Search for Open Work Shifts in Your Calendar Application!
Fellow members,
Everyone is familiar with the work shift system. You sign up for a labor shift every six weeks or so for the privilege of shopping at the Coop.
With the freelance system, there’s a small calculus involved to determine whether you should sign up for a shift: are you actually free to work at that time?
I have a convenient solution for this problem! I created a calendar that mirrors the Coop’s open shifts and you can add it to your favorite calendar application like Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook or Apple Calendar.
Primarily, you can now view open work shifts against your personal calendar for assurance of your availability at the work shift time.
You can also do other intuitive stuff like keyword search for shifts, copy shifts to your calendar, and navigate to the shift sign up page on the Coop website to confirm the shift on your Coop account.
Hopefully, this eases your work shift planning. I pray you are never labor suspended at the Coop ever again.
You can find the links to add the open work shift calendar to calendar application here: https://github.com/rexledesma/foodcoop-shift-calendar.
In solidarity,
Rex Ledesma
Naomi Gathering!
Dear Coop Members,
Is your name Naomi? You are invited to a Naomi-only gathering to discuss Naomi Klein’s book, Doppelganger. Doppelganger is about, among other things, being repeatedly confused with another Naomi.
- When: May 31, 2025 at 2:00 pm (rain date June 7, 2025 at 2:00pm)
- Where: Prospect Park Long Meadow, as north as you can get before hitting the paths (about a five minute walk from Grand Army Plaza)
- Why: For fun!
You’re welcome to come if your name is Naomi. If your name is Naomy, Nomi, Noemi, or something similar, please join us as well. Bring a blanket and a snack to share, or not, and your copy of Doppelganger. (We will try to get Naomi Klein to show up, but no promises.) Tell all the Naomis in your life!
Sincerely,
Naomi Becker, One of the Coop Naomis
The Myth of Plastic Recycling
Dear Coop members:
I read with interest the detailed and accurate environmental committee report by Stephanie Wilson about the items that NYC collects: “Recycling is Easier Than You Think” in the March 11 issue of the Gazette.
It is important to know what happens to all the plastic we put into those bins.
Plastics were invented in 1907. Since then, virtually ALL plastic items manufactured are still on this planet—either in landfills, as litter, in the oceans and virtually everywhere—microplastics have been found at astounding levels in every organ of our bodies! The only exceptions are plastics that have been incinerated—a process that releases microplastics and many highly toxic compounds into the air.
Plastic recycling is a myth created by petrochemical companies and chemical companies who frack ethane gas and manufacture plastics. They fear loss of market for their fossil fuel products due to increased efficiency of automobiles and green power alternatives. Therefore, plastics have become their growth industry. These companies invest a fortune in marketing touting recycling so that consumers will feel good about using plastics.
At best, only five to six percent of plastics actually get recycled (mostly in the few states with bottle bills)—and even those are mostly downcycled.
Plastic waste not only comprises a major source of deadly pollution; the extraction of starting materials and the manufacturing processes are major sources of greenhouse gases, thus climate change. Furthermore, toxic ethane cracking plants are located near poor and marginalized communities in which cancer and disease rates soar above the national average.
An excellent source of information is www.beyondplastics.org
I believe the Coop should do everything possible to reduce plastics on our shelves and inform our members about the many ruses such as bioplastics and so-called “green products” that are actually full of plastics.
Sincerely,
Will Boorstein
What Does the Coop Stand For?
Greetings:
I have been a member of the Coop since 2008 and value its continued existence as a not-for-profit cooperative that provides affordable and healthy food. Cooperatives are political entities by default, because they present an alternative to undemocratic top-down for-profit organizational structures. However, there are those who want the Coop to be “apolitical” and remain silent while a country, whose defense we fund with our taxes, commits genocide.
I have been ashamed of the Coop’s inaction on the violence being carried out by Israel’s far right government in Gaza and the West Bank. At this point, I can only attribute inaction as a sign of indifference to Palestinian life and hostility towards Coop members like myself who believe in universal human rights, oppose genocide and expect the Coop to live up to its values.
