Despite votes in the past year to unionize, employees at MOM’s Organic Market in Baltimore and elsewhere are working without contracts as negotiations languish and tensions rise.
Workers at the MOM’s Hampden location recently filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the company has refused to bargain, and is discharging staff members for engaging in union activity. The NLRB has yet to decide on the case, filed in May.
Previous challenges filed by the market’s Hampden and College Park staff allege that MOM’s management has demoted, suspended, and discharged employees based on union activities. The company also is said to have “failed and refused to recognize the union as the collective bargaining representative of its employees,” according to the claim.
Maydha Kapur, the union representative for the MOM’s workers in College Park, alleged that the company has also been refusing to bargain in good faith for a revised employee contract. Rather than negotiating with MOM’s corporate staff, Kapur said that representatives of the company came to the meeting to briefly collect proposals from the workers and subsequently left. Their next bargaining session is scheduled for June 20.
Hampden team member Kelsey Oppenheimer says that she and her coworkers have been negotiating a new contract for over a year and she has little faith that a resolution is within reached.
The company “has been able to wait it out while we’ve experienced another year of high turnover rates,” said Oppenheimer, “and they’ve just been able to really stall.”
MOM’s Organic Markets did not respond to a request for comment.
A recent study published by the Worker Empowerment Research Network found that “unions that use the NLRB election process as the means for organizing are successful in achieving a collective bargaining agreement in less than 10% of cases where the employer resists the organizing effort to the point that an unfair labor practice charge is filed.”
“This is a very dangerous time,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, the director of labor education research at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and member of network. “Employers are appealing everything to the Supreme Court, and we have an activist judiciary… that is very anti-labor.”
Bronfenbrenner referenced the June 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local Union No. 174; a case that originated after a 2017 strike of truckers working for Glacier. The court ruled 8-1 that union truckers who participated in the strike were liable for their employer’s resulting financial loss.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority opinion, stating that “because the Union took affirmative steps to endanger Glacier’s property rather than reasonable precautions to mitigate that risk, the NLRA does not arguably protect its conduct.”
To emphasize the effect of this decision on subsequent union efforts, Bronfenbrenner said that it is currently “dangerous to take cases to the NLRB unless you have a clear sense that [it’s] not something that’s going to be appealed up to the courts…”
To work around the difficult process of appealing to the NLRB, the unionized workers at all MOM’s locations are working to raise awareness of their efforts and the pushback they are receiving from their employers. They are wearing pins and promotional gear to encourage customers to ask about the union.
“We just had an action in the past month where we had all of the workers wear buttons and t-shirts in support of the Teamsters’ bargaining at the Hampden store because they are not getting anywhere in their bargaining,” said Kapur. “The way that workers are going to win their contract is through… collective action.”
