Keurig factory workers in Victorville vote to unionize: ‘We’re not standing for this anymore’

Keurig Dr Pepper Inc. workers in Victorville have narrowly voted to unionize under the Teamsters, and organizers say company pushback suggests that tough talks lie ahead to reach the factory's first collective bargaining agreement.

With a vote count certified Friday by the National Labor Relations Board, 266 workers at the Victorville factory are set to join Teamsters Local 896, according to the NLRB website. The vote was 129-112, with a few workers not participating. It applies to full- and part-time hourly employees in warehouse, quality control, production and maintenance roles.

Before negotiations between the union and Keurig Dr Pepper begin, the company gets a chance to issue any challenges it may have to the election results. The Teamsters say they aren't worried about claims of an illegitimate vote, and the union is preparing to flex its regional muscle in hopes of solidifying a deal for its newest members.

“If the company thinks they’re just dealing with Victorville with this, then they have a huge surprise coming their way,” Phil Cooper, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 896, told the Daily Press. “This is too important to every other Keurig Dr Pepper facility in California to not get a good contract for these people.”

Keurig Dr Pepper didn't respond to multiple requests for comment.

3,000 members across state

Local 896 represents beer and soft drink workers at some, but not all, production and distribution facilities in California, including those of major brands such as Coca-Cola, Budweiser and Pepsi. Its union work goes back 75 years.

Cooper, who has lived in the High Desert for nearly four decades and led the Teamsters unit for nine, said his Teamsters branch has about 2,500 members in Southern California and 500 members in Northern California, "so we're a small local."

However, with the broader union's state and nationwide presence — the International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents more than a million workers in North America — Local 896 often doesn't work alone.

Cooper says that cross-regional reach was put to use earlier this year, when he asked the International to assist the Keurig Dr Pepper campaign in Victorville. Despite a moratorium the union had in place on flying at the time, he says a group of Las Vegas-based Teamsters drove down to bolster the organizing effort.

Local 896 isn't the only branch of the union that seeks to organize the beverage industry. Cooper said a total of six Keurig Dr Pepper facilities in Southern California that had unionized with some branch of the Teamsters prior to the recent vote in Victorville.

Cooper said his local represents workers at two other Keurig Dr Pepper production facilities in the region: one in Vernon, the other in San Fernando. In both cities, drivers and merchandisers are unionized under a different branch, Local 848, which also represents salespeople in Vernon.

Separately, Local 952 covers a Keurig Dr Pepper facility in Orange, Cooper said. In Riverside, workers are unionized under Local 1932, which has organized public and private-sector employees across the Inland Empire. San Diego and Ventura are two other locations represented by different locals.

Similar campaigns are ongoing in the state's central and northern regions, he said, including an effort at a Keurig Dr Pepper distribution facility in Sacramento.

Cooper calls this amalgam of Teamsters branches a key to "union density," or the clout to leverage a wide array of workers toward winning demands at an individual workplace using tactics such as mass organizing campaigns or widespread strikes.

Still, pushes to unionize the beverage supply chain statewide have been a mixed bag for unions like Local 896. Keurig Dr Pepper facilities, including the one in Victorville, are no exception.

A union campaign fails if it doesn't get majority approval at the ballot box, and Cooper says the Teamsters only seek an official vote if they're confident they've got support from two-thirds of represented workers.

For that reason, the tight margin in this month's Victorville vote surprised them. Cooper attributes it to 25 eligible workers having not voted and some others having been swayed by counter-union efforts of the company.

Some past campaigns by Local 896 and its affiliates have faltered, dissipating before a vote was held.

'Wait a minute'

This isn’t the first effort to unionize workers at the Victorville factory.

Cooper said an initial campaign fell short in 2013 — just a few years after the Victorville facility opened as a Dr Pepper/Seven Up Inc. site — when the Teamsters found themselves butting heads with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) over which group would represent the employees.

The IAM ultimately got a successful vote to represent 23 maintenance mechanics at the facility. Teamsters wanted everyone else, but Cooper says the organizing process had become too disoriented to galvanize enough support for a separate vote.

He added that the IAM never reached a collective bargaining agreement with the company, effectively nullifying the mechanics' union status. Mechanics are now among those set to be represented by Local 896 in Victorville.

For years after the 2013 campaign, Cooper says he kept in touch with workers and made a few attempts to rekindle the unionizing effort. Then, in late 2019, a warehouse worker reached out to him.

“It was right before COVID hit where a lot of us were being worked a lot of hours — 12 hour shifts, seven hours a week,” Adan Soto, a material handler at the Victorville facility, told the Daily Press. “A lot of us started trying to organize and say, ‘Look, what can we do to let the company know that, you know, this is serious. We’re not standing for this anymore.’”

Soto and Cooper met in October that year, sparking a string of follow-up meetings between Teamsters from the outside and rank-and-file workers within.

Then, the pandemic began.

The organizing effort became an internal one led by workers like Soto. He says support for the union push gained momentum among workers as policy shifts became more punitive and less transparent. 

Soto said early in the pandemic, Keurig Dr Pepper would hold "town hall"-style meetings to inform the workers of any upcoming policy changes. The workers would then be given a consent form to sign, he said, acknowledging that they understood and agreed to the change. 

As in-person work continued at the facility, Soto says the meetings and consent forms stopped while policy changes continued.

"Now when the changes were made, we're like, 'Wait a minute, where's the paper to show that you explained this to me?'"

Soto says multiple workers went on to face penalties for violating policies they didn't realize had changed. One employee was written up for wearing earbuds in a filler room, he said. One got a write-up after not realizing his personal time-off had been converted to sick time-off; he entered the workplace premises while on sick time-off, which Soto says is a violation of the sick time policy.

Cooper, Soto and other organizers say the company also paid “union-busters” to organize impromptu meetings and hang around the facility to dissuade workers from the idea of unionizing — referencing union-required fees and saying the union can’t guarantee them job improvements.

Frustrations over those and other actions by the company, Cooper and Soto say, convinced a majority of workers to vote for the union.

'It's gonna be a struggle'

Cooper said assuming any election challenges from Keurig Dr Pepper are unsuccessful, he’ll send a request for information to the company for everything he needs to know about the worker experience, such as wages, medical benefits and disciplinary standards.

When a start-date for negotiations is determined, Cooper says the rank-and-file workers from each department represented in the Victorville facility — lab techs, janitors, forklift drivers and more — will tell Teamsters who they want in negotiations.

"We'll have a very large negotiation committee, and these rank-and-file workers are the subject-matter experts," Cooper said. "I'm going to help them get their first contract, but they're going to tell us what they want, and if the company tells us something and we turn around to ask if that's true, they can call bullshit."

Cooper said if Keurig Dr Pepper attempts "to give us a bad contract and never get it voted in," a broader Teamsters strike could result — putting the company "in danger of having the whole of Southern California shut down."

"It’s gonna be a struggle," he said. "I personally believe we’re gonna have to leverage this negotiation."  

Soto has become a de facto leader of the effort at the factory. He says he’s somewhat nervous, as this is new territory for him, but that he’s excited to fight for better, more secure terms of the job. He hopes to prove to his coworkers that joining a union was the right move.

Yet, Soto doesn't see the union push as one of hostility, and says he plans to be a fair mediator with Keurig Dr Pepper.

"I want to do what's right, what's fair for the workers, and also be that model employee for my employer."

Charlie McGee covers the city of Barstow and its surrounding communities for the Daily Press. He is also a Report for America corps member with the GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and around the world. McGee may be reached at 760-955-5341 or cmcgee@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @bycharliemcgee.