It Could Happen Here - How to Potluck Your Way to a Union

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Mia talks with Morgan and Rene of Muji Workers United about their struggle for a union and how ordinary people out-organized their bosses. https://www.gofundme.com/f/MujiWorkersUnitedhttps://www.instagram.com/mujiworkersunited.pdx/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Also, Media. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about what workers can do when they try. I am your host, Mio Wong, and with me today to talk about a company known, I guess, in Portland for being a place where you shop and known most other places for being the people who make pens is Morgan and Renee from movies. Mugi Workers United, Morgan Rune, welcome to the show. Thank you. Hi, thank you, Mia.

Yeah, so, and obviously, I guess as you may have gotten from the word union and the title probably containing the word union, I don't know, we haven't written it yet, is that, yeah, one of the, one of the Mugi stories in Portland is unionizing. Can you talk a little bit about, like, what Mugi is for people who are unaware of this slash don't follow pens and or haven't been to the store? Yeah, so Muji is probably, I would describe it as a worldwide Japanese minimalist lifestyle department store. And that's a lot of words to say it's a department store that is for essentially basics. Mugi is short for a full name that essentially translates to no brand. And that's the idea that they're trying to push for. They're trying to show to people that it's like an eco-friendly company and they try and push like high-quality products.

And at our location in Portland, it's the only one on the American West Coast. And we have a relatively small shop. There's only 32 people in our bargaining unit. And this is a wall-to-wall bargaining unit, which essentially means that everyone below the lowest management level at this location is involved with the union.

Yeah, which is A, really cool. And B, so we're talking about how this is the only one on the West Coast. is mostly a Japanese company that operates a little bit in the U.S. and does things here, right? My understanding? So it is a Japanese company. It's actually primarily operates like all over the world. It was began in Japan in the 80s, I believe, if I know my company history correctly. But they pretty rapidly expanded to across Asia and Europe. And then have also since expanded into Africa and the Americas. If the Americas were relatively, late. I don't think that there was a store in the Americas before the turn of the

millennium. And the portal in the location itself opened in, I want to say, 2018 sometime, like just pre-COVID. Yeah. So it's relatively recent. And I guess the thing that's even more relatively recent is y'all starting to organize a union. So can I ask, how did that start? And what was the sort of things that started to get the ball rolling on it? So I guess the way that organizing started was back in November of 2025, maybe shortly before that. We had a round of appraisals. These are

like yearly end of fiscal year appraisals that are technically supposed to be the end of the fourth quarter. Typically they get pushed back by a month or two. I just company practice because the appraisals are tied to our raises. And each employee who's worked for a year or more at the company gets appraised. And so we're scored in a system of

one to five. And if you get a three or better, I believe the system goes, you get a raise that is directly tied to the number that you got. They use decimal systems. So the thing is that this year, they gave us the lowest raise in memory of any of the workers that are currently there, myself included. For context, I'm one of the workers that has been at the store the longest and for, no, more than four years now.

We have a pretty high turnaround, which is how I. ended up being the longest tenured of the lower-the-management workers. And this came in a year that was the best year in the Portland Locations history. Yeah, there's this competition that Mucci runs internally, where it puts each store under like a group of stores worldwide, almost like, almost like World Cup groups in a way, where you're just kind of like randomly sorted into groups. And each year, one of the groups is chosen. and within that group,

they examine the performances of each of the stores within that group and select a winner to be the store of the year. So in 2024, we won store of the year, and it was kind of a shock to a bunch of us to have such low raises after that. Yeah.

For example, my raise of 65 cents last summer. Jesus Christ! Was the highest by a significant margin. What? Yes. It went as low as around, like 25 cents. Yeah, that's right. I've done the math, but like, is that subinflation? Like, I, yes, that is subinflation. It tends to be, there are employees who have been working

for more than two years who still get paid around minimum wage. Jesus Christ. In addition to that, the staff members who are key holders and full-timers and above get bonuses, and the bonuses are directly tied to the amount of money that the store makes over the target amount for the month. And they drastically increased the targets for the year going forward, which meant that because of that, our bonuses were getting lower. So this year, for the last month since that raise, I've actually been making less money per month than I was the year before. Jesus Christ.