In its inaction, the Coop is standing with those who demand the unconditional support of an ethno-nationalist and racist regime aligned with the Trump administration.
As the child of a torture survivor from Chile, I proudly told the story of the PSFC boycotting Chilean products during the Pinochet regime. Now, I’m ashamed to even call myself a member.
Sincerely,
Joao M. Da Silva
Reprehensible Behavior on All Sides
Dear Coop Members:
The Members for Palestine announced that the April 29 meeting at City Tech was cancelled because of a letter from an external activist group.
I read the letter sent to City Tech and found it morally disgusting: it has inaccurate statements about past general meetings, accusations based on flimsy speculation and bigoted innuendos about the Palestine Members. The group that sent the letter should be ashamed of themselves.
But the letter has kernels of truth. It is true both that the Palestine Members want the Coop to join the external Boycott, Divest, Sanction Israel (BDS) movement and that changing the bylaws to enable hybrid meetings is part one in their three-part strategy to do so (as they repeatedly state in their emails). It is also true that their effort to get members to vote for their hybrid proposal is not transparent: when they leaflet outside the Coop, they don’t advertise their real motivation for hybrid (to align the Coop with BDS ideology) or why they are in such a hurry (they are eager for a BDS win).
I also read the Members for Palestine’s email to their listserv sent after the meeting was cancelled. They refer to a group of their fellow Coop members as “Zionists”—not to describe those members’ political affiliation, but as a dehumanizing label. It’s dehumanizing because the Members for Palestine refuse to engage in any dialogue to learn about the diverse opinions of the members opposed to their BDS ideology, not one of whom supports “genocide” or “killing innocent families,” and all of whom value coexistence. Instead of sincere efforts to communicate, the Members for Palestine prefer using “Zionist” as a slur to justify excluding their fellow members from the “equality,” “diversity” and “cooperation” principles they claim to uphold. I find that morally disgusting, too.
Sincerely,
Zara Watkins
A Venue for the “Hybrid Meetings” GM Vote
Dear fellow members:
Finding a venue for the hybrid meetings vote has proven difficult. Hybrid meetings are attractive, providing opportunity for wider participation, but some Coop members and General Coordinators have resisted them. Zionist members, by definition pro-Israel, have threatened leaving the Coop given subsequently successful hybrid and boycott votes. And Coordinators seem acutely concerned with the possibility of such an exiting of Zionist members.
(Why refer to “Zionists” rather than “Jews”? Zionism is the secular movement that established the “Jewish State,”—despite a substantial non-Jewish minority—and continues its half-century-plus occupation of Palestine. Many pro-boycott and anti-Zionism members are themselves Jews. The ultra-orthodox Williamsburg Hasidim are anti-Zionism and pro-boycott, supporting virtually every pro-Palestinian rally! Alternatively, there are far more fanatically pro-Israel Christian Zionists than Jewish ones! Clearly, both Jews and non-Jews are pro- and anti-Zionism.)
Anti-BDS letters have claimed that a boycott “will alienate a number of Coop members,” citing the Coop’s mission statement, which describes being “welcoming and accessible to all” and which “respect the opinions, needs and concerns of every members.” “Welcoming all” will obviously continue, regardless. Respecting “opinions, needs and concerns” doesn’t mean abjectly submitting to them. We cannot control how people “feel,” but foregoing a GM vote to satisfy such claims rewards what is little more than emotional blackmail. And it’s certainly not respectful of the opinions and concerns of those calling for hybrid meetings.
Hybrid meetings—and when needed, virtual meetings—can work. No chance for disruptions like the one that occurred at the April 2015 GM, where Zionist members took over the stage, plunging the meeting into turmoil. Nothing in the bylaws prevents meetings from being held virtually, as were all the GMs during the Covid era. Those GMs did not require anything other than necessity. And neither should this proposal be denied a vote for spurious reasons.
