Half Price Books union keeps growing as workers in Apple Valley organize

July 20, 2026 by
Workers with fists raised outside a Half Price Books store

Workers at the Half Price Books in Apple Valley celebrate their successful union election. (UFCW photo)

The Twin Cities area has its fifth union bookstore, after workers at the Half Price Books in Apple Valley voted earlier this month to organize with United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 663.

Workers at the company’s stores in St. Louis Park, Coon Rapids, St. Paul and Roseville organized in 2021, won their union elections in 2022, and ratified their first contract in 2024. UFCW Local 1189 represents workers at the St. Paul and Roseville stores.

The new, 15-person bargaining unit in Apple Valley will look to build on gains made by union members at the other locations, bookseller Drew Schmidt said. That includes guardrails for the employer’s use of artificial intelligence in the workplace.

“Half Price Books is attempting to iron out the individuality that shapes our community by standardizing our roles and incorporating AI in our workplace,” Schmidt said. “Unionizing is our way of encouraging Half Price Books to correct its course.”

Apple Valley workers also hope to bargain for higher wages and better staffing in their store, which sees steady foot traffic despite being the smallest Half Price Books outlet in the area, bookseller Katelyn Anderson said.

“We’re fairly busy and have much more limited space,” she said. “I feel like sometimes we don’t have enough people to cover how busy our store is.”

Meanwhile, workers’ wages aren’t keeping up with the rising cost of living, and Anderson said the pay does not reflect the level of expertise she and her co-workers must maintain. Unlike most other retail jobs, Half Price Books workers make cash offers to people looking to sell their books, albums or other materials.

“It’s really hard to kind of feel comfortable in this job with how much work we’re asked to do for the wages that we get,” Anderson said.

“I love this job. It’s cool to see the stuff that comes in and be able to help people find materials that they’re excited and passionate about. It’s amazing, but it does kind of feel defeating because they’re just not really livable wages anymore.”

Apple Valley workers voted 10-5 in favor of unionizing. The National Labor Relations Board certified the election results July 8.

– Michael Moore, UA editor

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After trendsetting campaign, Twin Cities workers ratify first contracts with Half Price Books

June 12, 2024 by

Workers at Half Price Books in Roseville shut down the store during a two-day strike in July 2023. (UA file photo)

After an organizing drive that sparked similar efforts at bookstores across the country, workers at four Half Price Books stores in the Twin Cities ratified their first union contracts May 31, winning higher wages, job security and a voice on the job.

“Through the hard work of the entire bargaining committee, we have shown all of our co-workers the priceless value of having a union contract,” Aaron Kerr, a bookseller at the Roseville store, said. “This is going to help everyone at Half Price Books, and it will continue for decades to come.”

The contracts cover workers at Half Price Books locations in Roseville and St. Paul, who are members of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1189, as well as workers at stores in Coon Rapids and St. Louis Park, who are members of UFCW Local 663.

Union members from all four stores bargained jointly with the company. Their new contracts include higher starting wages – up from $12 to $16 across the company since workers formed their union, according to a statement released by the UFCW.

The contracts also include job protections like a “just cause” discipline policy with grievance procedures, protections for transgender workers and new rules governing layoff and recall process, scheduling and job classifications.

But those gains didn’t come without a fight.

Beginning in November 2021, local bookstore workers voted to unionize in four separate National Labor Relations Board elections, after Half Price Books refused their petition for voluntary recognition.

Contract bargaining began in spring 2022, but momentum toward first contracts slowed when talks reached the economic phase. Workers began appealing to customers for support, wearing union pins and demonstrating outside their stores.

In July 2023, workers at all four stores walked off the job in a two-day strike over unfair labor practices, accusing the company of dragging out negotiations in an attempt to bust their union.

Local 1189 President Jim Gleb praised the “commitment and incredible solidarity” that Half Price Books workers showed during their organizing and contract campaigns.

“They have shown workers all around the country what can be achieved by standing up for your rights, and I am proud to have them as members of the UFCW,” Gleb said. “The labor community is lucky to count them among us.”

Indeed, since Minnesota workers formed the first union at a Half Price Books location, booksellers at stores in Indiana, Illinois, Kansas and California have unionized, too.

Minnesota workers were the second Half Price Books union to ratify first contracts, following UFCW members at the Half Price Books in Greenwood, Ind., who voted on their union contract a week earlier.

“Workers at Half Price Books have blazed a path that inspires others to follow,” Local 663 Secretary-Treasurer Michael LaCoste said. “UFCW welcomes any workers that want to build a better life together.”

Wyatt Feten, a bookseller at the Northtown Half Price Books in Coon Rapids, added: “This victory comes from the work of everyone at all of our stores. We are looking forward to this new era at Half Price Books with an official union contract and representation.”

