This article appears in the July/August 2021 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Mike Woliansky began to speak, in a practiced, rehearsed fashion that most resembled the closing argument from a prosecutor. Woliansky is the CEO of No Evil Foods, a plant-based meat company that brands itself as strongly left-wing. Its product names include the vegan chicken “Comrade Cluck” and vegan chorizo “El Zapatista,” though when advocates of the Free and Sovereign State of Chiapas got wind of that name, they were furious, and the company changed it to “El Capitan.”
But on this day, February 11, 2020, at the company’s production plant in Weaverville, North Carolina, Woliansky wasn’t talking about the importance of veganism for climate protection, or the need to seize the means of production.
He was talking about quarterly earnings.
“We are nowhere near close to being profitable yet,” Woliansky said, pointing to a chart. He explained that while demand for plant-based foods had soared, and while No Evil products had jumped from 1,400 to 5,500 stores in a little over a year, “it takes a lot of money to launch and grow a business … and at this point that money doesn’t come from sales, it comes from investors who believe in our product.” The balance sheet showed consistent projected losses at about $200,000 a month. That was the plan, to spend what was necessary to build scale. The only thing that could get in the way, he explained to the workforce at the mandatory meeting, was if they voted to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).
“It’s a very real risk that having a union at No Evil Foods will greatly impact our ability to continue raising capital,” Woliansky intoned, the self-described leftist singing off the song sheet of cold-eyed capitalism. “I had one of our current investors say this week, ‘I’ve seen hundreds of companies come across my desk, and I have never seen an investment in a unionized startup … if I was looking at this business for the first time, I would run the other way.’”
It was a devilishly clever closing argument for what was a brutal, coordinated campaign against the union drive. Woliansky’s hands were clean; the threat didn’t come from management, but from the investors. They would bring down the company if workers tried to assert their collective rights. “Please understand that I have no control over what investors will do,” Woliansky stressed. He said that unionization would be seen by investors as a “vote of no confidence” in leadership. He could be deposed, with a new CEO brought in “to run this business in a very different way.” Investors might simply pull their money, or they would demand that management re-evaluate pay, benefits, health coverage, everything. Workers could lose what little they had.
“If you’re still thinking about voting to bring the UFCW to No Evil Foods, I’m asking you to step back, give us a chance to be successful by voting no,” Woliansky concluded. “You can always bring the union back in a year for another vote. But you’ll never know what we could have done and achieved together if you do it now.”
The room erupted in applause.
Former workers at No Evil Foods have described this as the “scorched earth speech.” Given two days before the election, they said it altered the dynamic from one where pro-union leaders thought they had a good shot to win, to one where it became pretty clear they would lose. “That was the biggest turning point of the whole thing,” said Jon Reynolds, a production worker and one of the key organizers. “Any people on the fence were hopping off. It was like a slow-motion car crash.”
Two days later, workers would vote 43-15 against going union.
THE SPEECH WAS THE LAST and perhaps the most nakedly direct of a series of captive-audience meetings held for No Evil Foods employees in the run-up to the union vote. Across America, meetings like this have been routine for decades; union organizers are excluded, of course, but employees are required to attend. They’re part of the playbook that union-busting consultants hand to companies looking to fight collective-bargaining efforts. No Evil Foods had the assistance of Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, a management-side labor law firm that runs union avoidance campaigns. (The day of the election, one of Constangy’s lawyers, Leigh Tyson, was walking around the vegan meat facility with a leather handbag, two workers told me.)
They may be routine, but it’s hard to truly gauge just what goes on inside these private meetings. We can imagine the arguments made about union corruption, threats to businesses, and the uncertain relationship between workers and management. But it’s quite different to actually hear bosses go on for hours, day after day, about the scourge of unions. The cumulative nature of the messaging can only be weighed if you hear it.
And thanks to workers at No Evil Foods, we can.
