The outside of an REI in Santa Rosa, California. 8 October 2022.
Image Credit: Missvain on Wikimedia Commons

Since March 2022, over 600 workers have voted to unionize at 11 REI stores. The campaign is growing, with workers in Greensboro, NC, voting to become the eleventh union store just last week. Workers at these stores are affiliated with either the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) or the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).

To date, management recalcitrance has stymied workers’ efforts to win a first contract, so the REI Union is trying a new tactic: Running candidates for the board of the 24-million-member outdoor equipment retailer, the nation’s largest cooperative.

REI has nine elected board members, who serve staggered three-year terms. This year, the REI Union is backing the campaigns of two nonprofit leaders as candidates—Shemona Moreno, executive director of 350 Seattle, and Tefere Gebre, chief program officer at Greenpeace USA—in hopes of installing pro-worker voices at the highest levels of the company.

Their bid faces a crucial test next week when the current board will meet to decide the final nominees to put toward a member vote—an opaque process some workers and members see as indicative of the co-op’s increasingly corporate feel.

REI has nine elected board members….This year, the REI Union is backing the campaigns of two nonprofit leaders.

The board has been silent about the union campaign, which workers say the company and its attorneys have worked relentlessly to stall. However, the two candidates’ nominations will force the directors to take a public stand as to whether labor can pursue getting seats at the table.

A Tough Road

The REI Union won its first union election in March 2022 at the retailer’s flagship Manhattan store in SoHo, New York City. Their demands—and the demands of other stores that have unionized—are similar to many other retail workers who have joined unions since the COVID-19 pandemic: improved compensation, consistent staffing, and workplace safety protocols, for starters.

Emma Harris, a bike and ski technician at the SoHo store, tells NPQ that the first contract negotiations derailed after REI changed legal representation in mid-2023. The company now employs Morgan Lewis, a firm known for backing Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and others in protracted and often ugly battles with unions seeking a first contract.

“They’re comfortable with taking their time and wasting our time,” Harris says.

Iris Miller, a salesperson at REI’s Lincoln Park store in Chicago, reports a similar experience. (REI is bargaining separately with workers at each unionized store.)

“We keep showing up for these bargaining meetings and making very, very little progress on only small issues,” Miller tells NPQ. “I think it almost just comes down to the lawyers trying to stall for time.”

The lack of progress has led to an increasingly contentious faceoff between management and workers. Several SoHo store employees recently walked off the job last December after management stopped providing respirators to ski shop technicians, who melt plastics in an underground room. Employees said they were threatened with termination if they declined to conduct repairs due to concerns over respiratory safety, and the ski shop staffers ended up remaining on strike for 52 days, only reaching an agreement to return to work last Friday, January 24.

REI disputes these changes and says it has conducted worker safety testing per federal OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) guidelines.

The company also denies stalling in negotiations.

“REI is committed to negotiating in good faith with our stores that have chosen union representation,” the company wrote in a statement. “The collective bargaining process—especially when negotiating a first contract—can be lengthy.”

But Margaret Poydock, a senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, expresses skepticism. Poydock tells NPQ that employers can use various strategies “to delay and lengthen negotiations—to diminish solidarity and, you know, potentially morale for workers. I think employers see first contract negotiations as, like, a way to potentially beat the union.”

“They need to have worker representation on the board….There needs to be someone that is, like, doing the day-to-day work at REI.”

Developing an Election Plan

With traditional bargaining tactics stymied, union organizers approached Gebre and Moreno separately last year to gauge their interest in running for the REI board, a creative attempt to shake up upper management at the company and mobilize everyday members.

Founded in 1938, REI is still registered as a consumer-owned cooperative. Each of its 24 million members gets a vote in the company’s annual board elections. According to REI’s own description, the directors are called “to set the direction of the co-op.” Presumably, this includes labor relations strategy.

“When I was asked, I did not hesitate for one minute,” Gebre tells NPQ. “In whatever way the workers wanted me to help, I’m going to be helping.”

Gebre notes that his wife has been a co-op member since 2001, and he credits REI with helping his daughter learn to ride a bike. But he also contends that the retailer needs a culture change from the top down.

“I don’t know what they are fearing if their workers have a combined voice and a united voice to actually demand what they need from the company,” Gebre says.