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Insulted by 1% wage offer, Half Price Books workers strike

July 13, 2023 by

Striking Half Price Books workers picketed the Roseville store Thursday morning.

Fed up with slow negotiations and an “insulting” wage offer, Half Price Books workers in the Twin Cities called a two-day strike this morning, and more than 40 union members – about three-quarters of the bargaining unit – showed up in Brooklyn Center at the site of scheduled talks with management.

But the bosses responded by canceling negotiations for the week and closing all four stores – the latest example, union member Hanna Anderson said, that the company is more interested in dragging out the process than in taking workers’ demands seriously.

“They told us that they needed the day to figure out the logistics of running the stores, so they couldn’t bargain,” said Anderson, a shift leader at the store in St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood. “An hour later we all got messages that all four of the stores were going to be closed for the next two days.”

That left workers, including longtime bookseller Aaron Kerr, fuming on the picket line.

“They are not in there. The stores are not open. Why are they not at the bargaining table?” Kerr said outside the Roseville location where he has worked for more than two decades. “That is something that makes me incredibly angry.”

Union members are angry, too, about HPB’s stubborn wage proposal, stuck at increases of 1% annually since the company made its first economic proposal in May. Anderson said the offer is insulting, especially given that the union scaled back its demands in bargaining earlier this week.

“This past session we came down a little bit,” she said. “They are holding to their 1%, and they refuse to even entertain anything else, which is obviously very upsetting to everyone here. Especially the past week, when the company basically said we don’t deserve a living wage, that really frustrated everyone.”

Workers have proposed increasing HPB’s starting pay from $15 to $16 per hour and $1.50 wage hikes for other employees, plus a new pay scale based on longevity.

Currently, workers get quarterly bonuses and annual raises at their bosses’ discretion, but raises of 2% or 3% don’t amount to much when your pay is stuck at $15 per hour, Anderson said.

“And there have been years where, if we were getting a new computer system, there weren’t bonuses,” she said. “It is just if they are willing to give us them. You can’t rely on them.”

Workers from the St. Paul and Roseville stores bargain jointly with workers from St. Louis Park and Coon Rapids locations. They all voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers – locals 1189 and 663 – in separate elections starting in November 2021.

Negotiations over a first contract began over 19 months ago, and they had been productive before reaching the economic phase, with tentative agreements on workplace health and safety, grievance procedures, scheduling. Other agreements would prevent managers from filling jobs that would take hours away from union members, and would clearly establish a process, based primarily on seniority, for potential layoffs.

Talks turned to economics this spring, and after a round of handbilling and informational picketing failed to move management, workers finally have called a strike, formally citing charges of unfair labor practices that the union filed over management’s failure to share “crucial information.”

It’s a big step for a new union to take, Anderson acknowledged.

“We have been saying ‘strike’ is kind of like the s-word,” she said. “People were nervous. But we have legal protections. We are really a close-knit community, and seeing everyone from all four stores has been really awesome.”

Kerr said support for the strike was overwhelming, and it showed in the turnout at the planned bargaining session this morning.

“In our meetings, everybody showed up and it was almost unanimous that we need to do this,” he said. “We have got to do whatever it takes to make management understand we are serious, or they will continue to pretend that what they want to give us is completely reasonable.”

Workers held picketing at all four stores today, traveling from Coon Rapids to Roseville in the morning, then hitting St. Paul and St. Louis Park in the afternoon.

Supporters are welcome to join the picket line (monitor the union’s social media feeds for locations). Union members are also asking supporters to call on Regional Manager Bill Holland to get back to the bargaining table and settle a fair contract.

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Workers keep pressure on Half Price Books for a fair first contract

May 26, 2023 by

Workers outside the Roseville store last weekend included (L to R) Garrett Hoffman, Max Sparks, Terell Paris, Hanna Anderson, Aaron Kerr and Bill Lloyd.

Nearly 18 months into bargaining their first union contract, workers at four Half Price Books locations in the Twin Cities are enlisting customer and public support to push their talks across the finish line.

Union members, who began holding public actions outside union stores last weekend, say the bookseller developed a case of writer’s block when it came time to draft economic terms of the contract.

The union’s bargaining team delivered its proposal for wages and benefits earlier this year, said Aaron Kerr, who has over 25 years of experience with the company.

“We were expecting them to counter on that offer two months ago, and they have not,” Kerr said Sunday outside the Roseville store where he works. “They stalled. They brought in a new lawyer, who pretended to not know what we wanted.”

With talks set to resume May 30, union members began appealing to customers outside the Coon Rapids and Roseville stores last weekend. The actions will continue from noon to 1 p.m. Saturday at the St. Louis Park store and at the same time Sunday outside the St. Paul store, located in Highland Park.

