08/03/2023
A statement from us.
Text UNIONSTRONG to 53555 to donate to our strike and mutual aid fund. Solidarity forever!
On April 5, a supermajority of us at Madison Sourdough voted to join United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW Local 1473) to enable us to bargain for a fair contract regarding our terms and conditions of employment.
At Sourdough, we love being such an integral part of the community. We love baking bread and pastries, cooking you meals, and serving you coffee. We love that we are able to reach you not only at our storefront but also through grocery stores and restaurants throughout the community.
However, though bakery work is highly romanticized, we work hard, long, early hours, and the work is physically demanding. For example, those in the bread and pastry departments work 10-hour shifts with a 25-minute break. We are passionate about our work and the role we play in the community, but we deserve to feel protected and financially secure while giving significant mental, physical, and emotional labor to a business from which we receive a fraction of the revenue.
It’s been amazing to see the people we work with come together to lift one another up. It’s been just as disappointing to watch anti-union efforts being made by the highest leadership in the bakery, both during the union drive and in the initial stages of bargaining.
We began the bargaining process at the end of May and have had five sessions. The business owner hasn’t attended over half of our bargaining sessions. All members of our bargaining committee work full time and have made time outside of work to bargain; the fact that the owner cannot make it to the table, despite working only occasionally, is incredibly disrespectful.
Ownership has stated that management “...never pursued a campaign against unionization because we were not necessarily against unionization” and that they “wanted to create space for all of our employees’ voices to be heard.” Now that we have won the election and begun bargaining, however, these sentiments have proven inaccurate.
Management retains Littler Mendelson, a notorious anti-union law firm retained by the likes of Nissan, McDonald’s, and Starbucks. Initially, management did not want to bring their lawyer to the bargaining table, but in an effort to step up Madison Sourdough’s anti-union efforts, she has joined the bargaining sessions. Littler Mendelson is well-known, both for delaying bargaining for years and for developing anti-union legislation. Unfortunately, the company has not engaged in good faith negotiations, including, most recently, refusing outright to provide relevant and necessary information to the union regarding how employees are promoted and reviewed. This is particularly important to the union, as long-term, dedicated employees (who support the union effort) have recently been passed over for promotion in favor of outside applicants who are longtime friends of Madison Sourdough management.
The Littler-Mendelson attorney recently doubled down on the company’s refusal to provide basic, presumptively relevant information during bargaining about how positions are filled and how employees are reviewed. She instead stated that the requested information wouldn’t be provided because “[t]he United States Supreme Court has long recognized, ‘the sensitivity of any human being to disclosure of information that may be taken to bear on his or her basic competence.’ Detroit Edison Co. v. NLRB, 440 U.S. 301, 318 (1979).”
In fact, the union is committed to ensuring that the company engages in good faith bargaining, which includes providing information regarding bargaining unit employees’ promotion and performance reviews. This information is presumptively relevant and has long been required by federal law—the National Labor Relations Act. Today, our union filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB to address just some of the company’s unlawful bargaining practices to date.
The National Labor Relations Act also states that employers must meet for contract negotiation sessions at reasonable times and intervals. Despite this, union avoidance attorneys like the one Madison Sourdough and Starbucks retain frequently attempt to delay contract negotiations well beyond a reasonable period. It seems that ownership would rather spend time and money fighting unfair labor practice charges in court than bargaining a fair contract with us–the company would rather spend money on Littler-Mendelson attorneys than on compensating its workers.
Is Madison Sourdough as it claims to be–a company that takes care of and listens to its workers, and an upstanding part of the Madison community at large? Or does it only serve to benefit the owner and his family--several of whom hold upper management positions in the company--by exploiting a passionate but overworked and underpaid food service workforce? Madison Sourdough likes to claim that it is the former. Despite this, the company retains the same notorious union avoidance attorney as Starbucks and has followed the same insulting union avoidance playbook.
Though the owner thinks of himself as a relatively good boss in the grand scheme of things, he’s decided to profit from a system that offers workers very few protections. He stopped working a full schedule at the bakery recently, within the last year–he decided that it was unsustainable for him, and he decided to opt out. Work needs to be sustainable for those of us who don’t have the option to opt out and collect the profits workers create.
To place what we’re doing in a broader political context, though we’re just a small group of workers, what we’re doing is meaningful, and the organizing you do at your workplace is likewise meaningful. The only power we have as workers is to withhold our labor–this can look either like getting frustrated and quitting, which feels good but has no long-term impact, or it can look like standing together.
To stay updated on our bargaining process, future actions, and how you can help, please follow us on social media. Text UNIONSTRONG to 53555 to donate to our strike and mutual aid fund!
