Employees at the Ben & Jerry’s Church Street location in Burlington have delivered a letter to the company announcing their intent to form a union.
“When will the activism and social mission our company empower come to reflect its own scoopers, the ones who work every day to keep the lines mooving,” the employees wrote — with an intentionally bovine spelling. “Despite record-breaking profits, incredible bounce-backs post-pandemic, and unwavering smiles, our staff is exploited within our work environment.”
The Burlington workers, under the name Scoopers United, are seeking to join Workers United, an international union in the U.S. and Canada, including about 6,500 members in upstate New York and Vermont in food service, manufacturing, hospitality and nonprofits.
Nearly three-quarters of nonmanagement staff at the Church Street store — 27 of 37 — signed a petition to join Workers United, which submitted it to the National Labor Relations Board on Monday morning, according to Rebeka Mendelsohn, one of the Burlington employees who organized the petition drive.
“I just really started to see the way that Ben & Jerry’s would say really amazing things about respecting workers’ rights and then not giving that same respect back to the scoopers,” said Mendelsohn, a University of Vermont senior.
Employees may file a petition for unionization if they collect signatures from at least 30% of the personnel in the proposed bargaining unit, according to the National Labor Relations Board website. The company has until April 27 to respond to the petition.
“The organizers just presented the company with this last night,” Sean Greenwood, a spokesperson for Ben & Jerry’s, wrote in an email to VTDigger on Monday. “It’s an important issue to us, we’re aware of it, and we’re actively working on it.”
The Burlington store would be the first Ben & Jerry’s location to be unionized, said Jaz Brisack, an organizer with Workers United. There were 583 Ben & Jerry’s locations worldwide as of 2022, according to Entrepeneur.com.
“It’s an amazing opportunity for a company that says it’s a progressive employer to actually put their money where their mouth is,” Brisack said.
Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen did not respond to a voicemail requesting comment.
In their letter, the employees asked management to agree to the “Fair Election Principles”, a code of conduct co-developed by Richard Bensinger, another organizer at Workers United, that includes allowing the union equal access to employees before the election, he said. For example, he said, if the employer is allowed to give a talk on company time opposing a union, the union would be allowed equal time supporting unionization.
Workers United also organized the Shelburne Road Starbucks in South Burlington, which is now a union shop, Brisack said.
In conversations with VTDigger, two of the employees leading the unionization drive cited insufficient wages and deficient training in how to respond to public drug use as among the reasons for their desire to form a union.
Mendelsohn said fellow employees at the shop “predominantly run by college students and high schoolers” were repeatedly denied promotional raises when they asked for them. On April 4, the starting wage at the shop was raised from $14 to $15 an hour, she said.
She said the scoopers are at the “front line” of dealing with the drug epidemic in Burlington.
“We would often find needles in our shop, and our bathrooms were definitely abused,” Mendelsohn said. She said the company did not properly train workers to handle such situations.
Mendelsohn said the bathrooms were closed permanently this summer after someone overdosed in one and was found unconscious.
The company organized a training event with the Howard Center’s Street Outreach team, she said, but it was optional for most staff members. She said more frequent mandatory training would be helpful.
“There’s just no formal training for escalation or Narcan administration,” organizer Parker Kimberly said, while referring to opioid overdose reversal medication.
More than specific issues, Mendelsohn said, the petition is to push Ben & Jerry’s to become a more equitable employer.
“We would like to sit at the table when corporate is making decisions that are directly affecting our workplace conditions,” Kimberly said, referring to corporate headquarters in South Burlington. “Why is there such a disconnect if it is a 10-, 15-minute drive?”