Sincerely,
David Barouh
The Case for a Member Bylaw Amendment
To my fellow Coop members,
I was scheduled to present item 910 on the original agenda for the April GM.
Agenda item 910 is titled “Amending Coop bylaws, policies and procedures to ensure the Coop’s survival and success.” Given the late change in location of the April meeting, I unfortunately will not be able to present my item.
Time has passed since my submission a few short weeks ago and I’ve had time to reflect based on communications from other members from last month’s Linewaiters’ Gazette as well as online via various social media accounts. Now, I believe that item 910 is timelier than ever given many voices pushing towards more democracy within the Coop.
What does democracy look like within the Coop and how do we abide by its principles?
During my presentation, I planned to discuss:
- Educating GM attendees on their individual approval and adherence to both the Rochdale Principles of Cooperation and—more importantly—commitment to the International Cooperative Alliance’s (ICA) guidelines
- Reinforcement of ICA’s 2nd Principle: Democratic Member Control, which clearly outlines how democratic process is defined within a cooperative organization plus management of a cooperative’s democratic governance
- Highlight why the Coop needs to instill a bylaw amendment study committee to evaluate the existing bylaws and to ensure that, as the Coop evolves, processes to amend the bylaws will mitigate any biases through pillars of objectivity, consistency and transparency.
We are moving away from unity and members are currently being both verbally and electronically harassed for their identities, which is not acceptable. A sound, formal review group will mitigate any bias in voting and—hopefully—will ensure that we’re upholding the foundational principles that we all signed up to follow.
In solidarity,
Zachary Zaban
City Tech Needed Only One Reason.
Dear Coop:
City Tech cancelled the PSFC General Meeting for April 29 and the usual single-issue boycott crew here are screaming conspiracy and racism and we-wuz-robbed. Yawn.
What they refuse to acknowledge is that the cancellation was justified. City Tech Theatre was sent a letter with a screenshot of an openly published Mailchimp announcement. Attributed to the boycott crew, it advertised the GM as a way to push forward what hundreds of millions of others worldwide see as the hateful boycotting of Israel. This announcement lay in stark contrast to the deceptively bland billing (“PSFC General Meeting” and “Hybrid Voting”) sold to City Tech. Those are the facts. Read the Mailchimp announcement, then put yourself in the chair of any theatre or institutional administrator comparing these conflicting documents on their desk. I wager the eager presenters were judged as two-faced on their own merits, and cancelled like any other duplicitous customer.
This GM was an underhanded attempt to ram a hateful boycott through the court of public opinion. Those who created the GM proposal need to explain themselves, no one else. Selling wildly differing stories even in the name of human rights is still called lying. Rejection is called accountability.
What thousands of other lies and omissions has this group told us under the guise of free speech and human rights? When will our committees finally ban this cancerous, officially unrecognized, faction from our Cooperative?
Best,
Jesse Rosenfeld
The Cost to the Coop of Fighting One Another
Greetings:
The controversy at Columbia University over student protests related to the war in Gaza has developed into a full-blown confrontation and quickly subsumed the institution into a chaotic spin. The same kind of thing can happen to the Coop, if we permit it. Grappling with a hot political issue offers no benefit to the store and can do it real damage.
The nation is in turmoil now, the right and left glaring at each other across a no person’s land. I suggest that we suspend decisions that can foul the feelings of members toward each other.
There is always a way without violence. The Coop must keep clear of supporting either side and advocate for a settlement that ends hostility. Taking sides only perpetuates it.
Sincerely,
Rodger Parsons
Hybrid Meetings: We Can Do This
Greetings:
As a sponsor of the proposal to make General Meetings hybrid, I have to say that the fear of this commonsense step feels overblown. Here’s a link to our proposal, including recommendations for implementation, developed alongside fellow members with professional expertise producing hybrid events.