So you're getting pay cuts? basically yes Jesus Christ after winning story of the year incredible stuff incredible stuff from the people who are running their company

in an extremely normal way that was the spark that set this push for the union ablaze and so in November I contacted the IWW industrial workers of the world and received a response

and so at first it was just me and one of the IWW representatives that we were meeting together to talk about forming a union. And we ended up having those meetings somewhat regularly, and the amount of people attending those meetings slowly started to grow. So it was maybe like two people, three people here and there. And then we took a break for the holidays,

because people were just generally unable to make it out, and everything was super chaotic at the store. And after the holidays, I had the idea of hosting potlucks, essentially, and inviting people to potlux. I can't remember, Renee, were you coming to these meetings before or after the Pollux? The first meeting I went to was at the hall where it was essentially just us grieving about our working conditions while the seasonals were there. And sort of it was, I don't know how much it was in the works for you, how much stuff you had done up until that point. But I think that was the moment where we sort of became confident as a body in our prospects for unionizing.

And then the potlucks thereafter. Yeah. And the potlucks ended up starting to pull around 10 people. I think the highest attended one was actually 12. And so when you have a shop that has about 32 people in the bargaining unit, That is about a third of the shop attending an early union meeting while we're still in the underground phase of organizing. And we managed to successfully remain underground up until we decided to go public on our own terms on March 31st. We had a march on the boss, which,

slightly inconveniently, the boss had actually left the shop about 45 minutes early into a shift. And we had accounted for her leaving early, but we didn't account for her leaving that early. And so the March on the Boss kind of had this anti-climic performance where the manager just wasn't in the store anymore. And there wasn't anyone that actually had supervisory authority at the store for the march. Which I think there's two things there. I want to come back to one is the like, oh yeah, of course management. Management never found out about the union, but just left early because they're management. And it's like, oh, right.

No, yeah, what happens if you leave just randomly walk off your job site like 45 minutes early? You're fucked. But management is just like, yeah, fucking I'm just done. I'm just out. Like, I'm just leaving.

Everything's going to be fine, even if I'm not there. So I'm just going to leave early. Right. God. I wanted to talk about the potlucks a little bit because that's a really good idea as just a way to make sure

you can consistently get a bunch of people there. And yeah, can you talk about sort of what that was like? how they've been and what the effect of that has been? The potlucks came about because I had the idea that people are going to be more willing to come to an event if it wasn't just going to be a meeting where they sat down and had to talk shop and they had to start talking about work while they're off the clock. But they'd be much more likely to come if the meeting was framed more as a way to just hang

out with their coworkers and eat dinner. Yeah. So this actually came from my experience. When I was a kid, I grew up Baha'i, and even though I'm no longer Baha'i, the way that our community did it back home was mostly through community feasts and having, prioritizing the feasts first and then the religious discussion later. So taking that sort of idea and putting a more of a union spin on it was the idea behind that. And it was a massive hit. Hell yeah. Renee, do you have any more thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think the fact, too, that our workers, body is, I don't know if uniquely is the right word, but especially tight-knit and supportive of one another, really just sort of helped things flow in a very natural and easygoing way. It was just super, like, salient for everything to come about out of these Pollux. we just sort of like sat down and immediately started like complaining about work. Hell yeah, hell yeah. So we got us going and like pretty much every meeting sense like that's how we just like start our discussion in our meetings.

It's just what bullshit have you been facing from your managers, et cetera. And we have to cut it short every time. Yeah, it feels like. bad sometimes to have to cut these complaints periods short because I think they can go on for two to three hours if we're not careful. And I think the early ones did actually go on for two to three hours and we had entirely potlucks that we didn't get any actual business done. We just spent two to three hours eating food and complaining about work with each other. And honestly, that kind of helped people get more comfortable with the idea and it really agitated people

in a way that I don't think we would have been able to do if we had just like tried to talk to people at work about unionizing or had like a more formal meeting and it really just kept the moment in going. Yeah, I think it has this effect of like realizing everything because I mean, even I would walk in and be thinking like, you know, this is like such a taxing endeavor unionizing the workplace. And yeah, you know, every once in a while you'd have to be thinking like, you know, every once in all, you'd have. some sort of hesitation, I guess. But then every time I would leave, it would just sort of be like, this is like, this is the only option. And we're definitely going to do it. And we're all with it. And it feels good. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like from everything that I've heard and everything that you're saying, it seems like it's a really powerful way to sort of both combat atomization, And both as it just like, oh, this is like a social space where you and the people you work with who are your friends can exist with each other.

