The following interview was conducted with Blue Cow Ice Cream worker and lead organizer Meridian at the Broad Street location in Short Pump on their recent filing for a union election with Blue Cow Workers United
The Virginia Worker (VW): We first saw the public announcement via your Instagram account for filing a union election. So the company is Blue Cow Ice Cream and is headquartered out of Roanoke?
Blue Cow Workers United (BCWU): They are, yeah. There’s five locations in the state. One in Roanoke, two in Richmond, one in Northern Virginia, and one in Virginia Beach.
VW: You are the first out of those five locations to file for a union election?
BCWU: Yes we are
VW: How many employees are at the store?
BCWU: Currently it’s around ten or eight, but the number fluctuates because people are leaving or get hired elsewhere. It’s pretty small because we typically have for the first half of a shift just the shift supervisor opening. No one’s getting ice cream in the morning. And then around dinner time we’ll have two or three more people come in so we really don’t need that many workers.
VW: Out of that many workers, how many filed or filled out union authorization cards?
BCWU: The exact numbers are a little tricky because we have had a lot of turnover as this is happening, so some people who sign cards left, some more people are working here so we believe it’s currently four cards signed out of six current workers.
VW: So you got more than 30% signatures required to hold a union election?
BCWU: Yeah
VW: What were the conditions that caused you to decide you need a union?
BCWU: For a lot of people this is a summer job. Everyone working here pretty much is in college. At the beginning it seemed like a pretty great job, all you have to really do is clean and serve people ice cream. When you’re not doing that you can chat, it’s not too strenuous or anything and we had a really great manager at the time. Then a few weeks ago when we started organizing the owner came in – Jason Kiser – and he fired our manager which was very upsetting to all of us because we all liked her very much. She was very friendly, she’s always willing to work with us. Then he fired one of our shift supervisors and we only had two shift supervisors so that immediately put a lot of pressure on the other one who had to work a lot more and longer shifts. So hefired our other shift supervisor over very unreasonable reasons. He fired the manager for taking a sick day, which is just outrageous. We were all so distraught for her because we had such a small company, so few workers, we had a really good bond with each other and also included our manager in that bond. She had been really good for us and so we were really frustrated by that and then in the wake of that we were all very scared about getting fired ourselves. We thought “what’s stopping Jason from coming in here and firing us for doing things that we aren’t even aware are any sort of problem?”
As a union organizer I was able to talk to the rest of the employees and I mentioned that organizing would give us our Weingarten rights which would protect us from unwarranted termination, not without putting up a bit of a fight. People rallied around that idea and then after the termination of the manager and supervisor, Jason was being very controlling in the store. He would watch on his off time, sit there and watch our security cameras to the point where one of the store managers from the Fredericksburg store called us on the phone and said that Jason had told her to watch our security cameras and that we were loitering too much. It had been 10 minutes of us talking and so we felt that we were under extreme levels of supervision. We were all working and doing a perfectly fine job selling ice cream. The store was clean and there was a lull in between lunch and dinner when people weren’t really getting ice cream, so we weren’t busy. We cleaned everything, we were in the back just chatting as we had done all summer. It’s not a trashy store, we keep it very clean, the customers are always happy, our reviews are amazing, it just feels weird to have this level of surveillance.
Jason started coming down really hard on everyone for all sorts of very minor things. This is why we feel that a union contract would help this mismanagement situation. There’s currently no sort of company system in place for discipline. Other places have systems, like you have to get write ups before they’ll fire you or you have to have a formal warning. We feel that these sort of systems help protect employees from spur-of-the-moment decisions. We could put that in the contract and that would make us feel a lot more secure getting income every week from the store without having to worry about getting fired for something miniscule.
VW: What made you all decide to go with Workers United, was Starbucks Workers United influential in that?
BCWU: I’m a Starbucks Workers United organizer. Last year I organized the Westchester Commons store for Starbucks. I had worked there for over a year and that was right around the time when the campaign really got going nationally. My store is actually the 22nd store in the country to organize. We’re just waiting on bargaining a contract. I don’t work there anymore, but I have been able to keep in contact with all the workers united people that helped me. My first instinct when we heard that my manager at Blue Cow had been fired was I texted my friend Virginia who is a labor lawyer. I said “hey is this legal, should he have fired her for this?” She said “hey that’s pretty bad, have you considered organizing here?” and it all happened very fast. We had gotten all our cards signed within three days of everyone getting fired and I was kind of impressing upon everyone the importance of moving fast with this matter to get our Weingarten rights to protect more people from getting fired. Unfortunately, one of the roadblocks that I’ve run into organizing this store is that people keep quitting, so in the first week before I had managed to talk to everybody about it and explain how the Weingarten rights would be better than quitting because you’d still have your job but you would be safer.
