The steep climb to unionize REI

Ski season came early in the Pacific Northwest this year, keeping Tini Alexander busy in the gear department at the Bellingham REI where she’s worked for the past three years. She’s been a customer of the beloved outdoor retailer since college, when REI helped her gear up for her first backpacking trip on a student’s budget.

“ That was what really encouraged me to become a member, because I was just so welcomed by the group and really encouraged to have even more outdoor adventures,” she said.

But Alexander’s relationship with REI has grown fraught since her store voted to unionize in 2023. Eleven of REI’s roughly 180 stores have unionized in the past few years, but none has managed to secure a contract. Organizers like Alexander accuse REI of playing hardball, while the company says it respects workers’ rights to collectively bargain, even if it doesn’t think a union is the best way to address employee concerns.

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The dispute poses a unique challenge for REI. The company has been in financial trouble for years, which could make increasing labor costs untenable. But the member-owned co-op is also known for its ethical business practices, including labor standards it holds suppliers to, like respecting unions. Though the labor fight is an acute problem for REI in some ways, it also reflects the broader challenges of a growing labor movement in the struggling retail sector.

Climbing out of a financial hole

REI has reported financial losses every year since 2021, due in part to the pandemic’s affect on the outdoor gear industry. Many turned to camping and other outdoor activities that made it easy to socially distance, causing a surge in demand for REI’s products. The company responded by stocking up inventory and making other investments in the business, only to see demand slump as other forms of recreation came back online.

REI also faces growing competition from big box stores and online retailers. REI has gone through several rounds of layoffs over the past few years, and shuttered Experiences, the business that offered classes and tours, earlier this year.

RELATED: REI cuts jobs and adventure activity program, citing financial straits

REI declined an interview for this story and did not respond to detailed questions about the union drive or its financial difficulties. CEO Eric Artz said, “we still have more work to do to return the co-op to sustainable, profitable growth,” in a letter to employees announcing the end of REI Experiences.

Longtime REI worker Sue Cottrell said the outdoors company shouldn’t see the union campaign as a financial liability. Cottrell has worked at the Bellingham REI for 10 years, and used to operate a small independent outdoor gear store in the area before that.

“ With a unionized workforce, you're going to have more committed employees,” Cottrell said. “You're going to have more experienced employees, you're going to have more long-term employees, and they're going to provide much better services. That's what REI has always been, and I feel like we need to get back to that.”

Green Vests fight for control

The first REI store voted to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in New York City in 2022. Workers in Bellingham and other unionized stores say they want higher wages, better benefits, and more control over their schedules.

“ I think that the union was very much necessary for our store because we were going through so many different fluctuations, whether it was for staffing, the hours that people were getting, people honestly were running into each other at the food bank and people are having a hard time paying for rent,” Alexander said.

Cottrell claimed REI sometimes reduces employee hours below the average weekly threshold need to qualify for benefits.

“ They're not getting enough hours,” she said. “It's really hard to even find a second job because they don't have a consistent schedule.”

Workers also want representation on REI’s board of directors. The company currently doesn’t allow so-called “Green Vests” to serve on the board, but a bill in Olympia is seeking to change that. House Bill 1635 would require all consumer co-operatives with 2,500 or more employees to allocate two board seats to non-supervisory employees who are elected by their peers.

While the bill works its way through the legislative process, the union is backing two environmental activists to represent their interests on the board: Greenpeace’s Tefere Gebre and Shemona Moreno, director of the environmental nonprofit 350 Seattle.

“REI has a chance to help lead the way to be a corporation that is truly living the values of what a co-op is, and especially in America right now, that's probably needed more than ever,” Moreno said. “We need more visionary leaders to tell us we can build a better future. We can build something different.”

An REI spokesperson said it has no record of Moreno’s application, but screenshots shared with KUOW indicate she submitted it by the deadline for the March board election. REI says it is considering Tefere’s application.

A labor revolution in retail

The retail sector has long resisted unionization. It’s a slow, sometimes tedious process, requiring organizers to go store-by-store at companies that could have hundreds or thousands of outlets. Turnover is high, making it difficult for union campaigns to gain momentum.

“ If you had told me five or 10 years ago that we would see successful union campaigns at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe's, REI, I’d say, you're crazy,” said John Logan, director of labor studies at San Francisco State University.

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Logan attributed the success of those drives to the type of worker the retail sector tends to attract.

“ Most young people now have entered the labor market after the Great Recession of 2008, 2010,” he said. “They’ve only ever known conditions of economic precariousness … they can't pay off student loans, they can't buy a house, they can't even get a living wage in a lot of the cities they live in. Second, they're actually, I would say, politically somewhat different from previous generations of young workers in a way that's made them more skeptical about the brutal aspects of U.S.-style capitalism.”

Logan said that companies, like REI, that cultivate a more progressive reputation are not immune to the traditional dynamics that characterize many labor battles.

“ In terms of how the company has behaved, it really doesn't seem to have made that much of a difference,” he said. “And in fact, in some ways, it seems to have made the company even more resistant to unionization because it says, 'Well, we're a special kind of company and this messaging in the non-union stores where workers have been trying to organize is that unions will threaten the unique culture, the cooperative culture that we have.'”

That threat is particularly perilous at a low-margin retailer like REI, which provides a dividend to its members equal to 10% of what they spent in the previous year, regardless of the financial picture. About 70% of REI’s profits go to the member dividend program each year, according to Fortune.

The successful union drives at REI, Starbucks, and other companies that were historically seen as too difficult to unionize have revived a rusting labor movement. But whether that momentum is sustainable remains to be seen, particularly as organized labor becomes more polarized.

“ On the one hand you have the old traditional legacy unions, the labor establishment, the building trades, the teamsters, the auto workers, the steel workers, the machinists,” Logan said. “Blue collar workers in the private sector, obviously, were attracted to the right-wing populism of the of Trump campaign."

Meanwhile, retailers like REI are drawing a different kind of worker.

"Over the last two or three years, when you look at where the energy and the enthusiasm and the optimism in the labor movement is, it's unquestionably amongst … that young activist part of the labor movement,” Logan said.