Healthy Living Appeals to NLRB Not to Recognize Its Labor Union

After a group of Healthy Living employees announced their intent to form a union this spring, the family owners of the Vermont-based grocer looked back at the previous year and noticed what they now contend was an unusual surge of applicants.

A number of overqualified job seekers — some with no retail experience and some who had recently relocated to areas around Healthy Living stores — had taken positions with the company. The small grocery chain, which employs 300 people in its South Burlington, Williston and Saratoga Springs, N.Y., stores, was staffed so well that it didn’t have to recruit workers for the 2025 holiday season, as it had each year for the previous decade.

In early April a group of employees informed the company they were organizing a union and on April 30, workers approved the proposal, 105-69.

In a bid to block formal recognition of the union, Healthy Living now asserts in a petition to the National Labor Relations Board that the hiring surge — and subsequent waves of employee departures — are evidence it was the target of a “salting” campaign in which operatives from the Workers United union joined its ranks specifically to organize its workers. The company wants the NLRB to undo the decision of its regional office that recognized the bargaining unit.

Healthy Living alleges that as many as 72 workers hired in the eight months preceding the April vote sought employment for the sole purpose of organizing a union and then resigned. Healthy Living COO Nina Lesser-Goldsmith said in testimony submitted to the regional labor board she believed that the only longtime employees involved in the union organizing committee were “people who have struggled with mental health issues” or were disabled.

In July, the regional labor board director dismissed Healthy Living’s election challenge without a hearing and certified the election results. She noted specifically that allegations of attempted coercion by union-funded salts were based on “unsubstantiated hearsay.” 

In its appeal to the NLRB, Healthy Living alleges that the regional board did not thoroughly investigate its claims and the director erred in dismissing them. 

In a bluntly worded response to Healthy Living’s appeal, Workers United, a national union with 86,000 members, says the company’s petition amounts to “a series of lies, misrepresentations, and half-truths” and contains “shoddy evidence” meant to overturn a proper election. It discounts some claims by the company as “hallucinogenic” and “delusional.” 

Michael Dolce, a Buffalo, N.Y., attorney for Workers United, wrote: “The employer has not demonstrated any ‘coordinated infiltration’ nor did any occur.”

Katy Lesser opened the first Healthy Living store in South Burlington’s Blue Mall in 1986. The store’s emphasis on locally grown food and a wellness lifestyle was ahead of its time, and the market developed a devoted clientele. The business grew steadily, adding two more stores. (A fourth, in Halfmoon, N.Y., is about to open). In 2021, it won the Vermont Chamber of Commerce’s prestigious Deane C. Davis Outstanding Business of the Year Award.

Lesser’s children, Eli and Nina Lesser-Goldsmith, now head up the operation, but neither responded to a request for comment. In its appeal, Healthy Living notes that it offers generous benefits for employees, including a 401k, health insurance and paid time off. The union is asking for a $20 base pay; workers say wages currently start around $16 an hour.

The bitter labor dispute draws attention to salting, a labor organizing tactic in which applicants seek a job at a company with the sole purpose of forming a union. As Healthy Living has acknowledged, salting is legally permitted, and even “salts” who are also paid by a union are protected from workplace retaliation.

The company asserts, though, that current law does not address its particular situation.

Attorney Heather Southwell of Downs Rachlin Martin posed this question in the company’s petition: “Specifically, does the [National Labor Relations] Act permit salts to flood an employer’s voting pool, sway the outcome of an election, and then simply resign en masse, leaving the employees who have a genuine interest in their employment with no genuine voice in the outcome of the election?”

Cathy Creighton, a labor law expert at Cornell University, read the appeal at Seven Days’ request and noted that it offered “no proof of the union salting the facility.” Even if it did, the legality of salting — union-funded or not — has been well established by the U.S. Supreme Court, she said. 

“The employer may have a more sympathetic ear in the currently composed NLRB,” she wrote, but unless the Supreme Court decided to reverse more than 30 years of legal precedent, “the employer’s arguments will fail.”

Creighton’s reference to a “sympathetic ear” was an acknowledgment of President Donald Trump’s appointments to the NLRB. With two nominees confirmed by the Senate last Friday, the board, which has five seats, currently has a 3-1 Republican majority, the National Law Review reported.

Healthy Living points out that Workers United has engaged in known salting efforts and its organizers have worked with the Inside Organizer School, which educates and encourages people to form unions at their places of work. In this instance, however, Workers United says the union simply supported an effort by the store’s employees to organize and denies any salting campaign.

Seven Healthy Living employees specifically accused by the company of being organizers for Workers United denied those claims in interviews with Seven Days.

Workers United has been behind recent efforts in the Burlington area to unionize other businesses as well, including a South Burlington Starbucks and a Black Cap Coffee & Bakery, whose owner closed the Church Street location after the election.

Healthy Living’s appeal gets political. The company argues that the alleged effort to salt its stores was part of a broader effort by Workers United and socialists to “dismantle capitalism.” Union supporters compared that ideologically charged language to the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era.

Workers United organizer Casey Moore, a member of the Inside Organizer School, has been assisting Healthy Living employees in the unionizing effort. While Workers United has been open about previous efforts to salt companies, Moore said it doesn’t need to engage in the practice when it comes to small regional chains such as Black Cap and Healthy Living, where there are plenty of union-curious retail workers. 

“Especially in Burlington, we get people reaching out to us all the time wanting to organize their workplace, and a lot of them do have left-leaning politics and believe in unions and want to work in a unionized workplace,” she said.

In its appeal, Healthy Living described Workers United as sharing office space in Burlington’s Old North End with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which the union denies. One worker said she was a former PSL member. Others said they were members of the Democratic Socialists of America, the group that helped elect New York City mayor and DSA party member Zohran Mamdani. 

Many of the workers who supported the Healthy Living union effort aren’t shy about expressing their views. Adam Franz, a recent University of Vermont graduate, was a barista at the South Burlington store until he was fired last month. He was also the sole candidate in the Democratic primary to represent Burlington’s Hill Section in the Vermont House this year. Healthy Living let him go by email after alleged customer service issues, Franz said at a press conference. He alleges his firing and that of two other baristas were retaliation for their support of the union.

These workers denied that they applied to work at Healthy Living only to help the union organize. Some planned to stay and benefit from the increased pay and protections they hoped a union would provide. Some of those who had resigned said they always intended for the job to be temporary, like many of the students and seasonal workers who staff Healthy Living. 

Andy Brown, a Colchester native who left his job as a software engineer at Google in 2021 before eventually returning home in 2025, is among those Healthy Living has accused of being a paid union organizer. In its appeal, the company noted Brown’s previous career, implicitly questioning why he would then seek work as a barista.

Brown said he was in a union while working for Google and described himself as a fervent supporter of labor. But he didn’t seek a job at Healthy Living solely to organize its workforce and wasn’t part of a coordinated effort to salt the grocery stores, he said. He was fired along with Franz over claims of poor customer service but said he hopes to get his job back if an unfair labor practice complaint filed on his behalf by Workers United goes his way. 

“It was like the opposite of software engineering,” he said, of the job’s appeal. “Instead of sitting around working on my computer all day alone in my house, I was interacting with customers, making people’s day better.” ➆

The original print version of this article was headlined “Labor Pains | Healthy Living contends a national labor group infiltrated its workforce to win a unionization bid. The union calls that claim “delusional.””

This article appears in August 12 • 2026.

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