VW: Have you already had your NLRB hearing yet to determine if your bargaining unit is acceptable or is that in the process?
BCWU: We don’t have our election date yet. We’re hoping that we won’t require a bargaining unit hearing just because the NLRB just heard a dozen Starbucks bargaining unit hearings in this specific area with this union so we’re hoping that those precedents will be enough for us just to get an election. Our stores are pretty far apart and so we don’t usually get cross scheduled. It actually never happened in my store until people got fired and Jason had to bring people in from other stores to fill in, but it was certainly not a part of my job at all to get sent to another store. So they really don’t have that argument which was Starbucks main argument for the district-wide bargaining units. We’re feeling hopeful that we can just get an election date. The other problem is that all of us working at the store right now are going back to college in August and so unless it moves very quickly or there are some particularly labor-focused new high schoolers that come in in the fall that I can talk to, the campaign is kind of hinging on how quickly we can get an election date. If we can make it to contract negotiations or even just certification before I leave that would be a really solid building block that I could hand off to the next generation of scoopers at the store. We could also potentially get some Workers United organizers to come in and talk to the employees and move the process along.
VW: What has the owner’s response been like since filing for a union election?
BCWU: Jason declined voluntary recognition. We’ve definitely seen an increase in surveillance. We’ve had this manager from the Fredericksburg store come in to do our scheduling and such and she has definitely been cracking down, trying to get us to stop talking to each other on shift which is definitely a change from how the store operated prior to organizing. So we’re seeing the tone of the store has turned icy. It used to be that the workers and management were friendly with each other, very understanding. I love our old manager so much. She was wonderful and now Jason has sent in this new manager who he’s definitely been talking to about the union. She has just not made any effort to befriend us at all or interact with us in any way other than she has to to schedule. We’re fighting to have security again, to be able to form friendships at work and have a more jolly attitude. We can only do that if we’re not scared constantly that we’re going to get fired. And for that we need things in the contract to make sure we have proper training so we understand what the expectations are and expectations for what the process is going to be for discipline prior to termination.
VW: Have there been unfair labor practices or have there been any kind of captive audience meetings since filing?
BCWU: There haven’t been any captive audience meetings and we haven’t formally filed any unfair labor practices but monitoring the cameras is probably an unfair labor practice. That’s never happened before in the store and what they told us to do was stop talking. So it would count as surveilling union activity,which is illegal. I did put up union signage in the store, we have a community poster board and so I put up a little notification to the community that this store is unionizing and a sheet where people could write their support for us and that was taken down, which is also an unfair labor practice. Other signs are allowed. Jason left up other things that we workers put up, but took down the union materials.
It has been pretty quiet from Jason. We were hoping to talk to him as this would potentially be a benefit of organizing with a small business. At Starbucks we weren’t able at my store to sit down with the CEO, but at this store there could be a very real potential that Jason sit down with us organizers and we could tell him why we are feeling this lack of security. Hopefully that would be able to create a bridge between the owner and the workers. So we extended the invitation to him to sit down and talk about it when we submitted our petition to the NLRB. Our email reiterated this is not an aggressive attempt from us. We’re not trying to delegitimize your ownership of the company where we genuinely think that having this union will create a better environment for the workers. Which should be prioritized because with this high turnover rate from mismanagement it’s delivering a inferior product to the customers. So it’s important for that as well and really all we want is to talk and extend that olive branch. He has not responded. I think his lawyer probably told him not to talk to us, so that is a disappointment to us as well because we had hoped at a family business that there would be a little more empathy there and ability to talk to us as people.
VW: Has there been any efforts to reach out to any of the other locations and let those other Blue Cow workers know that you all are doing this?
