What The Fuck REI?

Amid allegations of union busting, everyone’s favorite outdoor co-op is manipulating its board elections, endorsing fascists, and issuing half-assed apologies

Think of REI, and the first thing that pops into your mind is probably a helpful interaction you had with a friendly, knowledgeable person in a green vest. But the company is working to prevent those employees from unionizing, in order to keep their pay low and benefits limited. While that’s going on, REI has also blocked employee-backed candidates from its board, and is cozying up to the Trump administration. The good news is that all of us have a chance to send these fucks a message. Here’s how.

Let’s work in order here. Since 2022, employees at 11 REI stores across the country have voted to unionize.

“We’re unionizing at REI because we have not been provided with the working conditions and benefits we need to do the job we love,” explains the REI Union. “That’s why we’re coming together at REI to advocate for guaranteed minimum hours, pay that reflects our value and seniority, improved safety standards, and real job protections—all guaranteed in writing.”

The push for collective bargaining coincides with waves of company-wide layoffs. Beginning in January 2023, 167 employees at corporate headquarters were let go, followed by another 275 store employees that October. Then the company shuttered its Experiences division leading to another 400+ lost jobs. The company has over 16,000 employees nationwide.

Visit r/REI, and it’s easy to find dissatisfied employees sharing complaints of low pay, poor working conditions, cuts to working hours for experienced employees and a lack of training for new ones. All that is made worse by what employees say is an unresponsive and uncaring leadership team. One post from a year ago calls for former CEO Eric Artz to step down, noting that his salary amounted to over $4.5 million/year, even while base pay for a sales associate is only $19/hour.

In 2022, the REI Union struck a temporary deal for recognition with the retailer. But when that expired, the company refused to renew it. The day after the first store unionized, REI announced a plan to improve employee compensation, without input from the union. According to the REI Union, the company may be spending as much as $50 million on efforts to work against unionization at other locations.

Last month, the National Labor Relations Board found that REI had broken multiple laws in its effort to prevent employees from unionizing.

“REI broke the law by withholding merit raises and summit pay from workers at unionized stores nationwide,” NLRB states. “These benefits have been part of REI’s employee benefits package for over a decade and have been illegally withheld from unionized workers since they began bargaining, at one store (REI SoHo) that's in excess of three years.”

The law firm REI has contracted to help with labor negotiations—Morgan Lewis— is also representing Elon Musk in his efforts to dismantle the NLRB.

Artz announced he was stepping down in January, and was just fully replaced by new CEO Mary Beth Laughton, the co-op’s former board director who brings e-commerce experience from previous roles at Nike, Athlete and Sephora.

“No other company balances purpose and performance quite like REI,” Laughton stated alongside the announcement. She assumed full CEO responsibilities on March 31.

REI is the largest consumer co-op business in the country, with 24 million members. That corporate structure means that REI is owned by those members, rather than being publicly traded. Which is to say it works for us.

“REI’s core purpose is to ‘… inspire, educate and outfit for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship,;” reads the company’s mission statement.

Times have been tough for REI, like most other large retailers. The company declared losses of $311 million in 2023, and is expected to break even when results for 2024 are released.

The Co-Op’s employees feel they’re being left behind as the company focuses on cost cutting, in order to return to profitability.

“This is the kind of profit-over-people playbook that we would have expected from a corporation, from a big polluter, but not from a member-owned co-op,” Ben Smith, senior strategic partnerships advisor at Greenpeace, said at a rally to support unionization last month.

While all that has been going on, REI has also been kowtowing to fascism. In January, REI signed onto a letter from Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (a trade association) endorsing Doug Burgum for Secretary of the Interior. Since confirmation, Burgum has worked to strip public lands of environmental protections, fired thousands of workers across the National Park Service and other agencies, and lied to the American people about his plans to sell off our public lands in order to provide tax cuts for billionaires.

Then, earlier this week, Laughton recorded an Instagram video apologizing and retracting the endorsement.

“We shouldn’t have signed a letter of support for the nomination of Doug Burgum for Interior Secretary,” she stated, while pointing viewers towards REI’s political action page. “We apologize to our members. We retract our endorsement.”

That’s all pretty…weak. Retracting an endorsement for a cabinet secretary who was confirmed months ago, and is already wreaking destruction to the places, animals, and people we care about achieves precisely nothing. Working with the Conservation Alliance to lobby lawmakers is very much a worthwhile effort during normal times, but we are not in normal times. Just yesterday, for instance, Congress voted to disenfranchise 68 million women. A mealy mouthed apology does not meet the moment. Encouraging members to write to their representatives about “outdoor equity,” is going to do nothing as Burgum prepares to fire 30 percent of NPS’s workforce. Nowhere is REI even talking about the trade war that represents an existential threat to the livelihoods of its employees and the outright viability of its business. Nor is it addressing other key issues of concern for its employees, like access to healthcare, the physical safety of LGBT people, or the ability for employees who may not have been born in this country to continue employment, or avoid illegal extradition to a dystopian mega-prison in El Salvador.

REI is not living up to stated mission. It is failing its members by failing to provide the kind of work environment that attracts and retains the employees who are the reason we shop there. REI is also failing at efforts to provide “stewardship,” for public lands and the environment, and in the case of the Burgum endorsement, is actually working against that stewardship. As the largest single business in the outdoor recreation industry, members rely on REI to organize and guide advocacy for the outdoors, and serve as a model for responsible business.

Fortunately, there is a process through which members can directly create change in how the company is managed. As members, each of us gets a vote in the board of director elections.

But the company is failing members there, too. This year, two union-backed pro-labor candidates attempted to run for the board, but were rejected. Tefere Gebre, chief program officer at Greenpeace, and Shemona Moreno, who runs the climate nonprofit 350 Seattle both gathered thousands of signatures in an effort to run for a board seat, but when the list of official candidates was released on March 3, their names were nowhere to be seen. In their place, the board nominated two incumbent members, and the executive vice president of BJ’s Wholesale.

Changes to procedural rules governing board elections in the early 2000s give the existing board the authority to decide what names appear on the ballot.

“REI gamed the rules so they can keep anyone they don’t like off members’ ballots,” Sarah Cherin, who represents unionized workers at REI’s Bellingham, Washington location, told PBS. “We are sending REI a message by voting no in their board election and demanding that REI respect the rights of its members and workers.”

Here’s how this concerned REI member is voting in this year’s board elections.

Despite their control over which names appear on the ballot, REI’s board has no power over how all 24 million of us members vote. Each and every REI member gets to vote, and the process is easy, just follow this link. The REI Union is asking us to vote “withhold” for all three board-picked candidates.

If that effort achieves a majority, those seats will be considered vacant, and filled by appointment until the next annual meeting of members. This shouldn’t impact company operations, but organizers are hoping it will at least send a message.

The Union explains: “This is our opportunity to hold the company accountable and make it clear to the new CEO that REI members care about the company’s founding values and want to see them reflected in the Co-op’s future!”

Top photo: Sarah Stierch / Creative Commons

Wes Siler is your guide to leading a more exciting life outdoors. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports independent journalism and gives you personal access to his expertise and network, which he’ll use to help you plan trips, purchase gear, and solve problems. You can read more about what he’s doing on Substack through this link.