Urban Ore workers suspend strike

Workers at the Berkeley salvage yard Urban Ore agreed to suspend their open-ended strike May 1. The 45-day suspension agreement includes a just-cause disciplinary clause, formal recognition of the union from management, union security, a stable wage structure and the eventual reinstatement of laid off and striking workers.

The suspension comes after months of what the union calls bad faith bargaining on the owners’ behalf and several varied proposals from workers.

Beyond the immediate conflict is a deeper history. Urban Ore was founded in the age when co-ops were both a business model and a political statement in Berkeley.

Co-ops are still fairly common in the Bay Area, and they were designed as an alternative to traditional capitalism. Under the co-op model, workers shared in management decisions and shared in the profits.

Bay Area worker co-operatives bloomed in the wake of the 1960’s, when young people, desperate for change to the status quo, sought to make a new utopia. The bright-eyed hippies on Shattuck Avenue eventually grew up and became business owners themselves. Instructed by the idealism of their youth, they leaned into co-ops as a solution to capitalism’s exploitation.

Urban Ore, a legendary organization in the East Bay, comes out of that 1960s idealism. Birthed in 1980, it served as a small but meaningful push back against the growing consumerism that was subsuming America at the time. Initially it started with co-owner Dan Knapp acquiring discarded items from the dump and reselling them. It was an early effort at large-scale recycling.

Workers earned a modest salary—but also took home a share of the revenue.

“Look around the whole Bay Area, there’s nobody else who serves the same function. One of the reasons we’ve been successful and doing it for 44 years is the wage structure. Where everybody is structured into the same boat,” Mary Lou Van Deventer, co-owner, told me in an interview.

But for workers in the Bay Area today, where housing and other costs are brutal, it hasn’t been enough to expect a share of the profits. They want a different model: They need to know every week how much they will have in their paychecks.

While Knapp and Van Deventer have said repeatedly that they want to retire and transition Urban Ore into a worker-owned co-operative at some point in the future, in the present they’ve largely failed to address workers’ concerns about that instability.

Still, the mission of the Murray Street business is what draws so many workers and what keeps them coming back.

In my conversations with Knapp and Van Deventer, they expressed frustration at workers for striking, seemingly reflecting what they felt was an attack on their ideological mission. But as workers have told me, it’s not about them. It’s about trying to eke out a living in an area that has become increasingly unlivable for anyone not in Tech.

“Urban Ore is a really cool place and concept, but there’s a lot of failures of capitalism to fulfil the perfect utopian, ecological and environmental mission that Urban Ore wants to put forward,” Benno Giammarinaro, a member of the organizing committee who worked in receiving, said in an interview.

“I see an opportunity here to use labor pressure as a way to make a better Urban Ore for the community, not just for us directly as workers,” Giammarinaro said.

Initially, Knapp and Van Deventer were refusing to return to the bargaining table.

“Look, we’ve been at the bargaining table with them and we’ve gotten their most recent letter. This was only a couple of days ago, and it’s the same old that we’ve already said we can’t deal with,” Knapp said.

The owners claimed that the workers’ proposal was unaffordable but refused to provide any additional financial information and didn’t provide any substantive counter-offer.

“There’s just been no bargaining. What they want is for us to come down from our current proposals …without providing any evidence to back their claims of unaffordability,” said Sarah Mossler, a member of the bargaining committee who formerly worked in receiving. Mossler got word she was slated to be laid off shortly after our conversation.

“Our proposals are, and have always been negotiable. We have reaffirmed again and again that we do not want to do anything that would be unsustainable for the company,” Jordan said.  

Mossler echoed this sentiment, noting workers’ willingness to adapt their proposals if they’re met in good faith. 

“It’s important to emphasize that this whole time we’ve been willing to bargain…we want to reach an agreement and we want to reach something that’s fair for both sides. Obviously we don’t want to have a CBA that would bankrupt the company,” she said.

When asked if management would provide additional financial information to the bargaining committee, Van Deventer told me, “Absolutely not,” framing workers’ proposals as an attempt at budgeting.

“No, we’re not interested in doing that. I don’t think we’ve ever made a proposal that says anything like that,” Giammarinaro said.

Knapp and Van Deventer have framed this strike as a kind of attack on them personally and their mission. The workers I spoke with noted that this is more about stability and equity than the owners themselves.

“We want to get this thing done. We’ve watched the company take a serious financial hit from this and we would all prefer to be back at our jobs,” Mossler said.

California is an at-will employment state, meaning that bosses or owners do not have to provide a just cause for termination. A general point for workers is a just-cause termination policy that would allow employees who are slated to be fired to appeal and potentially go to their union for a review.

“Wages are only one component of what we’re trying to get. For me, the actual most important element is the just cause standard. I want to be able to work here without the fear that at any moment the sword could fall on my neck,” Spencer Jordan, formerly a salvager, said in an April 17 interview.

According to multiple workers I spoke with, their most recent proposals included a stop gap wage adjustment, an agreement on discipline and discharge, union recognition, union security and a grievance clause. Another component of workers’ recent proposals included immediate reinstatement for full-time workers and delayed reinstatement for part-time workers. As noted above, the May Day suspension includes clauses for all of the tenants above.

At some point during the week of April 6, a bright blue and green banner was lofted atop the entrance of the storefront reading “20% Off Everything.” Notably, this is the first sale in the company’s history.

Throughout the four-week strike many customers expressed support for workers in person and online. Workers would happily invite those customers back into the salvage yard if they get a contract that is fair and viable.

“We’ve heard from a lot of would-be customers that they aren’t going to shop at Urban Ore until we have a full contract and one that we’re happy with. And we told them, as a sign of good faith we are eager to bring those people back and use the community connections that we’ve called upon during the strike to lift up the company,” Mossler said.

Ostensibly started to combat the growing waste of our consumer economy and promote sustainability, Urban Ore has long been beloved by the East Bay in large part because it represented a place of direct action against consumer capitalism, a democratic reclamation of the environment.

Every worker I spoke with noted how passionate they were about Urban Ore’s mission. Failing to address their concerns like this reflects a failure to fulfill that original mission and as Jordan noted, this much bigger than the specific conditions at the shop.

“The union is our attempt to have some degree of workplace democracy over our conditions, which is a thing ownership says they believe in,” Jordan said. “More than just wages, it’s about dignity and democracy and security in the workplace as well.”