BCWU: There hasn’t just because we don’t really have the time or resources to do that. I am the person in the store with the most organizing experience. The other people are in the process of learning what all this is about and all of us work full-time at the store. There just really isn’t enough time for me to reach out to these other stores and particularly since it’s such a time-sensitive thing we need to get this store to certification before I leave for college ideally. If this effort at this store is successful we are planning to have Workers United staff organizers head out to the other stores in the following months to hopefully get other workers involved as well.
VW: Is there a specific set of demands that you want met by the owner?
BCWU: When I applied to the job on Indeed the job was listed for $14 an hour. It wasn’t until my interview where I was hired that Jason informed me that we actually get paid $7.50 an hour and that it counts as a tip job, which I think is just ridiculous because we’re ice cream scoopers and people shouldn’t have to tip ice cream scoopers. Jason promised, or rather implied, in my interview that because the store is located in a very affluent area the tips would be very high and that in the heat of summer Jason said that tips would reach up to $10 an hour and so if you add that to $7.50 you know that’s $17 an hour, that’s actually a really good wage. He
had mentioned with statistics from his other stores he was confident that tips would reach this level and so I thought hey, I’ve seen friends work as servers and get really good tips and so potentially this job just will work like that. Wrong! Not true! Some weeks the tips do make it up to around $13 an hour, but other weeks they don’t, in which case Jason has to make the wage meet minimum wage. I and other workers find it really morally reprehensible that the burden of paying the money that actually is literally our salaries is transferred to the customer.
As a customer I always feel really guilty when they show me the iPad and that’s like, oh, I have to tip an ice cream scooper now. So another way that I believe the union would be better for this company and improve the company is if we were paid a good starting wage to begin with coming from the company. Hopefully customers would feel less guilty and be able to enjoy
their ice cream better if there weren’t an aggressive tipping requirement. We believe that the company can certainly afford it. It was started in 2018 and they’ve opened five locations since then and if you have the money to do that you definitely have the money to pay your workers at least minimum wage. Another problem is that the store doesn’t have a store policy handbook. Obviously it doesn’t function like a contract and so when our shift supervisor was terminated it was for doing something that was permitted before Jason had suddenly decided that it was unacceptable. That was really just outrageous to see him just take back something that we were allowed to do and that is another thing that left us feeling so insecure. We would like for there to be a better system for how many hours people are going to get a week. Your interview you go in and they say “how many hours do you want to work?” “are you seeking part-time, full-time?” and the scheduling just does not hold up. It’s more common to not get as many hours as you had wanted. I was hired as a full-time worker and I was told that I would be getting at least 30 hours a week and there’s been some weeks where it’s been closer to 20 or 15. Some people who work here genuinely count on this income for their budgeting. It really needs to be more consistent. Like I said, a lot of us are college students so a lot of us may be saving up money during the summer to spend at college when we won’t have as much time to work. So there really needs to be a more consistent system for a lot of hours that people are getting what they need.
VW: How can community members help you out in this campaign?
BCWU: I’m definitely planning on posting some events. For example, a labor ice cream social I think would be a very fun one to do and get the labor community present in the store. We are calling for labor supporters to come to our location and engage the workers in conversation about unionization because a lot of the people that work here are completely new to the scene and don’t have any kind of labor history or any family who’s worked in labor and so they have some understandable insecurities and fears about how the process goes. I’ve been trying to encourage everyone and explain to them how exactly this benefits the store, but I think it would do a lot of good if other union members or friends of the labor community came to the store and just shared a personal story about a time that they engaged with the labor movement. I think showing us workers at Blue Cow that we’re not alone and that other people have faced the same struggles as us would do a lot of good for our organizing. So sharing community stories is definitely our main call.
VW: Did you have any further comments?
BCWU: We workers are really aligned with the company values that are espoused on the website and we want Blue Cow Ice Cream to have a lasting and positive impact on each community we are fortunate to be part of. The business sources their ingredients locally when possible and ice cream is made handmade in Roanoke so the company itself has a lot of community ties to local Richmond places. We really look up to these values espoused in the mission statement and the way we see it having a union will really build bonds between the workers and the community. We think that this will create a better experience for the customers as well and so really this is going to be a very positive thing for us, so we think that the union is not necessarily a reflection of these negative experiences we’ve been having as employees. It will solve these negative experiences, but more important than that it will create a more flourishing local community which is what Blue Cow Ice Cream has wanted all along.
The Virginia Worker 
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