And then also in a, we can combat sort of alienation and adamization stuff by just doing the union work of, oh, my God, we all have all of these issues with our bosses. Yeah. Yeah. And when we return, we're going to start talking and going to ask about the issues with the bosses. But first, here are, I don't know, the product and services that support. this podcast. Canadian women are looking for more. More out of themselves, their businesses,

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And that's not like your story versus my story. You're going to walk up and over that dang mountain. You're not just going to put your mind over it. Yep, yep, exactly. And if I can't walk up and over it, I'm going to go through it. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We are. back. I was like, oh, I have a good transition. I can go from complaining about the bosses to

talk about what the bosses are doing. And then I was like, shit, I was supposed to cut an ad pivot here. We didn't, we didn't think of that one fast enough. But, you know, speaking of doing things fast enough. So, yeah, I wanted to ask before we get into sort of how things have been going more recently and where the campaign is going in election stuff, other than sort of the pay-raised stuff, What are the kinds of things that people have been dealing with at Mugi? So there's a lot of small things that have kind of piled up. And honestly, I say small things, but each one of these is kind of just like shocking on its own, but not surprising necessarily to anyone that's worked in the service industry at all.

Yeah. So beyond the raises, there's just been like a long pattern of emotional abuse from the bosses. People have been yelled at for pretty much no reason. the bosses have directly insulted workers' abilities like on the floor as they're doing stuff. They've done things like pressure staff not to use their sick time, even going so far as occasionally implying that getting sick is like your own fault and that people are able to perfectly prevent themselves from getting sick.

Yeah. In your job, you have to be around people all the time because you're doing a service. God, I hate this like being weird pseudogenesis. this shit about disease that's just everywhere now that runs the Department of Health and Human Services of the CDC. Like this weekend, this weekend, or this last weekend at the time of recording, was Memorial Day weekend. And on Saturday, the peak day of that weekend, there were 3,000 customers approximately

in store over the course of the day. And reminder that we are a team of 32 people in total. And so, of course, not all 32 people are going to be at the store at once at the same time. And so when your crew was maybe 10, 15, if you're lucky, people big, and handling a customer volume of about 3,000 over the course of a day, you're interacting with so many people that it's worse than, maybe it's not worse than because kids can get pretty nasty sometimes, much respect to all the teachers out there. Yeah.

It can get to be a bit of a biohazard, especially when you're working in places like, the fitting room that don't have ventilation, and you're possibly interacting the closest with customers, and you're constantly interacting with, like, clothing that has been, like, pressed up against people's bodies. You're interacting with people that just aren't being super conscious about the space, and you're, maybe you're in this small, confined area with two, three, even four other people for a prolonged period of time. Of course, the customer service team is going to get sick more. Yeah, that's, like, a small, median-sized, like, convention. that's just running through your store over the course of one day.

It's like, oh, yeah, everyone has, like, Pax or whatever the, like, convention plague is. But that's just, like, going to work. It's like, oh, yeah, no, of course, apparently somehow you're supposed to, like, magically have the, like, anti-disease talismans. Yeah. As, like, the plagued masses. And on top of that, I've called out maybe once a month. I think that maybe there's one month where it was twice a month, since. January. And I've already used up all the allocated sick time that I get for a year.

Jesus. And that's with one of the better sick pay plans as a full-timer. And so I can't imagine what people are having to go through at part-time where they're already not getting enough hours to pay rent off of their job. And they're having to decide essentially between coming to work sick or calling out and taking that financial hit. Yeah. I know one of our staff members has actually been evicted because they were not able to make rent because they didn't make enough hours. Oh, my God. Or just having your sick hours rejected on the app. What?