Snippets of audio of the anti-union meetings have floated around in left media circles since the demise of the union drive. Vice, Jacobin, The Appeal, and the Dixieland of the Proletariat podcast have reported on them. Video of one entire meeting was put on the internet. No Evil Foods waged an aggressive campaign to get any recordings scrubbed, including filing takedown requests claiming that the company held a copyright on the speeches made, and even impersonating a former employee at the plant in making some of those requests. They failed, because North Carolina is a one-party consent state, making the recordings legal, and making reporting on them fair use.
The Prospect has exclusively obtained over five hours of recordings of nearly all the meetings held for workers at the plant in January and February 2020. In total, they paint an important picture of how companies, armed with that union-busting playbook, commit psychological warfare on their employees to turn them against collective bargaining.
Under the guise of voter education, unions were depicted as corrupt, money-grubbing businesses that would neglect workers and tear companies apart. Workers were told that their bid for collective bargaining could lead to cuts to pay and benefits; that they could be dragged before kangaroo courts and fined heavily for breaking union rules; that at a company like No Evil Foods, they would usher in a culture starkly at odds with progressive values and social justice. Most of all, employees were told that the union would upend a successful startup business, and get in the way of the team spirit and mutual trust that made No Evil Foods great.
YouTube
No Evil Foods CEO Mike Woliansky addresses workers at the company’s first anti-union meeting.
That last argument is what all the other arguments funnel into, a narrative honed over decades. “The actual message is that there are not two parties to labor relations, bosses and workers,” said Bob Muehlenkamp, a former organizing director for SEIU 1199 and the Teamsters, and author of the introduction to a forthcoming new edition of Confessions of a Union Buster, the 1993 Martin Jay Levitt autobiography. “There’s the employer and the employees and they’re the happy family. And something called the union, which is the outside, carnivorous, voracious, communist, violent third party … We’re here together and there’s this thing coming from the outside to divide us.”
There’s a reason these meetings aren’t broadcast, and a reason why No Evil Foods wanted them suppressed. At a time when workers attempting to unionize are under constant pressure—see the tactics used in the campaign to organize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama—union adversaries would rather keep their secrets under wraps. But it’s worth demystifying their methods, in the interest of, as any manager speaking at an anti-union meeting would tell you, keeping workers fully informed.
“Unions Are Big Business”
“We’re investing in your education about unions because we believe that it’s important to your future,” said Sadrah Schadel, one of No Evil Foods’ two co-founders, in her speech (she was one of four management-level speakers in the recordings; the others were co-founder and CEO Mike Woliansky, plant manager Becky Heinen, and vice president of engineering Mark McPeak). The meetings were pitched as information sessions, and speakers stressed repeatedly that, because unionization is such a big financial decision for workers and their families, the company was taking the time to make them knowledgeable voters. And workers did need more knowledge; there was little understanding of what unions were all about among the staff, according to workers I talked to.
Critical to management’s strategy was preempting any thoughts that No Evil Foods was peddling anti-union propaganda. McPeak repeatedly interrupted himself to say that everything being presented came from public sources, like the National Labor Relations Board website, the UFCW constitution, and the North Carolina Local 1208 bylaws, handbooks, tax filings, and news reports. “If you don’t believe me that’s fine,” McPeak says at one point. “I’ve got kids, they don’t believe anything I say … [but] it’s in here, it’s all in here.”
Furthering the pose of objectivity, management would occasionally point out the good in unions. McPeak noted several times that he was previously in the Teamsters, and that unions “make sense” for some companies. Schadel said unions “helped workers whose voices have been ignored by corporate giants.” But those moments were rare. The predominant assessment about unions was unequivocal. “Just like No Evil, it’s a business,” McPeak said. “Call it this, call it that, it’s a business, period … They’re in the business of negotiating labor contracts.”
