Facing its first-ever union uprising at a shop, Ben & Jerry’s is trying to burnish its progressive image. In a first-ever move of its own, the ice cream brand has agreed to follow guidelines that workers claim will ensure a fair election at the company’s flagship store in Burlington, Vermont. The agreement lays the groundwork for a fully fledged union to form more easily at that location, whose workers announced plans to unionize in mid-April. It also marks the first time a multinational company has agreed to that code of conduct.
The union—Scoopers United, which is affiliated with the same union as Starbucks baristas, Workers United—asked management to sign what are known as the Fair Election Principles, rules drafted in the mid-2000s that go beyond current U.S. labor law. Among other things, the employer pledges to grant organizers equal amounts of company time for every mandatory meeting about unionization, to avoid “implicit threats” (“lawful,” it notes, “but unethical”), and to not make “disparaging remarks about Scoopers United, Workers United, or the labor movement” because such comments aren’t “conducive to a spirit of mutual respect.”
In a statement, Ben & Jerry’s tells Fast Company that it “proudly” signed the workers’ request, adding that it represents “our shared goal of linked prosperity for all” and “a step in solidarity in the spirit of constant improvement toward a fair, inclusive, and equitable workplace.”
Richard Bensinger, the labor activist who developed the Fair Election Principles, says that, around 2005, he and Dick Schubert—a top-ranking Nixon Labor Department official—hashed out the guidelines after asking 800 workers who had participated in union elections how to improve the process to eliminate fears of reprisal or coercion.
“The Fair Election Principles shouldn’t have been controversial,” Bensinger wrote on Twitter. “In fact, in many ways they were the bare minimum as far as ethical conduct was concerned.”
They weren’t radical guidelines to begin with, he argues—companies could hold as many anti-union meetings as they liked; they just had to give organizers equal time. And if a worker argued they’d been fired for unionizing, their case merely went to expedited arbitration instead of winding slowly through the normal legal process. But no major companies volunteered to follow these principles.
“I’m torn between being incredibly proud of the Ben & Jerry’s workers and the management that made the right choice, and disappointed that it’s taken so long to get even one major company to finally do the right thing instead of going to war against its workers,” he continued on Twitter. “In my 49 years of organizing unions, this is a first for me. Here’s hoping it’s not the last.”
Workers at Ben & Jerry’s flagship say they started talking about a union last summer after a pair of drug overdoses occurred in the store’s bathrooms. They say both times, managers weren’t present and workers cared for the victims until ambulances arrived. They say no one on staff was trained on proper procedures, there wasn’t a way to dispose of hazardous sharps, and the shop didn’t have Narcan, medication used to treat opioid overdoses.
“After those incidents, staff were like, ‘We will not work here, if these bathrooms are still open,'” Rebeka Mendelsohn, a worker and organizing committee member, told Restaurant Dive on Friday. “Multiple people quit over the safety concerns.” Last month, an unheard-of 39 of the store’s 39 workers signed union cards.
Being progressive for a change
Ben & Jerry’s commitment represents a departure from the anti-union tactics being used by other retailers over the past year, including several that espouse social activism and are now aggressively fighting off union efforts—from REI and Trader Joe’s to Starbucks.
Starbucks Workers United has pushed similar, if less demanding, guidelines that the Seattle coffee chain rejected months ago. Baristas were initially hopeful that new CEO Laxman Narasimhan would take Starbucks in a less anti-union direction, although the course correction so far seems to involve simply inviting workers to sit with their managers for two-hour one-on-one meetings. Last week, the National Labor Relations Board’s Seattle office charged Starbucks with “failing and refusing” to negotiate with 144 unionized cafés. It also alleges a pattern of firing organizers.
That same week, Starbucks was busy staging a meeting between former CEO Howard Schultz—now chairman emeritus, as of last month—with the company’s 16,000 baristas in China, suggesting that the chain is doubling down on operations over there as its rapport continues to sour with workers domestically. In November, an investigation by Fast Company revealed the controversial ties that Starbucks has been actively forging with Beijing for years, from building infrastructure in rural China to praising actions by the Chinese Communist Party and Xi Jinping’s regime.
Back in downtown Burlington on Friday, however, Senator Bernie Sanders joined Ben & Jerry’s workers at a celebratory rally. He grabbed a megaphone and yelled: “If you believe in fighting for climate justice, that’s great. If you believe in fighting for gender justice, that’s great. But at the end of the day, if you believe in justice, you have to believe in economic justice as a right of workers to form a union and to negotiation decent contracts.”
Despite news stories on organizers’ fleet of victories, none of the well-publicized efforts to unionize have emerged on the other side successfully. Starbucks and Amazon workers notched surprising wins last year, but bargaining agreements have stalled for both. Nor is it obvious that Ben & Jerry’s commitment on Friday will translate to significant changes for the company’s workers beyond Burlington: One reason that retail chain locations are so hard to unionize is because they are often independent franchises, not company-run stores, a setup that complicates the union drive considerably. According to Ben & Jerry’s filings, the company had just 2 company-owned scoop shops in 2022 and 161 franchises.
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