If your beloved pet were to pass today, what would you do?
Luckily, there exist pet aftercare centers, like the one my co-workers and I work at. We provide skilled and empathetic cremation services for a whole range of household pets and farm animals.
But while the animals may all be treated with dignity and respect, we employees can’t always say the same.. That’s why we attempted to unionize our workplace last spring. We came close, falling just short of a victory—but we learned a lot along the way. Here’s how it unfolded.
Pets Over Profits
Workers in the pet aftercare industry help veterinarians and pet owners navigate the hardest part of their journey with their pets. We provide cremation services along with a selection of urns and memorial items like paw prints and custom jewelry. Working in this field requires a constant commitment to empathic communication along with technical artisanry to deliver high-quality memorial packages with the utmost level of care and trust.
Unfortunately, our company does not see things this way. They are the largest pet aftercare business in North America, and in the region where we work, they control about 80% of the market. The profit margin is huge and derives from exploiting the love that people have for their pets. Who wouldn’t be willing to pay whatever it takes for their sweet fur baby? For example, the most basic urn we offer costs us on average $2.30 to purchase from the supplier, but it retails for $98.00!
Such sky-high profits do not trickle down to the workers who show up every day. Instead, we have aging fleets of vans and trucks that put us at risk every time we get behind the wheel. There is a stubborn reluctance to invest in the machinery we need to get the job done and even more so regarding the mechanics needed to keep it all running. This introduces needless delays and sometimes safety risks in facilities all across the country.
Instead of an efficient, integrated decision-making process, we face bureaucratic siloing that ignores the expertise of those of us on the ground. Meanwhile, our pay fails to keep pace with rent and groceries. We have no childcare, and our employer abruptly changed our health insurance provider at the beginning of the year, saddling us with higher premiums. The overall business strategy is simply to become the biggest player in the arena, squeezing out family-run cemeteries and crematories all over the map, so pet owners have no recourse but to pay monopoly prices — which just lines the pockets of the C-suite executives and shareholders.
The Promise of a Union
For these reasons, we decided to try to unionize. It would have been the first in the company’s history to our knowledge. It would have also certainly been one of the only unions in our industry, which historically has suffered even lower rates of unionization than the workforce at large. After months of discussing the pros and cons as we saw them, we reached out to a union representative to help us out. He was incredibly patient and helpful and informed us of our rights and the benefits that would come with unionizing. In the middle of the summer, we met with him and talked about concrete next steps in enlisting his union’s support for our cause. Unfortunately, our efforts fizzled out shortly after.
The reasons why it failed provide crucial insight into the nature of contemporary labor organizing in the U.S.
For one thing, we went through some personnel changes. Some folks who were key in our struggle ended up leaving to take higher-paying jobs elsewhere. We didn’t have the same depth of relationships with the new hires as we did with our former co-workers, and that lack of trust and intimacy is a big obstacle to broaching a topic as sensitive as unionizing.
But more important than that, once we found out exactly what it takes to get our union recognized and the timeline that would require, our momentum faded. Our organizer walked us through all the steps required, including signing our intent-to-unionize cards, having more organizers follow up with each of us to ensure our commitment, and then possibly going through an NLRB-mediated election. That’s all just to try and establish a union in the first place. The precious union contract, which would address all the significant shortcomings at our workplace, would come later, and we couldn’t predict how bitter the negotiations would have turned or whether corporate would have even played ball.
State of the Pet Aftercare Industry
Working in this industry is less of a career and more of a dead-end job. My co-workers and I struggle with not wanting to work here long enough to realize the benefits of a union contract. And unfortunately, organizing purely for the benefit of those who would replace us isn’t tangible enough of a goal to keep the wind in the sails.
This is a difficult realization to wrestle with, and I’m not sure what it means in an age of “bullshit jobs,” to use David Graeber’s phrasing. I’ve never stayed at a workplace for more than three years, and that goes for almost everyone I’ve ever worked with. How do we organize amid such precarity and endemic lack of respect across all industries?
Life After Organizing Death
But there’s a positive element to this story as well. Out of many, we were able to come together to agree on the necessity of a union. We all brought very different experiences to the table, yet we were able to organize across them. Some of us are single parents, others have been previously homeless, many are queer, some are college-educated, and the list goes on.
I myself never thought that we would have gotten as far as we did. Only one of us had ever been in a union before, and many were completely ignorant of or even hostile to the idea when we first started. But by relying on the relationships we had forged with each other, and always bringing conversations back to the concrete experiences of our drudgery, freed from personal opinions or heady political ideologies, we were able to briefly band together for a higher cause.
I have never felt so much hope at a workplace as during those few precious months of our conscious organizing. I hope to retain that energy either here or elsewhere. What I have learned I will carry with me until every worker is unionized, in this country and beyond!
