Whole Foods Employees Want to Unionize

"About a year after being acquired by Amazon, this grocery chain has faced strong backlash from customers—who report empty shelves and the replacement of the store’s original loyalty program with Amazon Prime—and from employees, who say morale has plummeted. Workers are beginning organized unionizing efforts with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, demanding better pay, benefits, and a revived profit-sharing policy after a program that provided stock options to lower-level staff was discontinued. Organizers plan to solicit participation from employees across the chain’s roughly 490 locations. Both the company under Amazon and its pre-Amazon management have historically resisted union drives, and critics point to Amazon’s broader labor controversies; the debate has also drawn political attention, including Senator Bernie Sanders’s Stop BEZOS proposal that would tax large corporations based on the public assistance used by their workers." - Nikita Richardson