The tiniest of histories (one month)

In the beginning of June at PFC, three major policy changes and additions involving drug testing, employee wages, and computer use and confidentiality were placed into the hands of PFC employees. These policy changes were also immediately placed into new employee handbooks and distributed to all new employees.

The obvious rallying point for a coop in a hippie town like Ann Arbor was the introduction of drug testing into the culture of PFC. This produced in the matter of three hours about ten formal grievances against the General Manager of PFC, Carol Collins. I wrote the text of the grievances and organized the collection of signatures and was part of the group who presented the grievances to the General Manager.

I didn't realize how much dry tinder was waiting to be sparked into a fire at the coop. By June 6, two off-site meetings were held by employees to discuss the formation of a union at the People's Food Coop. Of the 56+ non-management employees at the coop, about a third showed up to these two meetings. In the last month, interest in the union has grown substantially.

Why? Because PFC is broken and the people who most want to save it, the people who spend more of their lives with it, and the people who are most financially entwined with it are the employees working there right now.

"...get together and organize. Which is to say - learn how to get things done together that we can't get done alone. That's all a union was meant to be" -- Utah Phillips