How Philly Whole Foods Workers Beat Bezos

Can labor sustain its forward momentum under Trump? The first big test came last Monday, when Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia voted on whether to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). Many in the labor movement were expecting a loss, since MAGA is now in office and since management — headed by Trump’s new billionaire buddy Jeff Bezos — went scorched earth against the nascent union effort. But a multiracial crew of young, self-organized, left-leaning workers proved the skeptics wrong, as so often has been the case since 2021.

Despite intense management intimidation, workers voted for the union 130-100. Given that Trump’s chaotic power grabs dominated the headlines last week, it would be easy to underestimate the momentousness of the result: this was only the second time American workers have ever defeated Amazon in a union election. (The first was the Amazon Labor Union’s April 2022 win at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island.) By beating Bezos, these Whole Foods workers have given the labor movement a much needed shot in the arm.

To find out how these young workers took on the most powerful corporation in the world, I spoke with Ed Dupree, an eight-year Whole Foods employee who helped lead the drive.

Q: Can you describe the moment when you realized you’d won the election?

We were crammed into a small conference room to watch the votes get counted — just a handful of us lead organizers and UFCW reps — alongside nearly every level of management from our store, corporate, and even global. I think the Whole Foods vice president and someone else from higher up were there too. Watching them get increasingly nervous as more votes came in was an incredible feeling.

When the final votes were counted, it was an overwhelming moment. As soon as it became clear we’d won, a few of us — me, my buddy Mace, another organizer Jack, and one or two others — left the office and headed down to one of our coolers on the main floor to celebrate.

We were high-fiving and cheering and one of my co-workers actually started crying. After so much stress — being harassed, seeing our coworkers turned against us — winning felt like a thread of positivity in the face of so much negativity in the company and in the country. It