RSS

Holy rockfall, REI employees vote for a union!

“The rock-climbing, canyon-crossing, river-rafting workers at outdoor gear giant REI” may love their jobs, but not so much their bosses.

“Overcoming stiff corporate opposition and a slick anti-union campaign, staff at the company’s New York flagship store voted Wednesday to unionize by an overwhelming 7-to-1 margin,” Mother Jones reported on Wednesday, March 3, 2022 (story here).

REI, an abbreviation of Recreational Equipment, Inc., is a consumer cooperative owned by its members, including me, which means it doesn’t have corporate stock or shareholders.

It does, however, have a corporate board of directors who appoint themselves. The board changed the rules a number of years ago so that members can no longer nominate board candidates, which shredded the tradition of the democracy that governed REI for decades.

The company was founded in 1938 by Lloyd and Mary Anderson of Seattle to import climbing gear from Europe for themselves and circle of friends. (Notably, Mary Anderson lived to age 107.)

I’ve been a member since REI occupied a small shop near Seattle’s Pike Place market (see photo below; the Andersons are on the left, and the tall guy right-of-center is Jim Whittaker), which means I have a very low REI member number, which is (or used to be) a Seattle status symbol. REI was warm and fuzzy then.

But somewhere along the way, business types took it over and turned it into a marketing behemoth. It branched out into a broad range of gear for outdoor activities. A lot of the outdoor clothing it sells is imported from China.

It seemed like the people running it grew sales just to grow sales. And, at some point, they made the members’ votes impotent so those who treasured the “old REI” couldn’t stop them.

I don’t bother to vote in REI board elections anymore, because it’s too much like voting in Russian elections now, and don’t even know who’s on the board now; last time I looked they were all business types, no pure outdoor enthusiasts of the sort who used to populate the board and participate in corporate decision-making.

REI is just too big a business now to let long-haired hippies interfere with spreading REI’s corporate tentacles across the nation and globe.

And for the people who work there, many of whom are outdoorsy types, as Mother Jones says, “REI calls itself a co-op, but that doesn’t mean it’s worker-friendly.” (See that story here.) Apparently the suits running it don’t subscribe to Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard’s philosophy, “Let my people go surfing” (yes, that’s now a book; get your copy here).

So now the suits have a union. What a surprise. Not.

Return to The-Ave.US Home Page


Comments are closed.