This is an app? Oh, my God. Yeah, that's right. If your sick hours can get rejected, you don't have sick hours. Like, yeah. What? And there's more, too. It doesn't end there.

They apply policies that we have this employee handbook that has this list of requirements and expectations. And it is not really a huge part of our employment, typically, but the policies that they have listed, there are applied and consistently stuff like the uniform code is one of the biggest examples of this where they will more heavily enforce the uniform code against people of color or people with alternative styles of dress. Jesus. Or even they can be fairly fatphobic. There have been multiple people that have said that the managers will pressure them to essentially

cover up parts of their body that they will allow skinnier people to show. What? Jesus Christ. Oh, my God. That is so incredibly shitty, and that's got to be illegal somehow, even under like unhinged American labor law. That just feels like it feels like a very open form of discrimination. But Jesus Christ. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Do you have anything to add, Renee? Along those lines, just sort of like being asked to profile people, all employees can be scheduled to cover the securities breaks, which, basically just involves standing around one of the entrances and reporting anything, quote, fishy on the radios. Anything suspicious. They say suspicious. So they could just co-opt you into being a security guard?

What? Yeah. The security guard doesn't have any duties regarding, like, loss prevention. All the managers do that as part of their duties, I guess. But yeah, so they just sort of say suspicious people. And on that note, too, there have been times where people have been maybe not strictly disciplined. I actually don't know for sure if there's been an instant of someone being written up, but there have been times where the managers have approached people and essentially just yelled at them for allowing someone to get out of the store with merchandise,

even though loss prevention is very specifically not part of our job description. and that the official store policy actively discourages staff from engaging in active loss prevention like that. So you're getting yelled at for doing the thing you were told to do that is explicitly not part of your job. That's supposed to be the manager's job and the managers are pissed off that you're not doing what's nominally their job that you also, in the written thing, you're not supposed to do. Exactly. Incredible. Incredible catch-22 logic here. It's real just, oh, yeah, you're explicitly not supposed to do this, so you could get punished if you do it, but also if you don't do it, we're going to yell at you. It's God.

Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. Naturally, there's not really anything that we can do about this besides unionize and besides start taking actions on our own, because the law certainly isn't going to help us for this. Even Oregon State law, which is, which tends to be more protective. of workers than other states are. They're incredibly overwhelmed right now with requests. And going through the Bowley Bureau of Oregon Labor and Industries, I think is the acronym, going down the bully website lists, there's a complaints box, but it says on the website that they have an incredibly high backlog of complaints that they're trying to process and that they're going through a triage system. And none of the things that we've listed so far would be placed very highly on that triage. In a

In addition to that, we don't have access to, like direct access to our HR department at work. They ask us to go through a third-party reporting company called Lighthouse. And as far as I know, no one has ever heard anything about Lighthouse doing anything to resolve a situation between them and management when management is treating them unfairly. Incredible. And it's essentially feels like just shouting into the void, interacting with Lighthouse. Yeah. Because you're just sending a complaint to a body that you don't have any access to and just hoping that they fix something.

So they've contracted out their HR department. So you're just like talking to their, or is it that you can't communicate with them directly? And that's very weird. So they have an HR department. The workers at the physical location cannot communicate with HR. We are not given their phone numbers or their emails or anything like that. All of our HR communication has to be done through our general store manager.

So when we have problems with the general store manager or assistant store managers, we can't really go to HR because we have to go through the very people that we're having problems with in order to reach our HR. Incredible. It's almost making HR even faker, which is incredible. Oh, good Lord. It would also be remiss, I guess, to forget about the sexual assault. Oh, Jesus Christ. Maybe not specifically sexual assault, but definitely sexual harassment, possible sexual assault

that has been raised to management before, where the management supposedly pushed those complaints to HR, but then HR would wait for weeks before doing anything about it. Oh, my God. This happened a year or two ago. No, it was probably more in the realm of two to three years ago, if I remember it is correct, where we had a coworker that was not just, just profiling people and calling security on people that were doing nothing, but he was also sexually harassing other co-workers.

