"Employees Are Bitter" as Whole Foods Chops Jobs and Wages [View all]

[HuckleB]

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/09/whole-foods-bob-mackey-job-wage-cuts-unions-wall-street

"Whole Foods Market co-CEO and co-founder John Mackey has never hidden his disdain for labor unions. "Today most employees feel that unions are not necessary to represent them," he told my colleague Josh Harkinson in 2013. That same year, Mackey echoed the sentiment in an interview with Yahoo Finance's the Daily Ticker. "Why would they want to join a union? Whole Foods has been one of [Fortune's] 100 best companies to work for for the last 16 years. We're not so much anti-union as beyond unions.”

On September 25, the natural-foods giant gave its workers reason to question their founder's argument. Whole Foods announced it was eliminating 1,500 jobs—about 1.6 percent of its American workforce—"as part of its ongoing commitment to lower prices for its customers and invest in technology upgrades while improving its cost structure." The focus on cost-cutting isn't surprising—Whole Foods stock has lost 40 percent of its value since February, thanks to lower-than-expected earnings and an overcharging scandal in its New York City stores.

Sources inside the company told me that the layoffs targeted experienced full-time workers who had moved up the Whole Foods pay ladder. In one store in the chain's South region, "all supervisors in all departments were demoted to getting paid $11 an hour from $13-16 per hour and were told they were no longer supervisors, but still had to fulfill all of the same duties, effective immediately," according to an employee who works there.

...

It's not unusual for a publicly traded company to respond to a market swoon by pushing down wages and sending workers packing. But Whole Foods presents itself as a different kind of company. As part of its "core values," Whole Foods claims to "support team member [employee] happiness and excellence." Yet at a time when the company's share price is floundering and its largest institutional shareholder is Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs—which owns nearly 6 percent of its stock—that value may be harder to uphold.

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Whole Foods lies about almost everything. It's entire marketing scheme is nothing but a scam. It has always worked to use employees up, to get what it can out of a community, while giving the absolute least. It is the epitome of the ugly corporation. Ugh.