Seattle-based REI will cut 275 retail jobs, including 19 in Washington state and an unknown number in Alaska, where REI has a store in Anchorage and one in Fairbanks.
The cuts come at a time when, one by one, REI stores have unionized over the last year. In February, the company, run as a nonprofit, laid off 8% of its workforce, and this round of layoffs will eliminate 2% of the jobs, for a total of 10% downsizing this year alone.
The company is changing its brick-and-mortar business model, said Mary-Farrell Tarbox, REI vice president of stores, in an email to to employees Thursday. It will hire seasonal workers and part-timers as a part of the change — jobs that offer 16 to 24 hours per week.
“Our current operating model for stores is more than a decade old,” Tarbox wrote. “There are many areas that are out of date and no longer serving our employees or REI’s mission and business.”
The “Lead” role in stores was chosen for cuts, according to the Tarbox email, as it is “the most inconsistently used role across the fleet and [we] are retiring it effective immediately.”
United Food and Commercial Workers Union has been organizing in several of the stores, making demands of a company that is, by its actions, struggling to compete. New York, Berkeley, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston, Durham, N.C., Maple Grove, Minn., and Bellingham stores are now unionized.
The REI Union wrote that the union will be pursuing legal recourse because the company is required by law to negotiate with the union any major layoffs. It’s unclear if 2% of the workforce will be seen as a major layoff by the courts, but litigation appears on the horizon.
The REI union wrote, “instead of honoring the expertise their most veteran employees bring to the Co-op, REI made the callous decision to lay off tenured staff even while they are still hiring new staff at lower wage rates. REI executives are sacrificing their most loyal employees to cut labor costs– a decision that not only betrays the values the co-op was founded on but eliminates years of expertise that REI customers have come to rely on when they shop.”
With unionization on the march at REI, the union management doesn’t seem to connect their actions with the company’s management decisions. Instead, the union has been heralding its organizing victories:
“But let us be clear: because we unionized in SoHo, these layoffs are *illegal.* REI has a legal obligation to negotiate with their unionized workers over ANY restructuring plan. REI has broken the law by unilaterally implementing these changes in the eight unionized stores,” the union wrote on social media.
In a response to other social conditions, such as out-of-control shoplifting and other crime, REI decided to close its store in the Pearl District of Portland, a location that last year recorded the highest number of break-ins and thefts in the past 20 years, despite adding security. That store will close in February, which will also add to the downsizing of the REI footprint.
REI has more than 16,000 employees are 181 locations in 41 states plus the District of Columbia.