Jesus Christ. And the store managers told us that they had pushed these complaints to HR, but HR wasn't doing anything. And it took them about a month, I believe, to fire this person. And essentially what they were doing before is they were telling people that if they talked about the situation or create a drama about the situation that they would retaliate against the people that were talking about the situation. Oh my God. Jesus. They didn't say outright, but they implied everything up to job loss for the people that were talking about this. Oh, my God. And they started

pulling people into the office and essentially having one-on-one conversations. Oh, my God. That were honestly quite scary to the people that were trying to spread the word about this. And they created quite a hostile store environment for a long time. Around that time was actually the first time that we had attempted to try and get a push to unionize, but that ended up dissolving. And that was essentially the end of that up until this most recent push. Yeah, God, that's really hideous. Both the way in which they just pushed it up the ladder to HR and then just didn't do anything about it for like a fucking month.

And that also just, the only thing they did do about it was retaliate. against the people who were trying to talk about it. That is, Jesus, that's disgusting. Yeah, about the most that they did during that month to the actual coworker in question that was doing. The harassment was they tried to maintain some degree of physical separation

between him and the other co-workers, and that was it. They kept him on the roster. They kept him at the same positions that other people were working. He had essentially all the same job responsibilities as other people and still had a pretty high degree of contact

with other coworkers. during this whole time. Yeah. So the people who were trying to speak out, I guess, said, until this guy was fired, we're getting punished more than he was. Essentially, yeah.

Jesus. All the way up until he was finally fired. And I don't know what it was that actually got them to do it this time, but they wanted to wait until they had got something actually on camera, I believe. But it's kind of hard for you

to catch something like harassment words on camera. Yeah. If their bar for sexual harassment is stuff they can catch on camera, they're never going to get most instances of harassment. And they're not doing their proper job investigating these accusations. Yeah, and that also means that their deliberate strategies to wait for someone to get hurt again. Exactly. That's right.

They're just throwing them to the fucking lion's den. Mm-hmm. Their strategy to, like, detect that a bus is about to hit someone is to push someone in front of the bus and take a picture of it, which is just so unbelievably unacceptable. Yeah. And I want to be clear, too, that this whole list is very much non-exhaustive. There have been so many cases of just patterns of abuse from management, and it's not possible for me to go down the entire list of things.

I mean, as I mentioned previously, it would be two to three hours of people complaining about stuff that they had gone through at work during these meetings. And occasionally you get some repetition, but this is something that is very consistent. It's just a part of working at the store. Yeah, every day there's another unique horror that someone is experiencing. And I guess this brings us to, okay, so how do you make the horror stop?

And that is unionizing. So, yeah, let's talk about what's been happening recently in terms of like how the union is immobilizing and about the upcoming election, which will be a few days after you're hearing this, assuming you're listening to this the day it comes out. Yeah, so we've been sort of ramping up a little bit. It's been ebbing and flowing since we started, you know, last like November. But we're really trying to kick it into gear, get people aware, get people back engaged. So we have a few things we've been doing. On May 1st, for May Day, we're, we're going. We're going. We're going to get people aware. We're going to get people back engaged. We're, we're We tabled with the IWW and just started a petition just for signatures from the community, for support, for acknowledgement, if we ever need to, you know, pull it out and show our bosses that, you know, this is no light endeavor. This is not like something they can laugh off.

Yeah. But it ended up being sort of successful beyond what I. I imagined, we got lots of attention, lots of people saying that they didn't know that we were unionizing, people taking lots of pictures of us, our big banner. We got one inquiry for a journal report that I think is out now. And we were also written about in, what was it? Was it Oregon Live? Or was it the Oregonian? Do you remember, Luna? We had a small article published about us by the Northwest Labor Press that was then picked up by the Portland Mercury. That's right. Yeah, so we did that.

