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Half Price Books workers in Roseville, Minnesota, after unionizing.
Four Half Price Books locations in the Twin Cities area made history after successfully organizing the first union in the company’s fifty-year history, winning their elections with the National Labor Relations Board this past winter. Half Price Books Workers United, affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers, is now inspiring booksellers to unionize stores in Illinois and Indiana.
The national discount book chain temporarily closed all of its stores on March 18, 2020, due to the pandemic. Some locations reopened on May 2 of that year, with others continuing to reopen stores through June as state and local regulations allowed.
“We all work together, we pose demands that we know will make our conditions better, and we didn’t waver from those principles.”
Two weeks after the closures were announced, 78 percent of its workforce were laid off or furloughed. Those who were kept on “expected to see a decrease in scheduled hours or a pay cut” that would vary based on salary, as reported by The Dallas News.
Many employees who lost their jobs during this period never returned, even as some locations began reopening in May of 2020 as state and local regulations allowed. Before the pandemic, Half Price Books had more than 2,700 employees; compared to the approximately 2,000 currently employed with the company.
“It was very unclear how the layoffs were decided, who had a say and who didn’t, as well as the recall process,” Hanna Anderson, twenty-five, tells The Progressive. Anderson lives in Minneapolis and has worked at Half Price Books in St. Paul for two-and-a-half years.
“There were a lot of us in the dark on why we lost our jobs. Once the store reopened, we were working with a staff of ten people where before the pandemic we had a staff of twenty-five,” Anderson says. “Corporate was essentially saying ‘Do the work of twenty-five people when you just have ten people.’ It was unreasonable, and we feel like the hard work we were putting in every day was not recognized or appreciated.”
The pandemic only intensified the underlying problems that many workers already faced on the job: bare-bones staffing, erratic scheduling, long hours, low wages, and overbearing workloads. When Half Price Books stores resumed business, there was widespread confusion about safety protocols and enforcement, or lack thereof. Workers have struggled with harassment from customers who refuse to wear protective masks or to engage in social distancing, as well as other problems that they said were ignored by their employer.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, we realized there were a lot of concerns that the company didn’t seem aware of, or interested in addressing,” David Gutsche, thirty-four, tells The Progressive. Gutsche has worked at the Half Price Books store in Roseville, Minnesota, for nine years.
Gutsche discussed the possibility of organizing with coworkers and began researching how to start a union, which is how he discovered a web resource published by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). As the largest private-sector union in the country, UFCW organizers have been helping retail locations such as Politics and Prose, which became the first bookstore in Washington, D.C., to unionize when the UFCW Local 400 was formally recognized as the collective bargaining agent for workers at all three locations on January 3, 2022.
“The thing that motivated us to get to that point was the company not listening to our concerns,” Gutsche says. “As pressure started building again, people were getting more upset with their working conditions and with what we were being compensated. So I contacted somebody from the UFCW. We met up in George Floyd Square on May Day [in 2021], which was very appropriate, and the efforts went from there over the next couple of months.”
The retail sector is notoriously difficult to organize due to high turnover rates and burnout. Half Price Books workers in Roseville connected with employees at other stores in the Twin Cities area and established the bargaining power necessary to negotiate their first contract.
The Half Price Books stores in Roseville, St. Paul, and Coon Rapids, Minnesota, filed for a union election with the NLRB in October 2021. Around this time, a series of labor actions were taking the country by storm in what was known as “Striketober,” involving more than 100,000 workers from various private sector jobs. There has also been a popular push to organize workplaces that have traditionally lacked unions to fight for wage increases to keep up with rising costs of living and inflation, better working conditions, fair scheduling, and other benefits.
Founded in 1972 with just one used bookstore location in Dallas, Texas, Half Price Books has since expanded into a national chain with 123 stores in nineteen states: Arizona, California, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. As with other companies faced with the possibility of a unionized workforce, Half Price Books attempted to stop these efforts in Minnesota before their influence could spread nationally.
