Costco workers in Norfolk, VA last month convincingly voted to join Teamsters Local 822, marking the union’s first organizing victory at the wholesale retailer in more than two decades. The 238-worker group of associates employed at the Costco on Glenrock Road now must hammer out a contract with Costco management.
“This campaign was all about standing together as a group and taking control over our well-being in our workplace,” said Damion Thomas, a front-end cashier at the Norfolk Costco who served on the organizing committee. “We can’t wait to be covered under a strong Teamster contract that will give us a real voice and bring real change to the job.”
With the addition of the Norfolk facility, 56 of Costco’s 600 U.S. warehouses are now organized. Of those, 40 are located in California where some of the old Price Club stores remained unionized after it merged with Costco in 1993. Additionally, employees at 14 other warehouses in New York, New Jersey and Maryland (all former Price Club locations) joined the Teamsters in 2002. Another Costco location in Glen Allen, VA (which was not a Price Club unit) was unionized in 2004. Those 56 unionized stores represent about 18,000 of Costco’s approximately 206,000 workers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
“Costco workers saw the new energy at the International under the O’Brien-Zuckerman (Teamsters International president Sean O’Brien and secretary-treasurer Fred Zuckerman) administration, and they wanted in. I’d like to thank the Teamsters warehouse division and organizing department for their support throughout this campaign. Most of all, I want to thank the workers for standing strong,” said James Wright, president of Local 822 and International vice president at-large. “This campaign was all about boots on the ground. These workers understood the power that comes with being a Teamster.”
In October 2022, the Teamsters ratified a first-ever national master agreement for those already organized Costco workers. The national agreement boosts wages and pension contributions by the employer and provides members with higher semi-annual bonuses and a more flexible attendance policy, among other workplace improvements.
From the other side, Costco management has taken a different view of the Norfolk election. Instead of pointing fingers at its employees in the manner that former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz did, former CEO Craig Jelinek (who retired on December 31) and new chief executive Ron Vachris looked at themselves for the results of the election.
In an internal letter to its U.S. employees, Vachris and Jelinek said they were disappointed with the Norfolk workers’ decision and attributed the result to a “failure on our part.”
“At Costco, we take great pride in our relationships with each other. We’re not anti-union, but our core value of ‘taking care of our employees’ has never been the result of any union,” Vachris and Jelinek stated in the letter, which was dated December 29.
Eight days earlier, in a statement about the then-upcoming vote, Local 822 said that it was seeking “strong representation to address years of concerns and improve working conditions,” adding that many of the Norfolk workers who voted to unionize were influenced by that national master agreement.