RUTLAND, Vt. (AP) – Labor unions are shopping for new members at a seemingly unlikely place: Vermont’s community food co-ops.

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America bagged their first group of celery-stocking colleagues in February at the 160-employee Onion River Co-op City Market in Burlington and its second in April at the 70-employee Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier.

The United Food and Commercial Workers now are eyeing the 125-employee Brattleboro Food Co-op. Organizing attempts now under way in southern Vermont are similar to those waged in northern and central Vermont, reflecting how once small, volunteer-run co-ops have become big business in the state.

The Burlington co-op, for example, reports $14 million in sales the first year of its new $5.9 million, 16,000-square-foot downtown market. The Montpelier and Brattleboro co-ops, which reap almost $9 million and $12 million respectively in annual sales, are wrestling with their own multi-million-dollar expansion plans.

But co-op workers cite smaller numbers. In Brattleboro, newcomers earn a starting salary of about $7 an hour (the state minimum wage is $6.25), while the store’s average wage is $9.50 an hour plus benefits. In comparison, the state’s Joint Fiscal Office says a single Vermonter with employer-provided health care needs to earn at least $11.58 an hour in a full-time job to reap a “livable wage” of $24,086 a year.

“At a co-op you pay a little more to eat organic food,” says Kimberly Lawson, a United Electrical (UE) representative in Burlington.

“Wouldn’t it also be nice to shop at a place where people were able to sustain themselves on livable wages?”

Management, in response, is recognizing workers’ rights to organize. But leaders question how unions will affect their ability to compete against price-slashing supermarkets in a business with expenses as high as earnings.

Labor unions stepped into Vermont food co-ops this winter when workers at the state’s largest, Burlington’s Onion River, organized with the UE.

The seven-decade-old union was the first to organize Vermont’s machine tool industry during and after World War II and went on to become the state’s largest manufacturing representative before business closings and consolidations.

Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers now include colleagues at workplaces as divergent as Burlington’s food shelf and the nearby Flynn Center for the Performing Arts box office. The union further upended its weapons-plant image this winter by speaking out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“The members of my union take a stand on most issues,” Lawson says. “Our position is if we don’t speak for issues that affect the working class, who does?” Onion River workers voted 89-23 in a straw poll for the union, noting two concerns, the first being pay. “Burlington has an ordinance that brought all city employees up to livable wages,” Lawson says. “We don’t think it’s out of line for a community-owned co-op to live up to the same standard.”

AP-ES-06-01-03 1502EDT