Members express concerns that hybrid meetings will cost too much. We found the cost for what the Coop needs is low. Necessary equipment is largely covered by the Picnic House and the Coop, with additional needs being a camera and tripod, one-time costs of $300-$400.
The Zoom tier the Coop currently subscribes to accommodates 300 participants, and scales up at $0.16-0.50 per participant, depending on meeting size: for example, Webinars for 1,000 members cost $340/month, or $0.34/participant.
SimplyVoting, which we’ve used for several votes, costs $200/ballot, accommodating 200 voters; that price also scales depending on the participant-count. Voting for 1,000 members costs $500, bringing the cost for 1,000-person meetings to $840, alongside the Zoom upgrade. Our rental at City Tech to vote on this proposal—had it taken place—would have cost us $7,000+.
People also worry about privacy in hybrid meetings. I share this concern, but want to point out Zoom’s safety features, which the Chair Committee utilized during Lockdown. Zoom offers watermark features to identify recordings’ origins: screen recordings superimpose your email, and audio recordings are encoded with inaudible information that allows Zoom to identify the accounts from which recordings are made. If virtual participants can only register using emails on file with the Coop, we can identify anyone who might make and share a recording.
Of course, this is a big change, and we should be thoughtful about how we move forward. But hybrid meetings shouldn’t scare us! We can do this.
In cooperation,
Morgan Võ
Why Does Nobody Say: This Ends Here
Dear Agenda Committee:
April 13, 2025–Cody Allen Balmer set fire to the Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence in Harrisburg while the governor, a Jew, and his family were inside—for Palestine.
August 10, 2024–Kingston Avenue, Crown Heights. Vincent Sumpter stabbed a Jewish man, missing his heart by centimeters—for Palestine.
May 29, 2024–An East Flatbush yeshiva. Asghar Ali drove his car onto the sidewalk, attempting to strike a group of Orthodox Jewish students and rabbis—for Palestine.
January 26, 2025–The Park Slope restaurant Miriam. At 3 AM, three masked individuals defaced the storefront with red paint—for Palestine.
May 31, 2024–The Brooklyn Museum. Demonstrators graffitied the OY/YO sculpture, causing $100,000 in damage—for Palestine.
Acts against Jewish individuals and business are indefensible. They do not ease the suffering in Gaza nor do they influence Israeli policy. They serve only one purpose: to deprive Jews of the most basic civil right—the right to safety in the public space.
In New York City, there have been more than 500 confirmed hate crimes targeting Jews since October 7, 2023.
The BDS movement rhetoric, which recasts the Jewish state as uniquely evil and Jews as imposters, inspires, encourages and incites this violence.
The Members for Palestine are attempting to amend the Coop’s by-laws for the sole purpose of enabling a vote to endorse BDS.
Even if a BDS motion is defeated, simply entertaining the possibility of supporting BDS at the Coop will further normalize this false, toxic narrative—and further endanger Jews.
How is this even under consideration in a Coop that claims to be devoted to equality and inclusion?
Why is no one saying: this ends here?
Sincerely,
Barbara Mazor
Is the Coop Fascism Adjacent?
Dear Coop community:
I am outraged that the vote on hybrid GM scheduled for April 29 was cancelled without any explanation. I have since learned that the cancellation was engineered by a pro-Zionist group called End Jew Hate and it isn’t clear how that group got involved with PSFC’s business. What is clear is that the Coop for Unity group has opposed the boycott of products from Israel since BDS was proposed years ago and their extreme rhetoric about PSFC4Pal set the stage for what occurred with City Tech.
Meanwhile the genocide perpetuated by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people continues, along with the ongoing occupation and apartheid state. The total destruction of homes, hospitals, schools across Gaza and the West Bank, the ruthless killing and starving of fellow humans is an unfathomable horror and a disgrace. By purchasing products from Israel we are complicit in these atrocities.