And then other than that, we're sort of fighting some recently published propaganda from our boss. It's with just a hilarious amount of misinformation. Oh, no. Yeah, an average boss communication. The other big thing that's been happening is that the reason that the election is happening so long after our initial march and declaration of intent to unionize is that the bosses have been trying to divide up the bargaining unit in a fairly strange case where the employer has been contending that the merchandising staff, which is essentially the back of the house staff, but only like a subsection of the back of the house staff, are not eligible for unionization under the same union as the rest of the state. staff are. They did this under the notion that the merchandising staff don't share a community of interest with the rest of the staff. And the other thing that they tried to do is they tried to take the keyholders, which are sort of like a shift lead position away from the bargaining

unit by trying to get them designated as supervisors, specifically Section 211 supervisors under the National Labor Relations Act. And we managed to shoot down both of those contests in a board hearing with the National Labor Relations Board. Hell yeah. And the process took a little bit over a month, if I remember correctly. And without going too heavily into detail about it, the community of interest rule basically says that if employees don't share a community of interest with members of a bargaining unit, they have to unionize under a different union.

And then the other thing is that the NLRA says that if you have supervisory authority, and there's a whole laundry list of authorities that are defined in the act. If you are a supervisor, then you don't get to unionize legally, period. And so what made this case strange is that typically employers try and add groups of employees onto the unit. They believe are on the side of the employer, the anti-union side, and the union generally has to contend that these people don't share community of interest or are supervisors or whatever. So it was kind of a bit of a strange situation. where it's turned on its head, where instead the employer is having to prove that these people are

not sharing community of interest or our supervisors. And so even though we couldn't afford proper legal counsel, and so the union representatives were myself and a friend of ours, who was a member of the IW, we were able to essentially represent ourselves in this board hearing, and the case was decided in our faith for on both counts. Hell yeah. So that rocks. It really does. I would, I was not shocked to find out that the case was decided in our favor on the community of interest issue because that would be like saying that the back of the house workers at a restaurant can't unionize with the front of the house workers just because they have different job descriptions. Yeah. Chivish. Right.

However, I was surprised. At first, I was surprised at least that we managed to win on the issues of supervisory authority with the keyholders. I thought that it would take a pretty solid case in order for us to defend against that. And huge props to our friend who I'm not sure if they're comfortable being named dropped as an IWW member like 5 to the world. So I'm not going to name them. But it is large thanks to this friend of ours that we won that case. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart.

IAR Radio. Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHARP, Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists, like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHart Pride Canada. Stream us on your phone or listen now at iHeartRadio.ca.

Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers, and guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, name? Huge news. We created our own podcast called, Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it.

We're the first people to do podcasts. Pretty, yeah, pretty wide range of podcasts throughout there. But this one's extra special. So how did we actually come up with a name, Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. Well, we were thinking I'm originally calling it one of the early names of our band. Before Jonas Brothers was...

This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast, where people could call in and say, hey, Jonas. And then I wrote down on my little notepad, Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys.

Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down. Portia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. They holding Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky has financial issues.

I like the bougie style of Housewives show. I think it looks like it's going to be interesting. On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise. The drama, the alliances, and the team everybody's talking about. As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching. it, I understand the game. As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this. At the

end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment. To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, everyone. I'm Cheryl Stray, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things.

I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers, and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes and life experiences that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats. I also bring a bit of advice into the mix so we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pull out what you already have inside. We're coming into this world fighting for our lives. All I'm going to do is pull out what you

already got inside. We're there to support and celebrate each other. And that's not like a your story versus my story. You're going to walk up and over that dang mountain. You're not just going to put your mind over it. Yep, yep, exactly. And if I can't walk up and over it, I'm going to go through it. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So that's where we stands now. The board hearing was decided in our favor, and the election has been decided for next week. And both sides are now just trying to have our campaigns in preparation. Yeah. Hell yeah. It's a sort of different version of like the very common tactic of, because bosses want there to be more time in between when you like file your paperwork

to unionize and the election because it gives them more time to do intimidation and fear tactics. And like that period in between deciding to unionize and getting to actually do the vote is one of the periods where a union is most vulnerable. And it's also really impressive that, yeah, you just sort of walked into the board hearing and beat them by just reading a bunch of labor law. Stop. Yeah. I don't know.

Workers of the world, too, fucking anti-union lawyer zero. Yeah. Basically, yeah. It was very strange cross-examining my manager under oath. Hell yeah.