“We’re handing out stickers and bookmarks, just telling everybody about what’s going on with our negotiations and asking for their support,” Kerr said. “We want to put some pressure on the company, and hopefully then we can get back to business.”

Workers at all four stores are bargaining jointly with Half Price Books, with representation from the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

The talks had been productive before reaching the economic phase, with the two sides reaching tentative agreements on language regarding workplace health and safety, grievance procedures and scheduling.

Other tentative agreements would prevent managers from filling jobs that would take hours away from workers in union shops, and would clearly establish a process, based primarily on seniority, for potential layoffs.

Kerr said supporters are welcome to show their solidarity inside or outside the stores this weekend, or by signing workers’ petition demanding a living wage and fair benefits.

Half Price Books workers in Roseville and St. Paul went public with their union drive in October 2021 after a round of layoffs that, workers said, were handled arbitrarily and left their stores with inadequate staffing. The union bug spread to Coon Rapids and St. Louis Park in the months that followed.

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General counsel will urge NLRB to deem captive audience meetings illegal

April 25, 2022 by

After learning its booksellers were forming a union, management at Half Price Books in St. Louis Park called Lindsey Dorsey and her co-workers into a meeting, hoping to snuff out the organizing drive.

“When you’re scheduled to do it, you do it,” Dorsey said. “But it was really clear why they were there and what they were doing and what they were talking about.”

Such mandatory meetings – known by union organizers as “captive audience meetings” – could soon become a violation of federal labor law, after the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel announced April 7 that she will ask board members to overturn a longstanding precedent allowing the practice.

Jennifer Abruzzo, appointed general counsel by President Joe Biden last summer, said employees organizing a union on the job have a right to listen to – or refrain from listening to – employer speech concerning their rights to act collectively to improve their workplace. And it falls on the NLRB to protect that right.

For over 70 years the NLRB has allowed employers to use captive audience meetings to stifle organizing drives and take disciplinary action against any employee who refuses to attend. Abruzzo said that’s inconsistent with the National Labor Relations Act, which the board is charged with upholding.

“This license to coerce is an anomaly in labor law, inconsistent with the Act’s protection of employees’ free choice,” Abruzzo wrote. “It is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of employers’ speech rights.

“I believe that the NLRB case precedent, which has tolerated such meetings, is at odds with fundamental labor-law principles, our statutory language and our congressional mandate. Because of this, I plan to urge the board to reconsider such precedent and find mandatory meetings of this sort unlawful.”

That’s good news for working people looking to gain a say over their wages, benefits and working conditions, union organizers said.

“Ending captive audience meetings puts decisions about organizing back in workers’ hands,” Minnesota AFL-CIO Organizing and Growth Director Todd Dahlstrom said. “Working people need the freedom to decide whether to join together in union without a boss putting their finger on the scale with threats or misinformation.”

Captive audience meetings are a mainstay of the anti-union playbook, utilized by human resources departments and the high-priced, union-busting consultants they call on to squelch organizing drives. In a 2009 study, the Economic Policy Institute found that 89% of employers held captive audience meetings in advance of union elections between 1999 and 2003.

In Abruzzo’s opinion, those meetings should have been voluntary and, moving forward, employers should be held responsible for making it clear that attendance is optional. “Such an approach will appropriately protect employers’ free-speech rights to express views, arguments, or opinions concerning the employees’ exercise of their protected labor rights without unduly infringing on the rights of employees to refrain, or not, from listening to such expressions,” her statement said.

“This is a big step in returning power back to working people,” Dahlstrom said.

Whether workers at the Half Price Books in St. Louis Park could have opted out of their meeting with management without facing discipline is unclear. No one thought to ask, Dorsey said.

Either way, the move backfired, as workers later voted nearly unanimously to form a union with Local 663 of the United Food and Commercial Workers. Several workers, Dorsey said, signed union cards shortly after the meeting with management.

“We knew when they were being misleading because we had been communicating with workers at other stores,” Dorsey said. “So when we were talking about our staffing issues and we were told that it’s our store’s problem and no other store has that problem, we knew it was a lie.

“That’s the best defense against anything, just communicating and knowing the truth.”

Half Price Books unions in St. Louis Park and three other metro stores – Arden Hills, Roseville and St. Paul – are currently bargaining first contracts with the bookseller.

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Half Price Books workers ready to bargain after victory in St. Louis Park

January 7, 2022 by

(Photo from MN Bookstore Workers United’s Facebook feed.)

In an election certified yesterday by the National Labor Relations Board, workers at Half Price Books in St. Louis Park won recognition of their union, joining workers at three other Twin Cities locations who voted to organize a month earlier.

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 663, which supported the organizing drive, said workers in St. Louis Park look forward to bargaining a contract with “livable wages, better working conditions and a seat at the table.”