I joined PSFC 40 years ago and for most of those years was proud to be part of an organization that had integrity and stood for the values I believe in. I trusted that the leaders were ethical, representing our membership, choosing products that were healthy, local, humanely raised, etc. I shared in the work and enjoyed being part of a strong collective. The bitter division and behind the scenes manipulation by the board and GCs over BDS have soured me to the coop and I am disgusted by this latest sham.
We, as a coop based on fairness and justice, should be in the forefront of the fight against fascism. Instead we are facing the same blind self righteousness dividing our country. The same fear and loathing that justifies deporting people for speaking out, or for no reason at all, is preventing a democratic vote from happening at PSFC.
Every member of our Coop deserves to be heard and vote in a hybrid GM on the question of boycotting Israel.
Sincerely,
Sarah Safford, member since 1985
Stop Stymying the Smooth Functioning of Democracy at the Coop
Dear Coop Members:
A small group of extremists have once again delayed a vote on hybrid General Meetings, scheduled for April 29, through a coordinated campaign of harassment and threats against the venue set to host: last year at Brooklyn College, this year at CUNY.
To state the obvious: pressure groups use these anti-democratic tactics because they know their positions are unpopular. I agree with them on the facts: when there is a vote on continuing hybrid general meetings, it will pass easily. When there is a vote on the BDS proposal, polling suggests that it will also pass easily.
The question remains why the overly credulous General Coordinators keep folding under the pressure. Specific individuals are repeatedly preventing the smooth democratic functioning of the Coop, and the same individuals are repeatedly published in the Gazette trying to normalize and justify their radical positions. Why not vote?
Sincerely,
Mac Simonson
About Our Meetings
Dear Fellow Members:
If we’re blocked from having a large in-person meeting, we should have a plan B and use the secure online vote that we have in place for board elections and coop-wide polls and referenda. Whatever the reasons, we have been prevented from renting an appropriately sized venue at least twice.
It’s the height of “uncooperative behavior” to threaten venues. Those members should face the disciplinary committee for attempting to block our GM governance and wasting everybody’s time.
I’m in favor of hybrid meetings because monthly physical attendance for three hours at the Picnic House on a Tuesday night is clearly too big a burden for participation in Coop governance. People with children, mobility issues, medical concerns or work commitments all deserve a say. The pandemic prompted us to figure out other tools that we can use. This is an opportunity to fix and update Coop governance.
Sincerely,
Lisa Guido
Evidence That Hybrid GMs Are a Good Idea
Dear Coop members:
I write to address Elizabeth Tobier’s letter, which deems hybrid General Meetings a “bad idea.” Tobier suggests hybrid meetings would not draw many attendees. However, I believe all Coop members deserve equal access to democracy at every meeting.
Joe Holtz estimates 150 people as the average attendance at in-person GMs. Running the numbers provided by Tobier, average online attendance was 169. Even excluding the outliers of several meetings with higher attendance, such as the May and June 2020 meetings with 500 or 600 participants each, the average is 135.
One hundred and thirty-five attendees for online GMs is not far from 150 attendees in person. And of course, hybrid meetings will combine in-person and online attendance.
Importantly, there’s currently no way to accommodate more than a fraction of our 16,000 person membership in the Picnic House, whose maximum capacity is 255. Case in point: our proposal was flagged by the GCs as necessitating a larger venue of 800-1,000. It’s been in the Agenda Committee’s queue since December 2023, but the GCs still haven’t found a way for members to vote, in spite of the significant response it’s received. Our current set-up means that the proposals that are the most interesting or important to members are the least likely to be heard.
Ultimately, our proposal to make GMs hybrid is not about numbers. It’s about providing access to participate in democracy. If hybrid meetings increase access for even one Coop member who’s disabled, a parent or caregiver or can’t make it to the Picnic House on a Tuesday night, that’s worth it. More likely, this will increase access for many members and make our Coop more truly democratic. I invite you to read our full proposal, and to advocate for it to be brought to a vote. It’s a good idea!
Best,
CJ Glackin