A Growing Union Campaign Has Put REI's Progressive Image On Trial

REI workers from stores around the country showed up uninvited at their corporate office in Issaquah, Washington, last Friday. The signs they were carrying made it clear to the white-collar employees looking down from the windows above that they weren’t there to tour the campus.

“Where the hell’s our merit pay?” one sign asked.

“Ask me about my raise (REI took it away!)” read another.

Plenty of REI’s devoted customers ― “members,” in company parlance, since REI is structured as a cooperative ― would have been surprised to see disaffected employees protesting such a beloved retailer. But a growing union campaign that has so far organized nine stores and counting is testing the progressive reputation that REI built through its environmental and conservation advocacy over the years.

Workers who are trying to improve their jobs through a union contract say the cooperative is failing to live up to its values and damaging its reputation in the process.

“I think they are trying to figure out how to be dug in on this and maintain their public image,” said Steve Buckley, a senior sales specialist and union leader at the company’s flagship store in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City. “That is getting increasingly harder to do as the days go on.”

Buckley’s was the first of REI’s 181 stores to unionize, in March 2022, joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The RWDSU and its parent group, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, have organized eight more stores, with election wins in Berkeley, California; Cleveland; Chicago; Durham, North Carolina; Boston; Bellingham, Washington; Maple Grove, Minnesota; and Indianapolis.

Employees at REI’s store in Santa Cruz, California, on Thursday became the