Minneapolis-based Local 663 and UFCW Local 1189, based in the east metro and Duluth, have partnered on the groundbreaking union drive at the nationwide chain of booksellers. Workers at four of the Twin Cities’ six Half Price books locations, including Coon Rapids, Roseville and St. Paul, have now unionized, the first in the country to do so.

Each Half Price Books shop employs about 15 workers who are eligible to join the union.

Kristin Tamayo, a bookseller at the St. Louis Park store, said it’s exciting to be part of a “movement happening right now with booksellers and other members of the working class across the country.”

“We’re happy we organized a union so we can have protection of our jobs, benefits and equal treatment for all in our workplace,” Tamayo added. “Now we will have a voice at work and a seat at the table when it comes to making decisions that directly affect us and our wellbeing.”

Union members at the four stores will seek to bargain their first contracts jointly with Half Price Books. Talks are likely to begin this winter.

Those negotiations, like the organizing work that preceded them, will be led by Half Price Books workers themselves, Local 1189 representative Claire Van den Berghe said.

“From the start this has been a worker-led campaign where the workers call the shots,” she said. “They run their own social media, they make their own decisions, and we intend for bargaining to go the same way. It’s their voice at the table.”

The union drive has energized Half Price Books workers like Hanna Anderson, who works at the St. Paul store. She said that momentum will carry over into contract talks with the company.

“We’re excited to unionize because we’ve been working so hard throughout the pandemic and faced huge challenges – like low staffing levels, on-the-spot training, overwhelming workloads – all while risking COVID exposure every day we go into work.

“Through it all, we’ve stuck together. We all want to continue working at HPB, and it’s exactly because we enjoy working here that we want to unionize and make it a place that we can sustainably stay employed long term.”

Follow Half Price Books workers’ contract campaign on Facebook and Twitter.

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Half Price Books workers in Roseville, St. Paul form unions

October 18, 2021 by

These Half Price Books workers fully support forming a union.

Workers at Half Price Books stores in St. Paul and Roseville marched on their bosses Thursday, demanding the bookseller recognize their union.

Afterward, several workers traveled to other Half Price Books locations in the metro, encouraging workers to join the union drive, supported by Local 1189 of the United Food and Commercial Workers and its sister local, Minneapolis-based UFCW Local 663.

Workers said they are joining together to bargain higher wages – currently they earn $12.50 per hour – and gain more say over working conditions that have worsened since stores reopened after pandemic shutdowns.

Laura Peña, who works in the St. Paul store, said management has cut staffing in half, leaving employees to do double the work.

“We take in a lot of books all day, and at first, when there was lower staffing, there was a restriction on how many (books) people could bring in to sell,” Peña said. “Then corporate kept ramping things up, telling us to take in more and more, but it’s not like we had any more staff to back the ramping up.”

Peña said workers also hope to amend a post-pandemic policy that makes all new hires probationary for 90 days, keeping them ineligible for benefits.

For many Half Price Books workers, the pandemic brought into focus both how little regard the company has for their concerns and how unsustainable their jobs have become, said Aaron Kerr, who has 24 years of experience working in Half Price Books stores.

“For years prior, we were really kind of just putting up with it, just accepting this as the way things are,” Kerr said. “And we would see so much turnover. People were saying, ‘I love this job, but I can’t afford to work here.’

“We all love our customers. We love being booksellers, and we want to continue being booksellers. We look forward to negotiating with Half Price Books to make our stores a great place to work and a great place for customers to come into.”

[Click here to sign a petition supporting Half Price Books workers’ organizing drive.]

Half Price books calls itself the nation’s largest family-owned retailer for new and used books, and successful organizing drives in Minnesota could give the UFCW a toehold in the chain of over 120 stores.

All 16 booksellers and shift leads at the Roseville store signed union cards, as did an overwhelming majority of employees in the St. Paul store, located in Highland Park.

Kerr and other Roseville employees began considering a union after surviving a round of layoffs that, to them, seemed unnecessary, given the availability of paycheck protection loans.

In May of this year, after the Center for Disease Control changed its masking guidelines, employees in Roseville sent a petition asking the company to hold off on lifting its in-store mask mandates. Half Price Books brushed it aside and lifted the mandate anyway.

“None of us wanted that,” Kerr said. “They lifted it without consulting the employees. They did it at a time when other big companies, like Target, were not.”

Half Price Books executives won’t so easily ignore workers’ petition for a union election. Perhaps by coincidence, the company’s district manager was in Highland Park when workers there marched on the boss, according to Peña.

“We were nervous, but I was glad we all had each other’s backs,” she said.

“We are prepared for the worst,” Kerr said. “But we’re already very organized, getting more organized and making more connections every day.”

UPDATE 10/19/21: Workers at a third Twin Cities store, in Coon Rapids, marched on their boss today, demanding recognition of their union.

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