Becky Heinen spent much of her speech running through the UFCW’s 2019 tax statement. She highlighted the $222 million brought in from dues paid by its 1.2 million members. That’s the union’s main revenue source, and to No Evil Foods managers, all that the union cares about. A lot of stress was placed on how hard it is to get out of paying dues. At one point, McPeak rattled off a series of unfair labor practices filed against the union over a number of years, repeating several times that “they won’t let them resign or stop paying dues.” Heinen compared dues to “a shitty gym membership you want to get out of; the stipulations on it are insane.” (When called on this by Meagan Sullivan, a pro-union employee who often spoke up to rebut management statements, Heinen said the comparison was merely to a passive deducted payment like a subscription.)
Heinen then ticked off where the UFCW’s money went. She described high salaries (the president of the international makes $341,000 a year, not even on the charts compared to a corporate CEO), generous benefits, and perks. She mentioned a $1 million “party” at the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas, and $220,000 to hire travel agents. (These combined are less than one-half of 1 percent of dues revenue.) She claimed that $120 million directed to officer salaries, buildings, overhead, political advertising, and lobbying was “not spent on the members or getting the things that they need.” And litigation was highlighted: “They did illegal things on labor laws, and union dues are their source of money, so y’all going to be the ones paying for things on their lawsuits,” Heinen said.
With all this talk of dues, only rarely did a couple of salient facts slip out. First of all, in the right-to-work state of North Carolina, workers can opt out of dues-paying. (Management even painted this as a bad thing, because those workers would have no say in the election of a union representative or a final contract.) Plus, it’s rarely mentioned how much No Evil Foods employees would actually pay in dues, which considering how much emphasis is put on dues, you’d think would be a primary preoccupation.
In his “scorched earth” speech, Woliansky briefly talked about the union leaders “collecting $500 a year in dues,” which is the approximate average for Local 1208, the North Carolina UFCW affiliate. Once, Schadel made the mistake of breaking that down in terms of the weekly paycheck: ten dollars. And dues across all UFCW locals are less than half that, which is the weekly equivalent of the discounted cost of one package of No Evil Foods’ “The Stallion” plant-based Italian sausage. But because the low level of dues was inadvertently mentioned just once, and the concept of siphoning dues from workers was foregrounded, an impression was made.
“You Give Up Your Voice”
Management emphasized over and over that if employees chose the union, it would become their “exclusive bargaining agent” for all terms and conditions of employment. They framed this as workers giving up their individual rights to speak with managers. Even the union steward, who would be a fellow worker elected by the employees, wasn’t talked about as if they were a fellow employee. “Whoever you select … is the only person in the unit that can negotiate on your behalf,” McPeak said. “Somebody says, ‘Oh, I want to talk to you.’ Nope, can’t do it, gotta go through this person.”
This is part and parcel of the idea that the union is a scary interloper that would break up the glorious worker/management relationship. “I don’t want to sit across a table from you. I want you all next to me,” said Schadel during her speech. “I don’t want your individual voices to be silenced.” Asserting collective-bargaining rights, in management’s description, would constitute a reduction of overall rights at work.
This narrative continued in management’s discussion of the grievance process, a masterstroke of anti-union doublespeak. Heinen pointed out that stewards have “total discretion” to decide what grievances to pursue on behalf of workers, whether for wrongful termination or unfair disciplinary action or other slights. The labor contract would likely have a formal grievance and arbitration process, but “no real legal obligation to help you if you have a problem,” Schadel said.
Schadel and McPeak both read off a litany of what they presented as 6,500 unfair labor practice cases against the UFCW, where workers claimed violations of the union’s duty of fair representation. Notably, managers gave no insight into the nature of the cases or how they turned out at the NLRB. “You can go look it up and find out what happened to this, if you have interest in it,” McPeak said about one charge. “I’m not sure how these cases turned out,” Schadel said about two others. But if you are to believe the narrative, the mere existence of complaints against the UFCW demonstrates its overriding failure to represent its membership.
