Worx has been honored to produce customized merch for a fast-growing cadre of new unions recently.
We’re the union printers for the Starbucks Workers United custom t-shirts, baseball caps, and other promotional items helping to brand the union’s efforts nation-wide.- We also helped a fledgling Amazon Labor Union get their supporters a united, branded, cohesive presence with branded shirts, customized caps, and more.
- The staffers at Google forming the Alphabet Workers Union, CWA Local 9009 (Communications Workers of America), also just opened an online merch offering with Worx as their union printers.
- Now, Ben & Jerry’s staffers from the company’s flagship store in Burlington, VT, have come to Worx for their union’s promotional needs, and we think that’s especially sweet. Welcome to Worx, “Scoopers United“!
Why is the New Ben & Jerry’s Union So Important?
Ben & Jerry’s is really important, to Worx and to the workers’ rights movement. We really have to salute the company for being the first in America – and the first multinational corporation – to recognize Fair Election Principles of union formation.
They’ve taken the opposite path that Amazon and Starbucks chose when workers started to organize. Ben & Jerry’s welcomed the union and actually helped workers get organized. They immediately met with union reps to get worker organizing started.
Workers United Upstate NY and Vermont, the union that helped Starbucks Workers United launch, is supporting the effort at Ben & Jerry’s as well. When the company was founded in 1978, it definitely leaned left and supported liberal causes. Now it’s owned by the huge Unilever conglomerate, which makes it all the more significant that Ben & Jerry’s is behaving in a manner that’s true to the company’s original roots.
According to an article in the New York Times, “Ben & Jerry’s has agreed to provide the union organizing the Burlington store, Workers United, with equal time to discuss the campaign and equal space to post material in the store; to refrain from making disparaging comments about the union; to refrain from threatening or retaliating against workers who seek to unionize; and to resolve accusations of retaliation through an arbitrator.”
Fair Election Principles of union organizing were developed by Richard Bensinger in the early 2000’s to help workers organize without fear of reprisal by their employers. In a tweet about it, Bensinger wrote, “The Fair Election Principles shouldn’t have been controversial. In fact, in many ways they were the bare minimum as far as ethical conduct was concerned. But labor law is extremely weak & includes many loopholes, so they remain a key demand in the fight for labor rights.”
You can check out the great merch collections of these new upstarts and stand in solidarity by donning a cap, perhaps – and maybe giving it a tip to honor workers rights!