Employees of MOM’s Organic Market in the Hollywood Shopping Center on Monday failed to overturn a clause in their union contract that requires all of the grocer’s workers to pay union dues.
During balloting at the store, 19 employees voted to deauthorize mandatory union dues, while four opposed the move to make dues voluntary.
Twenty-one workers — a majority of the store’s 40 union-eligible employees — would have had to vote in favor of deauthorization to invalidate a dues requirement in the union contract that was ratified in November, according to Jonathan Williams, communications director for United Food & Commercial Workers Local 400 (UFCW). The contract also authorizes MOM’s to fire any employee who refuses to pay dues.
Williams said the union had already told MOM’s employees, via a bulletin board announcement and an email, that it would not enforce mandatory dues.
“Dues are entirely optional, which is why this entire exercise was, to my mind, a total waste of time,” Williams told College Park Here & Now.
But Patrick Semmens, vice president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, said employees wanted that promise to be made official through a secret-ballot election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.
“I and many of my colleagues at MOM’s don’t support UFCW union officials, but we are compelled by law to deal with them,” Nora Ricse, a MOM’s employee who collected signatures on a petition to trigger the vote, said in a press release issued by the foundation. “We are requesting this vote so we can ensure our hard-earned money doesn’t flow into union bosses’ pockets, regardless of what they’ve told us is going to happen.”
Dues for full-time MOM’s employees are $10 a month and $8 for part-time workers. Williams said no dues have been collected so far.
MOM’s employees voted to unionize in December 2022. In November 2024, workers voted 22-9 to remain in the union.
Associate Editor Jalen Wade contributed to this story.