But in select moments, management gave the exact opposite impression: that the union would zealously protect and defend the worst possible members. They relayed lurid, mostly hypothetical tales of unions fighting to keep sexual harassers and stalkers on the job, even forcing them to work side by side with their victims. Heinen said this happened to a friend of hers at a unionized workplace, although the union in question wasn’t identified as part of UFCW. This was expressed as just part of the directive of the union, to advocate on behalf of their members. But most of the time, management was stressing that the union would not advocate on behalf of their members.
Schadel tried to pull off the feat of expressing both ideas at the same time. “I’m horrified at the thought that a union that’s supposed to represent all of you including anyone who is subject to harassment might fight to put that person back to work,” she stated. Then pivoted. “And maybe they wouldn’t. I mean they do have the right not to process a grievance. And they definitely have a history of abandoning cases against their members’ wishes.” She took a stab at squaring the circle by suggesting that the harasser may be the union steward, or the victim a vocal opponent of the union. But she wouldn’t be pinned down on one side or the other; the union either is negligent in protecting wronged workers, or passionate in defending sleazebags, or both, or neither.
Despite the logical faults, you could see how it worked. If you view yourself as an upstanding employee, the picture of the union given is that either you won’t get the help you need, or someone who doesn’t deserve the help will. Which just raises doubts about the advantages of unionization.
“Everything Starts at Zero”
It is entirely true that nothing is guaranteed in collective bargaining; the union only wins the right to ask for certain terms. But the way No Evil Foods managers presented that fact was clearly designed to play on worker fears.
The only rules governing a contract bargaining session, as management reminded workers several times, are that the parties operate in good faith and in a reasonable time frame. All of the details regarding employment—pay, benefits, vacation, worker conditions and complaints, and so on—would be “unknown and uncertain,” as Woliansky put it. McPeak was even more stark: “The fact that you have a union agreement doesn’t mean there’s more money” at the company for wages.
Key to this discussion was the fact that No Evil Foods paid $13.65 an hour on average at the time of the union vote, more than a living wage for the region, which includes the college town of Asheville. The company had even recently offered health benefits. Several employees, even pro-union ones, remarked at the meetings that they were making more than they ever had before. The company also added a “shift differential,” increasing pay for those on the night shift working irregular hours.
The contention from pro-union forces was that they just wanted to lock good pay and benefits into a contract, giving them the security that it cannot be taken away. That drew the counterattack from management. “It starts at zero,” McPeak said of the bargaining process. Everything would be renegotiated. If there was an impasse, Schadel explained, management could implement their last, best, and final offer, and institute pay or benefit cuts unilaterally. When asked whether it was mandatory to negotiate all employment terms from scratch, McPeak answered wryly, “No, but it’s smart business.”
No Evil Foods couldn’t even confirm who would be sitting at the bargaining table. It could be the CEO or it could be the investors, as Woliansky pointed out in his “scorched earth” speech, who’d be re-evaluating everything. Examples of pay cuts and concessions that unions had made—most of them from the period of the Great Recession when businesses were desperate to avoid closing—were peppered into the speeches, as well as cases of unionized businesses failing and shutting down. Woliansky described the potential outcomes of bargaining: “Could be less, could be more, could be the same.”
By law, management is not allowed to say that workers will lose pay or benefits if they vote to join a union. But they can say that the outcome is unknown. And any worker with some memory of precarity in their heads will immediately make the connection: They could lose what they have. And if they didn’t like it, No Evil Foods would find workers who’d accept those terms. “Do you think people in Asheville would be willing to work for less than what we pay?” Woliansky asked at one point.
Bargaining units were not even guaranteed to win a first contract, Schadel declared, using 2009 data from the Economic Policy Institute. Even more than three years after winning a union election, 25 percent of bargaining units fail to win a first contract, EPI reported. Then again, non-union workplaces get contracts governing their employment zero percent of the time.
