NLRB Rules Tennessee Food Manufacturer The BE Hive Wrongfully Fired Three Workers for Organizing

Food Production Worker Correspondent

This month, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that two of my coworkers and I were wrongfully terminated from The BE Hive—a vegan food manufacturer based in Tennessee—after we had been attempting to organize the facility.

The company has over 40 employees between its two storefront locations in Nashville, TN and Austin, TX; its salespeople from various states; and its production facility in Nashville.

I had been working at the production facility since 2022. As the company expanded into different regions, hired more workers, increased production, and expressed its goal to become the “vegan Starbucks,” I got together with two of my coworkers to talk about organizing for improvements to overtime, pay, and production increases.

We held our first meetings at the end of February. Within a week, seven of us were laid off, including myself and the other two workers leading the organizing effort. Despite attempting to disguise why we were fired by also laying off several other people, the reason was obvious: we were let go for attempting to organize the workplace.

Over the next two weeks, most of the remaining production line workers went on strike and picketed outside the Nashville storefront location. The main demand of the strikers was reinstatement or better severance for the terminated workers. The strikers picketed nearly every day for those two weeks, and many supporters came out. We raised over $6,000 for the strike fund, including with the help of a benefit show. The strike was able to successfully pressure The BE Hive into giving myself and the other terminated workers an additional week of severance.

While the strike fund gave strikers enough money to strike for two weeks, that well eventually ran dry, and the strikers made the difficult decision to vote to end the strike. While the increased severance was certainly a victory, it was still only a partial one. The BE Hive never met with the striking workers, and workers were not given the opportunity to negotiate their demands. Instead, The BE Hive went to social media to lament their own financial hardships they claim were responsible for the layoffs.

Every time a company faces a labor struggle, they always talk about their hardships as a company. The script is tired. Crucially missing from the narrative are the financial hardships of the workers—who The BE Hive or any other company in the world could not exist without.

After being laid off, every financial decision carries an entirely different weight. Could I afford the phone I just bought, which I needed to communicate with The BE Hive about work? Could I afford to sign the lease my new landlord was preparing to send over the day I was fired? Will my former coworkers be able to afford to fix their cars to get to work, or afford the moves they were planning to be closer to The BE Hive? Can any of us afford food and gas during these rising prices?

We were lucky and grateful to be able to lean on each other as workers as well as the community that offered us support, but we are still feeling the effects of this implosion in our lives. We are playing catch up on stability, on debt incurred to live while unemployed, and job security.

Since the NLRB found that it was well within our right to organize and that we were wrongfully terminated for doing so, The BE Hive must compensate us in back pay and/or the right to reinstatement.

We are still negotiating the terms of the settlement, and between The BE Hive’s procrastination and the bureaucracy of the NLRB, we are unsure of how long the process will take. The process from filing the Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) to the NLRB making a decision already took five months, and we are three months into negotiations on the settlement. What will our financial position be by the time we reach an agreement?

While we wish for a swift and fair settlement, we understand companies seldom go down without a fight, but neither do we. When capitalists attack their workers, it only keeps the workers down for so long. We will not accept anything less than what we are owed, and we urge readers to pressure The BE Hive into giving us our due.

As we chanted on the picket line,
“No Bees, No Hive! / Workers of the World Unite!”

Image: Solidarity picket outside of BE Hive location in Austin, TX. Retrieved from GoFundMe.

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