REI is having a dispute about whether to unionize. The leadership decided to hold a podcast to talk about it.
Wilma Wallace:
Hi REI. My name is Wilma Wallace and I serve as your Chief Diversity and Social Impact Officer. I use she/her pronouns and am speaking to you today from the traditional lands of the Ohlone people.
So I'm here chatting with Eric Artz who serves the co-op and all of us as CEO....
So just to recap for the audience on Friday January 21st we were notified by the National Labor Relations Board that the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union filed a petition for an election at our SoHo store in New York. And since then I'm sure you've heard from lots of employees across the co-op. Maybe we can start by you sharing some of what you've heard.
Eric Artz:
Well thank you Wilma. Thanks for hosting and hello to everyone that is listening. For those of you who I have not had the chance to meet, I use he/him pronouns and I'm speaking to you today from the traditional lands of the Coast Salish peoples.
Spoiler: they are not in favor of allowing their workers to unionize.
Spoiler: they are not in favor of allowing their workers to unionize.
ReplyDeleteThat's OK. I'm not in favor of workers unionizing, either. That just forces them to surrender all of their labor power to union bosses, who generally do not have the workers' interests in mind.
Of course, workers not unionizing is entirely different from workers ad hocly banding together in order to address this or that particular matter with management.
I'm writing to y'all from the traditional lands of Eric Hines.
Eric Hines
I'm confused. I thought REI is a co-op. Has something changed, or is the company still owned by its employees? And if this is the case - why would an employee-owned company choose to unionize? Are they all bi-polar or something, and just spoiling for a good argument with themselves?
ReplyDeleteThe "traditional lands" part is kind of curious. Are the Black Hills the traditional lands of the Lakota, or of the Cheyenne and Crow who they drove out, or the Arikara before them?
ReplyDeleteI don't know the history of the Coast Salish, but I'd bet there were others before them.
I don't know much about the internal affairs of REI, Aggie. I'm just amused by the way in which the wokeness is being used to mask these capitalist oppressors as progressive.
ReplyDeleteJames:
I had a similar thought. That whole 'stolen lands' pose requires pretending that these lands weren't being constantly fought over and exchanged at war beforehand. I went by Crowheart, Wyoming once and was informed that the local bluff was called that because a Crow had his heart ripped out there by the victorious Shoshone (I think it was). I grew up near Ballground, Georgia where the Cherokee and Creek would sometimes settle disputes with a warlike stickball game -- but also sometimes with real war, a bloody battle there forcing the Creek to withdraw all the way below the Chattahoochee.
It's like how the Irish invade about the English invading Ireland, but the earliest history of Ireland is called "The Book of Invasions," of which the Irish were the last. There are no aboriginals, not really.