Of course, unions do have tools that may get what they want, most prominently the strike. No Evil managers didn’t shy away from arguing that strikes are effective at crippling businesses and forcing changes, but they naturally focused on the economic costs to the workers. It is certainly true that UFCW offers a meager strike fund of $100 a week for full-time employees, and only then after 14 days on the picket lines. (In a recent labor action at Stop & Shop grocery stores in New England, Schadel said, UFCW paid nothing because the action lasted only 11 days.) Schadel layered on top of that the fact that workers would not get health insurance premiums paid, would not be eligible for unemployment insurance in North Carolina, and could even be permanently replaced if they walk out.
In fact, fewer than 1 percent of UFCW bargaining efforts evolve into strikes, because both businesses and workers have large incentives to avoid them. But the worst-case scenarios are the main ones presented at anti-union meetings.
“They’re Going to Come After You”
Mark McPeak devoted an entire session to a small subsection of the UFCW constitution. Perhaps deliberately, he chose the most confusing legalese in the document to illustrate his point, with a smattering of lawyer jokes along the way. (“It was written by a bunch of lawyers, so it’s got to be really easy to understand.”)
The rule in question was about how the union can discipline members for “violating duties and obligations,” and the vagueness of the duties and obligations that could draw such an action. McPeak homed in on the proviso that former members who were previously part of a union local could be brought up on charges. “These charges can be brought by peers,” McPeak said, his voice rising. “So if somebody didn’t like you … you can still be charged, and they can go after you financially, after you leave.”
McPeak explained that those charged would be “put on trial” before the local executive board, with the ability to gain assistance only from another member of the union (“You can’t even do what the American justice system allows you to do, which is have a lawyer”), and if found guilty by two-thirds of the board, be assessed fines. “So you’re going on trial,” McPeak concluded. “They can get you up with a financial penalty through this trial. It’s a lot like a real trial, except you don’t get a lawyer … you’re going to be charged for something.” He kept emphasizing the word “shall” in the legal document, as evidence that you, the person in that room, will definitively be brought up on charges at some point. (“Shall” refers, of course, to what must happen during the hypothetical process.)
Coming out of McPeak’s mouth, the process sounded like something out of Kafka. But missing from the hysteria is any indication of whether members or ex-members are routinely brought up on charges for violating the constitution or its bylaws. The only real example that McPeak managed to find were cases involving “scabs,” workers who cross picket lines. “If you’re providing for your family,” McPeak said, “they’ll come after you because you’re in violation of the bylaws. If you stay out, your family doesn’t eat.”
McPeak supplied one letter from a union local warning members that they would be retaliated and discriminated against if they crossed a picket line (the letter was a response to the employer’s claim that changing their union status would allow them to do so), and one case of a worker in western Massachusetts who had crossed a picket line in the Stop & Shop strike, was subjected to harassment (including unacceptable homophobic slurs), and eventually brought up on charges by the union.
This led to a remarkable exchange. Meagan Sullivan asked McPeak, “What was the result of that with the guy?”
“I have no idea,” McPeak replied, alluding to the fact that the scab filed an NLRB claim against the union. “You can go on the NLRB website and go make yourself happy and look these things up.”
“I did actually,” Sullivan said. “The guy received a settlement, and got all his dues paid back, and now they have posters all around their workplaces at Stop & Shop saying that you don’t have to continue, that you are able to cross picket lines, that you won’t lose your job as a result.”
McPeak: “Well if you knew the ruling, why’d you ask me the question?”
Sullivan: “Because you’re not telling us.”
McPeak, now wounded: “Why are you being hostile?”
“Information From Both Sides”
McPeak’s one-sided retelling of this event typified the stories management told in the meetings. Despite claiming to put out information “from both sides,” routinely managers would relay the most damning tales about union malfeasance, without discussing the outcome. “Every single case that you guys have cited has been resolved,” Sullivan said at one point in a meeting.