Moreno, whose climate work at 350 Seattle often intersects with labor rights issues, calls worker representation a crucial part of good corporate governance.

“They need to have worker representation on the board,” she tells NPQ. “There needs to be someone that is, like, doing the day-to-day work at REI.”

As the union promotes Moreno, Gebre, and their pro-labor platforms on social media, the pair still has a major hurdle to clear at the board’s next meeting on February 3. Per its charter and bylaws, the board’s Nominating and Governance Committee is responsible for filtering candidates to put on the final member ballot. The bylaws also limit the number of ballot options the board can put forward, further limiting member power.

“It’s not very transparent,” Moreno observes, “unless you’re just like an avid follower of all of the things that are going on behind the scenes at REI.”

REI did not respond to requests for comment about the pair’s chances.

Still, a nomination form obtained by NPQ shows REI is looking for tech-savvy senior executives from leading consumer brands, ideally those who have “led a company through several phases of hypergrowth.”

Those qualifications match the composition of the current board, chaired by Chris Carr, who most recently was chief operating officer at Sweetgreen and who worked decade-plus management stints before that at Starbucks and ExxonMobil. Only one of the nine elected directors, Dr. Michael McAfee, CEO of PolicyLink, has spent most of his career in the nonprofit sector.

As a climate justice organizer with no significant corporate experience, Moreno was circumspect about her chances of being selected for the final ballot.

Union organizers are hopeful that the board candidates’ campaign will attract widespread support.

“This [effort] is more to highlight the process,” she says. “I was under no illusion that I would actually make it onto this board.”

Gebre is more optimistic, though, citing his work alongside corporate CEOs on the United Way board and the diversity of background and experience he and Moreno would add.

“They have a lot of explaining to do,” he says about the nominating committee potentially skipping over him. “I truly believe I’m well-qualified to be able to be on that board.”

Retaking the Co-op

Within the co-op community, REI’s anti-union stance has raised widespread ire. A petition organized by the Union Co-ops Council of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives labeled REI’s labor relations approach as a “betrayal of basic Co-op values.”

As of December 6, 40 member co-ops had signed the petition.

Can co-op members take their co-op back? Gebre and Moreno are the only candidates with a wide-reaching public campaign for the board seats, and if they can get on the ballot, they like their chances. According to Gallup polling, 70 percent of Americans approve of labor unions as of last August, up from 64 percent pre-pandemic and a low of 48 percent in 2009.

“I get, like, two, three, four phone calls a day from just random people from the environmental movement and some from the workers’ movement who are members of the co-op,” Gebre says.

Support for unionization at REI is not universal and has yet to reach most of the co-op’s 181 stores. But union organizers are hopeful that the board candidates’ campaign will attract widespread support.

Mark Lloyd, a Seattle resident whose family has had an REI membership since the 1960s, tells NPQ that he remembers members feeling “a strong sense of ownership” during his childhood. Now 67, he has noticed an marked decline in member involvement, particularly after the board moved to closed-ballot elections in the 2000s. Lloyd has advocated for greater transparency and responsiveness, but the board hasn’t been eager to respond.

“The REI board is so entrenched in how they’re doing things,” he says. “The last thing they want is someone coming in as an insurgent. It’s unfortunate, but that’s just the way it is.”

Miller, the Lincoln Park employee who has also been an REI member for nine years, echoes Lloyd, saying that having no voice makes it difficult to feel any sort of belonging in an organization that “likes to call itself a co-op.”

“These days it definitely doesn’t feel as much like it is one,” she added.

With a slate of unopposed candidates last year, the union urged members to vote “Withhold” on all nominees. They also report that members petitioned in 2024 to have two union-backed referenda placed on the ballot; one measure would have reserved a board seat for member-nominated candidates, and the other would have put further changes in bylaws to a popular vote.

The board rejected both petitions, leaving some workers and customers to say REI was no longer a co-op at all in a slew of posts and comments online.

If last year’s letdown is any guide, Gebre and Moreno’s nominations may spark similar outrage. But as long as REI calls itself member-owned, outrage could remain a key tool for workers as they continue pushing for better compensation, higher safety standards, and a legally binding contract.

“We need as many members as possible to wake up to what’s going on to the co-op that they putatively own,” Chris London, a ski shop mechanic at the SoHo store, tells NPQ. “It’s their co-op.”