And then going to work, I didn't manage to attend the entirety of either of the days of the hearing because I had to to close. I had to go to work at noon on both days that the hearing was. That's so nuts, which is why I wasn't there for the full hearing for either of the days. So I ended up having to log on in the morning onto the Zoom meeting and attend the first two and a half hours,

and then hop off call and leave, and then go to work and see my managers at work. Oh my God. Oh, my God. It's also, that's so nuts that you didn't get time. off to go to the union hearing. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, they were getting paid, right? That's wild. They were getting paid.

Oh, my God. The managers that were testifying in favor of the employer. Capitalism, bad system. Wow. We could possibly have expected this. Yeah, it was actively a challenge to find witnesses to testify for us because the people who would be able to call us witnesses or coworkers are people who are maybe working the days of the hearing.

and can't actually get time off to come testify because they have to be at work. Oh, my God. That's so fucked. There was one person who we approached because we were hoping that they would testify for us, who couldn't because she was working that day. Oh, my God. And it's too complicated of a process to want to try and, like, subpoena them and illegally get them to have the time off to come to the hearing.

Jesus. So we ended up just having to figure out a way to present different. witnesses and have a slightly weaker case because of it. And thankfully, that didn't end up mattering. But for a minute, I was worried that we wouldn't be able to have as good of a case as we could have because we were not able to get a keyholder on the stand like we were hoping. Yeah. I'm glad you're able to pull it together.

That's really impressive. And yeah, that you still just beat them even though they had. And I guess that is one of the lessons of this is like, yeah, if you're willing to put the work in and work together and figure out how to navigate the system and figure out how to out where you can apply pressure. Like, yeah, you can beat a bunch of people who have way, way, way, way more resources than you do. Because they're usually just wrong. Yeah.

Yeah. I want to actually really drive that point home that neither I or my co-representative have experience in any sort of like legal fields. Neither of us are even law students. We are just the people that decided to step up and take on this role. And I don't think that there is some, like, special unique quality about us that allowed us to do it. It was just putting in the work that was required. It's a scary thing being asked to essentially represent yourself in a legal setting. And I think it's a testament to how people are capable of things that they're not necessarily trained to do.

And that this whole process of unionization does not necessarily require. the vast resources that you might think it entails. It requires some planning. It requires some tactics, but it is something that everyone is able to do. Hell yeah. I guess if I was really on my game here, I would have something about like the concept of the organic, intellectual, etc., etc. But I don't even think that's really what's going on here. It's just like in the same way that like economics is designed to be esoteric and, you know, like finance is designed to be difficult to understand. But in the immortal words of Dan Olson, there are plenty of C's students who've gotten economics degrees. Like, you can't understand this. It's just, it just takes

some work and it takes some dedication to fighting together. And it takes, yeah, people working together. But these people are not smarter than you. They're not better than you. They have more money, but that's ultimately not the fact that decides everything. And I don't want to discount the amount of support that we've received from the rest of our coworkers as well. Yeah. This was truly a group effort, and everyone helped out in their own small ways, whether it was helping take care of social media posts, whether it was helping cook for us, host meeting locations. I've been dealing with a pest problem at my apartment.

So I've been unable to, for about the amount of time that all this legal process has been going on, so I haven't been able to host potlucks anymore. And a former co-worker of ours has been hosting instead and putting in the work for that. It really is something that works when everyone comes together and takes part in the process. Hell yeah. So speaking of everyone coming together and helping to work for the process, if people want to help you all, what can they do? We are looking actually at a bit of a financial struggle right now. The biggest thing is that we don't have enough of the funds at the moment to go on strike,

not for any significant duration at least. Yeah. We have a GoFundMe, Moji Workers United. Yeah, we will put that in the description. The other thing is that we are looking for a lot of social media support, actually. Mucci is a very media-driven company, and we are trying to set up an Instagram account that has a lot of visibility. You can follow us also,

Muju Workers United on Instagram and it seems like people have been sharing our articles and across the internet both the NWLP article about us and then now you're interviewing us which is an enormous help to

us, Mia, thank you. We super appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much. Of course. Coffee cute. I don't know if you have anything to add to that, Renee. Yeah, just the Instagram. We have lots of very talented artists working at NUji like everyone.