That included not just the case at Stop & Shop. Management brought up a situation involving sexual misconduct claims against Mickey Kasparian, president of a UFCW local in San Diego; Kasparian was voted out by the local membership in 2018. There was talk of the embezzlement of nearly $300,000 by a former union president and secretary-treasurer at the local that No Evil Foods workers would be signing up for, Local 1208. The local’s members complained about it in 2014, the international union investigated and uncovered the thievery, and both parties pleaded guilty and were sentenced in federal court. Schadel even brought up cases of sexual harassment at the New York City Ballet and a Ford plant in Chicago, which had nothing to do with the UFCW.
A back-and-forth argument would ensue habitually about these cases. Sullivan would point out the resolutions, which managers chose not to describe, and would then call them “stories of accountability,” where the system worked to root out misconduct. Woliansky would then interject, whether he was leading the meeting or not, and say that actually, they were stories of corruption, and should give workers pause about entering an organization where this kind of conduct goes on. “If it were me and I heard that story about a company I was about to go work for, whether or not they held themselves internally accountable … I would still decide I don’t want to be a part of that organization,” he said once. Woliansky later reiterated the story, initially saying the Local 1208 leaders had been embezzling for 40 years, then four years, then “several.” (It was three years.)
Union members have certainly made mistakes, engaged in despicable acts, and even committed crimes. In an organization as large as the UFCW, you are bound to find stories of impropriety if you go back far enough. Even in a small company like No Evil Foods, managers said there had been episodes of harassment and discrimination, and asserted that they had swiftly terminated anyone confirmed to have been involved in such conduct. The company wanted credit for holding bad actors accountable, while neglecting to mention when unions had done the same.
“These Are Not Our Values”
No Evil Foods prides itself on its woke progressivism—the managers were types who would wear baseball caps and black hoodies to work, and throw out the words “fuck” and “shit” a lot. Whenever they could, managers tried to use that pose to demean the UFCW as out of step with their culture, claiming that the union “co-opted the language of worker’s rights and socialism” for their own purposes.
Schadel referred to the “old white guys” at the top of the union, and how much money they made. Heinen compared union dues paying for “junkets” to Vegas to how “it bothers me that tax money is going for our president to play golf.” (At the time, the president was Donald Trump.) Schadel, who was adept at wielding this identity politics, responded to the argument about the union holding people internally accountable to how Harvey Weinstein was brought to justice, but “does that make him absolved from the fact that he did those things?”
The often-repeated incidents of sexual harassment and anti-LGBT comments were singled out for umbrage-taking. “This is the exact opposite of what we stand for and who we are,” Schadel said.
A popular argument involved referring to Local 1208 as those people from Tar Heel, home to the Smithfield Foods plant, the largest pig processing plant in the world, which is unionized with UFCW. No Evil Foods is a vegan food company, and managers tried to play up the rivalry. “I am an unapologetic vegan, I don’t trust a union that represents meat,” Heinen said at one meeting. Woliansky took it a step further, outlining a conspiracy theory that the union local would want to sabotage No Evil Foods. “If they keep us from being successful, all they do is create new opportunities for Smithfield and the 3,400 meatcutters in Tar Heel that they represent to put animal meat products into stores instead of our plant meat products,” he said. “I mean come on, these guys are our competitors.”
There was such a deliberate effort to build a dichotomy between No Evil Foods culture and union culture that Woliansky just blurted it out: “I think a lot of these points are being made to draw a contrast between the culture we are trying to build at No Evil Foods and the culture and atmosphere that sometimes is built around unions.”
“Just Trust Us”
The closing argument throughout the meetings was that No Evil Foods was a great place to work, and that bringing in the union would create an irreparable breach in the relationship between workers and bosses. The union was just not a “good fit” for a young company looking to grow; it would prohibit flexibility and add bureaucracy. It would throw a company of equals into an “us versus them” posture. It would “force us to apply a one-size-fits-all approach to people we see as unique individuals,” as Schadel put it. It would leash a high-flying company in an emerging field to a dying union model; several managers noted how union membership was declining, as if that was a consequence of the unions themselves and not decades of employers using the deficiencies of labor law to make organizing nearly impossible.
