Workers at a New York City Barnes & Noble store are petitioning to unionize, expanding nascent organizing efforts at the longtime non-union chain.
(Bloomberg) — Workers at a New York City Barnes & Noble store are petitioning to unionize, expanding nascent organizing efforts at the longtime non-union chain.
Employees at the four-story Manhattan book store, located on Union Square, filed a petition on Friday with the US National Labor Relations Board in order to hold a unionization election. They say a majority of their coworkers have signed up to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, or RWDSU, which is an affiliate of the United Food & Commercial Workers union, or UFCW.
Last week, staff at a Massachusetts Barnes & Noble location petitioned to join a local UFCW union there. A group of New Jersey-based employees of Barnes & Noble Education Inc., a separate company spun off in 2015, also filed for a unionization election with the RWDSU earlier this month. The labor board has scheduled a vote there for May 12.
“We respect the decision some of our employees have made to seek to unionize and look forward to engaging with them,” Barnes & Noble said in an emailed statement Friday. The company, which was acquired in 2019 by Elliott Advisors UK, has said it operates around 600 bookstores. Barnes & Noble Education has not responded to inquiries about the organizing campaign there.
Barnes & Noble employees said they aim to secure better pay, staffing, and training, as well as more input in decision making.
“Decisions are made by people upstairs, and we are not consulted and we are not rewarded for all the work we do enacting their plans,” said Aaron Lascano, a leader of the campaign at the Manhattan store. Lascano said he hopes his site inspires more workers at Barnes & Noble and elsewhere to organize.
When a majority of employees sign up to unionize in the US, a company can either voluntarily recognize and negotiate with the labor group or refuse to do so unless the union first prevails in a government-run election. The process of determining who should be eligible to vote in an election can take weeks or months. Companies often use that time to deploy tactics such as mandatory anti-union meetings.
The Barnes & Noble effort follows a series of landmark unionization victories since late 2021 at major companies including Starbucks Corp., Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. and Trader Joe’s. None however, have reached a collective bargaining agreement with newly organized staff.
RWDSU has been hearing from numerous booksellers at various chains in recent months, said the union’s organizing director, Adam Obernauer.
Being subjected to new safety risks during the pandemic contributed to a “class awakening” among retail workers, Obernauer said, and witnessing victories elsewhere has helped overcome some employees’ sense that organizing was impossible. “That barrier has broken,” he said.
(Updates with company comment in fourth paragraph)
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