On the Clock is Motherboard's reporting on the organized labor movement, gig work, automation, and the future of work.
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If HelloFresh workers vote to unionize, they would be the first in the booming meal-kit industry, which includes Blue Apron, Sun Basket, and Martha & Marley Spoon, to do so. Founded in 2011 in Germany, HelloFresh is now the largest meal-kit company in the United States. The service—which includes user-friendly instruction cards for each meal—is marketed to white-collar professionals, in particular women, short on time for grocery shopping and planning recipes."We want to break the cycle that so many of us at HelloFresh are under," Mary Williams, a 26-year-old pack line worker at the Aurora site who earns $15 an hour, told Motherboard. "It's a cycle of low-paying work and having to work back-to-back jobs. We believe that having a union will really change things.""We are struggling financially. There are a lot of people who don’t know how to meet income requirements to rent apartments."
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The majority of workers at the HelloFresh facilities in Colorado and California are people of color, according to UNITE HERE—many of them Latinx, African-American, and Pacific Islander. Workers in Aurora say supervisors and managers are predominantly white men. "HelloFresh workers came to us and we responded," D Taylor, the president of UNITE HERE, told Motherboard. "A German company has come to the United States and set up factories and made enormous profits—became the pandemic profiteer—and workers came to us because of health and safety issues. "Lots of us are excited. We are sure a union is what we want and what we need to have the change we need to make.”
"We want to organize workers in our industry who are being exploited and don’t have a say on the job. This is not the first or the last time," Taylor said. "We know that many companies that promote progressive ideas have a problem and will fight workers tooth and nail in order to keep a union out."