The message was clear: No Evil Foods cared about its workers. It provided health benefits and extra pay for the night shift. It fixed the concerns that initially animated the union drive. It made sacrifices that other startup companies wouldn’t to give back to the workforce. It hired people who’d been incarcerated and attempted to rehabilitate them. (Several workers told me managers seeded a rumor with these people that the union would drug-test employees, raising their anxiety.) And what the company was doing was working, with rising sales and excitement about the future. “I think the best thing I can say is it comes down to trust,” Woliansky said. “Sadrah and I really do have a vision for what we want to do here.” That vision could only be derailed by the union vote.
“They did a good job cultivating this team language that’s difficult to get over the hump,” says Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes, who reviewed transcripts of the meetings. “And reading transcripts with swearing as part of the general conversation, like we’re hanging out and having a good time. That’s going to be effective in creating a situation that’s cynically very paternalist … it’s very insidious and tremendously effective.”
Prior to the union drive, workers told me that they were friends with their colleagues, able to sit down and talk in a civil manner about just about anything. But the effectiveness of management’s campaign could be seen in the question-and-answer sessions held at the end of the meetings, which often devolved into shouting matches among the workers. By the end, pro-union voices were being told by their fellow employees to “go find another job,” and that “this is [Woliansky and Schadel’s] company … don’t try to be here and fuck up what they got.” This was more than just people expressing their opinions about their job and the company and the union; it got personal.
The infighting grew into a manifestation of how the union itself would toxify the pleasant workplace. The worker discussions served to prove the point management was making. “I swear these people got off on making those of us especially vocal about it,” said Meagan Sullivan. “They’d just push us and push us until we hit a breaking point, where we’re visibly upset. They painted us like we’re these emotionally unstable bullies. That was the goal, to cause tension between all of us.”
It’s part of management’s playbook, according to Muehlenkamp, the former Teamsters organizer. “You have to create this miserable workplace, and then you provide the relief at the end,” he said. “This is the psychological, physical, economic, manipulative system, and all the parts work together.”
The divide-and-conquer approach began right at the outset of the union effort the previous summer. Soon after it started, No Evil Foods shifted from a four-day, ten-hour schedule to five days a week. This led to about half the staff leaving, according to workers, including many who had signed union cards. “It leads me to believe that maybe they had caught wind of the organizing push,” says Josh Coit, a former production assistant at the plant.
To fill that gap, the company hired a lot of new workers, who largely felt that things were going well and didn’t want to risk a union blowing that up. “I spent seven months trying to find a job,” said one worker. “Now I’ve got a job … a better-paying job than I ever thought I’d have … No Evil Foods has helped me change my life tremendously. And I think I trust the people who helped me get that far.”
ON FEBRUARY 13 OF LAST YEAR, when the NLRB tallied the votes, the union effort fizzled.
A month later, the COVID pandemic led to lockdowns across the country. It was a disaster for restaurants and hotels and the hospitality industry, but a huge boost for food companies, as grocery stores were flooded with customers and Instacart shoppers.
The No Evil Foods facility was small; workers toiled in four smallish rooms, working in close proximity. Several were either immunocompromised or had family in that condition. Without a union contract, it was up to management to decide how to handle the pandemic and keep workers safe.
They offered workers three choices, which had to be made within 24 hours. Option one, they could quit, with three weeks’ severance, and sign a nondisclosure agreement agreeing to not work in the food industry for a year, refrain from talking to the press, and absolve the company of any violation of the National Labor Relations Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the Family and Medical Leave Act. There would be no option for filing for unemployment insurance in the event of a resignation. Option two, they could quit, not sign the NDA, get no severance, and maybe come back later. Option three, they could stay, with a $1.50-an-hour pay increase in the fall, but only if workers had perfect attendance for the next 90 days.
