its own grocery brands into Whole Foods, and is debuting robot-run ​“mini warehouses” to encourage customers to buy more of its conventional products. Its thirst for profits and quest to dominate the grocery market has led the company to expand at a rapid pace. Meanwhile, workers struggle to keep up.

“The store operates chronically understaffed,” says Piper, who has worked as a customer service operator at Whole Foods for the past three years and asked that her last name be withheld for fear of employer retaliation. ​“I can only speak for my team specifically, but we’re exhausted from trying to meet these unrealistic productivity metrics, especially the Items Per Minute quota for cashiers. We’re told to ring as fast as possible to get customers in and out — as if we’re robots.”

The campaign has been a year in the making, as ​“people come and go due to the churn of working retail and working for Amazon,” explains worker-organizer Ben Lovett, who has been at the Center City location since 2023 in the prepared foods department and as an online order shopper. ​“It slowly built as we mapped all the departments and recruited new organizers. We started collecting cards a couple months ago and reached a majority after about 7 or 8 weeks.”