Northeast Philly Home Depot workers reject union

After workers at a Home Depot store in Northeast Philadelphia voted overwhelmingly not to unionize, leaders and supporters said Sunday that efforts to organize the chain’s workforce have just begun.

Saturday’s 165-to-51 tally against forming a union ended a campaign led by a group called Home Depot Workers United that raised concerns about compensation, staffing, working conditions, and upper management at the Roosevelt Boulevard store.

About 80% of the store’s 274 eligible merchandising, specialty, and operations employees cast ballots and rejected unionizing by a 3-1 ratio. Management at the store could not be reached Sunday.

But Home Depot spokesperson Margaret Smith told WHYY that the company is “happy that the associates at this store voted to continue working directly with the company. That connection is important to our culture, and we will continue listening to our associates.”

The rejection vote “was unfortunate and disappointing,” organizer Vincent Quiles said. “But we have paved the way for whatever will be the first Home Depot to organize.”

None of Home Depot’s nearly 2,000 stores in the United States is fully unionized. The chain describes itself as the nation’s largest home improvement retailer.

Quiles filed a petition signed by 103 employees of the Northeast Philly Home Depot with the National Labor Relations Board on Sept. 19, asking that it set up and oversee an election.

With organizing underway, he and other employees filed a complaint with the NLRB in October, alleging that their efforts to unionize were being met with “surveillance” and “propaganda” tactics by management.

Sara Gorman, a spokesperson for Home Depot, denied those allegations and said the retailer would cooperate with the NLRB’s investigation.

Last Friday, lawyers for a Northeast Home Depot store employee named William Bermudez filed a complaint in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court on behalf of Bermudez and workers at Home Depot’s four other stores in the city, alleging management violated requirements of Philly’s Fair Workweek Law.

The measure went into effect in 2020 and requires employers to provide hourly workers in the fast-food, hospitality, and retail industries with predictable hours as well as advance notice of schedule changes.

The complaint alleges that management failed to provide Bermudez and other current employees with the required “written, good-faith estimates” of how many hours they would be working, and also did not provide written work schedules in advance. Nor are new employees given the required estimates and notifications, the complaint alleges.

Philly’s Home Depot vote followed an unsuccessful union organizing effort at an upstate New York Amazon warehouse and came amid an ongoing campaign to unionize Starbucks stores. Organizing efforts are on an upswing nationwide.

“I think the vote was much more our loss than Home Depot’s win,” said Quiles, 27, who lives in South Philly and has worked at the Northeast store for more than five years.

Although its Twitter and other social media posts drew enthusiastic support, Quiles said the organizing committee itself “missed the mark” in managing the campaign.

And while the complaint filed Friday with the city is a separate matter, Quiles said the union organizing effort may have helped create the circumstances under which employees with other concerns could come forward.

Said Ryan Allen Hancock, one of the lawyers involved in the Fair Workweek filing: “This is not the end of the fight.”