Each of the Half Price Books workers who spoke to The Progressive described captive audience meetings with the workers to dissuade them from forming a union at their stores. Corporate representatives even came to meet with workers at the locations that filed for a union election, including CEO Sharon Anderson and President Kathy Doyle Thomas, who confirmed that these visits took place in an email to The Progressive.
“We try our best to listen to the feedback of our employees and make changes to company policies when we can,” Thomas says in the email. “We’re disappointed that the conversations with our employees at the unionized stores will now have to go through their union representatives and we won’t be able to act as quickly.”
Shortly after the filing, a company notice was posted in all Half Price Books stores in Minnesota that filed for a union election. The notice read, in part, “This is a very serious decision, one that could affect your working future, and the future of those who depend on you. We believe that, once you get all the facts about the union, you will decide that our future will be better without a union.”
The notice was criticized by Half Price Books Workers United as “patronizing,” featuring “vague threats” and “explicitly anti-union sentiments.” Gutsche says the company apologized for the notice but that “they have made it clear that they do not respect this process.”
“One of their tactics was to present the union as an outside force that came in,” Anderson says. “That’s something we took to heart. We were like, ‘No, we’re the union. Don’t frame the union as this outside bad guy. We are the union.’ In this climate of Amazon and Starbucks, we really thought it would be a good opportunity for Half Price Books to show they support unions, but they chose not to recognize us. They spent a lot of energy trying to keep us from unionizing, which actually pushed a lot of my coworkers to unionize.”
On December 16, 2021, three Minnesota stores voted to unionize with the UFCW. Less than a month later, the workers at the St. Louis Park location won their union election on January 6, becoming the fourth store to unionize in the Twin Cities area.
The four-store Minnesota Half Price Books Workers United committee is currently at the bargaining table to negotiate a contract with the company. The union is demanding increased wages, job security, staffing levels adequately matching each store’s workload, transparency with layoffs, sufficient training time and updated training materials for new employees, and the creation of a health and safety committee.
Gutsche says the reason for the successful union election at his store was two-fold.
“One, the camaraderie and solidarity that we have as a unit, that no matter what was said in a meeting or what the company told us individually or collectively, we had each other’s backs and knew why we were organizing,” he says. “Two, we rallied around a set of principles we all knew were important. We all work together, we pose demands that we know will make our conditions better, and we didn’t waver from those principles.”
News of Minnesota Half Price Books Workers United’s victory traveled to Greenwood, Indiana, a suburb on the southside of Indianapolis. A week after the Minnesota stores went public, employees at the Greenwood store received a dollar increase to their hourly wages, followed by an additional dollar increase a couple of weeks later.
“The whole time I was working for this company, I never received an annual raise,” Mike, who requested to be identified by his first name only, tells The Progressive. Mike lives in Indianapolis and works at the Half Price Books store in Greenwood. “That was the story for a lot of us. We worked through the pandemic, for multiple years, and for whatever reason we didn’t get an annual raise or it wasn’t on par with cost of living increases. When Minnesota went public, it forced Half Price Books’ hand and showed that they had the money all along to do this. We knew that if we did something about it, we can get more because we’re worth more.”
Once a union drive was underway in Greenwood, the company followed the same playbook of anti-union tactics that it used in Minnesota. Despite company pushback, the Half Price Books workers in Greenwood filed on March 1 and won their union election on April 1.
“The Half Price Books organizing effort has been a significant success,” Marc Perrone, president of UFCW International, says in an email to The Progressive. “These organizing victories also prove, once again, that we’re in the middle of an historic period in the labor movement where retail and food workers everywhere are speaking out, organizing, and demanding real and substantive change in the workplace.”
Following the union election victories in Minnesota, a group of Half Price Books workers at a store in Niles, Illinois, contacted the union on Twitter, who in turn put them in touch with regional UFCW organizers in Illinois. The Niles Half Price Books workers filed to unionize on March 25, and the election is scheduled for May 6.
“Start talking to your coworkers,” Gutsche says. “Get some conversations started, find out the kind of collective action you can do together and the principles you share as workers.”