Whole Foods is tracking and scoring stores it deems at risk of unionizing

<i>&quot;We agree with the overwhelming majority of our Team Members that a direct relationship&quot;</i> [lengthy justification] <i>&quot;is best.&quot;</i><p>OK so if it&#x27;s not the employees, I&#x27;d like to know, in the universe of this quote, what people or entities are promoting a union and creating this &quot;risk&quot; of uninionization? Out of this whole story this is the most disingenuous bit that annoys me the most. If the majority of employees were against the union, they would stop it themselves without company help, wouldn&#x27;t they? Still, it&#x27;s very generous of them to look out for employee interests like that, large eyeroll.

Strange that companies would rather invest in fighting unionization than actually raise the work standards, and treatment of their employees.

I had a friend who worked for a union supermarket chain. It went bankrupt as it had trouble competing with non-union chains like Whole Foods who pay their staff half of the old chains but somehow get a reputation for treating employees well. It would be good to know which stores are union and which ones aren&#x27;t because it isn&#x27;t obvious.

Sometimes I wonder if we will ever reach the point at which the people that Amazon would never employ combined with the people who would never agree to be employed by Amazon leaves them with fewer people than they need.

Clickbait title. They aren’t tracking employees, just stores.<p>As to what they’re actually doing, it seems like a good thing if they proactively find stores with potentially larger employee resentment and find ways to make conditions there better, but it’s rather unseemly that they would only do that with the purpose of preventing unionization efforts.

If unionization is a significant risk to a business&#x27;s share price, it is malpractice to fail to assess it and plan accordingly. This sophisticated approach seems like a positive signal to investors. It&#x27;s like tax avoidance, financially and ethically.

I wonder why they suggest that racial diversity has an inverse relationship with union formation. Is this because of a broader range of employee perspectives on work? Are employees in diverse environments less comfortable talking to one another? Both? Something else?

Me living in Sweden, reading this article: W.T.F.?!?!?

&quot;If you put Amazon in the headline, they will come.&quot; Interesting call that the story isn&#x27;t compelling enough if it &quot;just&quot; involves Whole Foods.

The article directly contradicts its title. They aren&#x27;t &quot;heat mapping employees&quot; they came up with a scoring system to estimate the most likely stores to unionize.<p>&quot;The scores are based on more than two dozen metrics, including racial diversity, employee loyalty, &quot;tipline&quot; calls, and violations recorded by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.&quot;<p>Whatever they are doing to avoid employees unionizing, it isn&#x27;t &quot;heat mapping&quot; them. It isn&#x27;t even heat mapping stores. That would imply some sort of density+value combination. This is a ranking based on weighting various data points into a single score.

Amazon is getting to the point that anti-trust scrutiny should be invoked.