About 13 percent of the workforce took the buyout. Jon Reynolds and Meagan Sullivan circulated a petition, which a majority of the workers remaining signed, asking for “reconsideration regarding the ‘90 days of perfect attendance’ policy before we are able to receive hazard pay.” Reynolds started to get that old feeling back. “It was like there was solidarity in the workplace again,” he told me. “We were going to take the petition and march to the boss with the petition in hand.”
But the day before that was to happen, he was pulled off his shift and asked about the petition. Shortly thereafter, the company announced an immediate raise for production employees of $2.25 an hour, with no conditions. Reynolds wouldn’t be getting it. He was fired a few weeks later for “social distancing violations.” Another union organizer, Cortne Roche, was fired for violating the company’s dress code; she was told her pants were too short. Sullivan would voluntarily leave shortly thereafter, also feeling pressure that edged up to retaliation.
Reynolds and Roche took their case to the NLRB, and No Evil Foods agreed to a $40,000 settlement in October 2020. The company didn’t have to admit fault—although during the anti-union meetings, just the existence of a complaint was enough for them to smear the UFCW—but it did have to post a flyer in the facility stating that workers had the legal right to organize without fear of retaliation.
Rarely do you get an opportunity to see exactly how important a union job would have been to a group of workers.
That flyer didn’t stay up for long. On June 11, every remaining worker at the North Carolina facility lost their job. No Evil Foods announced it would outsource production of its foods to a separate manufacturer in Danville, Illinois, eliminating the need for the workforce. “In-house manufacturing with our own team was something we built, loved, and fought for very hard,” Woliansky said in a statement. “Ultimately, however, for a company of our size to survive in the hyper-competitive marketplace, the co-manufacturing model will be required going forward.” Discourse Blog reported that the co-manufacturer also makes meat products.
Workers were given no notice; the day they found out, at a staff meeting with a tearful Woliansky, was their last day on the job. Nobody got a day of severance. Health benefits were immediately canceled. Woliansky claimed in the meeting that the company had run out of money and had to make this tough decision. But No Evil Foods wasn’t shutting down; it was just outsourcing its labor. Schadel, in her statement, made it sound like this was simply the evolution of the company: “With this next phase of No Evil Foods, we look forward to continuing to deliver delicious, sustainable foods to our customers that they can feel great about eating.”
The company did give workers an envelope on the way out; it included a form letter of recommendation and a flyer for a job fair in Asheville.
“Screw all of y’all,” said one worker before leaving.
Rarely do you get an opportunity to see exactly how important a union job would have been to a group of workers. With a contract, they would have been able to negotiate over hazard pay and workplace conditions during the pandemic. They would have been warned 60 days in advance of any shuttering of the facility (small workplaces with under 100 employees, like No Evil Foods, are exempt from this legal requirement). They would have been able to work with the company to try to save their jobs. Instead, taking on faith that the bosses would look out for them and take care of them, the workers ended up with nothing.
The theme of the anti-union meetings was that unionization was a risk, a roll of the dice, a threat to the status quo. But businesses are inherently fraught with danger. The risk is always present, as workers at No Evil Foods found out one year later. But people are naturally protective of what they already have, and suspicious of the unknown. With unions so decimated as a percentage of the U.S. workforce (they represent just 6.3 percent of private-sector employees), it’s easy to paint a nefarious picture of them to the uninitiated, and then let human nature do the rest. “It’s really underrated how scary it is to vote yes,” Loomis said. “In the modern workplace it’s a brave act to vote for a union.”
The only way to reverse this is with strong labor laws that prevent the most egregious anti-union tactics, including captive-audience meetings of the kind we’ve quoted from in this article. Absent such laws, it will be very difficult to prevent the mass psychological experiment that management has enacted, with sophisticated precision, over the past 40 years. Whether at a meeting or on the shop floor, those tactics will continue. Workers looking to organize must be prepared for them.