It's great graphic designers, a lot of just very fun and cool people. So yeah, I'm sure that will be expressed in our future social media posts. Yeah. Hell yeah, we'll link that in description too. Awesome. Thank you, Mia.

Yeah, on one final thing, do you want to plug direct action? Yes, I do. So we've spent a lot of time talking about the legal side of unionization because our union is currently seeking federal recognition with the NLRB. I want to emphasize that this is not the end of unionization. The goal is not a contract. The goal is to use direct action to enact the changes that you want to see in your workplace. For what are probably obvious reasons, I don't want to talk about specifically stuff that we have planned or maybe

not even stuff that we've done in the past. But for example, one thing that I can talk about is that we have an ICE response plan. Like, what do we do if ICE shows up at a workplace and tries to rate us? We have a plan for that. And I obviously don't want to go further into detail about that, but that is something that we did as an example of a direct action. There's also other stuff. There's lots of historical examples of workers getting gains in their workplace. You have examples of stuff like just a simple march on the boss has historically worked to sway the boss even without it's necessarily a change in the contract, or you can have stuff that's all very legal and above board, obviously,

of people like just agreeing to not be as friendly with their boss at work and an emotionally sway their boss that way, or having smaller outside of work actions where people are helping each other out and having a workplace mutual aid project. Or even something as simple as implementing, like, a workplace fitness plan. That's something that we've discussed a couple of times at meetings very loosely, just going on hikes together or having like the community sports and stuff just to keep each other in shape and keep our communities healthy. All of this stuff is stuff that exists beyond the contract.

We're currently emphasizing the contract because that's what we are at the moment seeking, because the contract helps this feel more real for people who aren't quite on board with the idea of unionization yet. Yeah. But unionization at a workplace gets you much more than just a a better contract with your employer. And you can enact changes at your workplace faster if you work together with your co-workers and organize your co-workers. Hell yeah. Anything to add, Renee?

Everyone in the union is very aware, you know, regarding their respective capacities to help what they can, you know, and cannot do their limits. And I think just after, you know, work. working together enough, everything marries in a very effective way. And, uh, and yeah, even just like, like, uh, all of these sort of direct actions that, that Luna was naming or just came out of our meetings, just ideas that people think might be fun to do or, or, you know, people sharing their hobbies and, and want to share them with other people. Um, yeah. And so, yeah, it really is just sort of a fun hang out.

I don't want to trivialize it, but it's like, you know, extreme hanging out. Well, yeah, I think that touches on something that's really important about all of this, which is, you know, people will in the abstract talk about unions as like social institutions. But like, what that actually means is this like, yeah, it's a place where you and your friends and the people you work with go and do stuff together. And, you know, I guess I want to wrap up on like, if you want a way out of the stultifying boredom and isolation and crushing poverty of the modern capitalist experience, you too can create a union and resist all of those things simultaneously. Yeah. Yeah.

It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcast from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Cool Zone. Media.com or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Number one hits, millions of records sold. Awards, sold out tours. You think that Jonas Brothers are satisfied? Nope, it's podcast time.

We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Hey, Jonas is available now, and their first guest is a big one. Paul Rudd. You know, Steve Carell is a great singer. Can you tell you not to audition the office or something? I told him. Whoa. We were filming Anchorman.

Clearly, I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to him, right? Listen to Hey Jonas on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of family secrets.

He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's something that should not be as complicated as it is, getting a racist statue removed. And here's something that should be a whole lot easier than it is. Getting a new one put up in its place. I'm Akela Hughes.

And Rebel Spirit, Season 2 is about both of those things. As I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslave people. Listen to Rebel Spirit season two on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Champs podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Sway Lee. Do you realize how legendary you are? I appreciate that. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got like so much more to do. like Prince, he dropped like 30 albums. We dropped like five right now.

Like, that's the rate we gotta be going. Yeah, that's a good attitude. No matter the era, Drink Chams brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered conversations. Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.

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