Driving into Urban Ore’s parking lot last weekend, it was hard to miss the hand-painted “20% off Everything” sign hanging over the main entrance. It was still harder to miss the group of protesters posted up out front. Sometimes it was impossible, particularly when they followed customers past the picket line and nearly inside the store, imploring them not to shop. 

“It’s not punk to cross a picket line,” shouted one demonstrator to a teenager dressed in a black leather jacket with metal studs, as an SUV rolled into the parking lot on a recent Saturday afternoon. 

A living fossil of Berkeley’s erstwhile hippie culture, Urban Ore is a do-your-own-thing kind of place where you can find a scratched midcentury armoire for $100 or a handful of loose bolts for a five-finger discount, but six weeks of boycott have made the environment anything but laid-back. Instead, escalating conflict between two aging owners and a handful of union members has hardened animosity between the parties in a business that has long relied on community goodwill. Previous allies have morphed into opponents as individuals choose between idealism and hard truths.   

The strike has forced both sides back to the table and led to a 45-day ceasefire of the boycott for further negotiations. But after years of stalled talks, you’ll forgive some longtime employees for a lack of optimism. 

For 44 years, Urban Ore has sold reused materials ranging from kitchen cabinets and power tools to metal pipes and vintage jewelry, diverting tons of material from landfills to fulfill its hippie-era mission: “To End the Age of Waste.” Some of the materials it sells are donated, and much is reclaimed from the dump. All of it is sorted and organized for sale by the store’s staff, many of whom have worked there for a decade or more — perpetuating an institution that feels central to the city’s idea of itself.

The conflict goes beyond the usual disagreements over wages and other benefits. It’s a symptom of a clash of values as the old-school environmentalism that birthed Urban Ore in the first place runs up against the worker-first ideals of its newer employees. 

Trapped between the owners and the union are 20-odd workers left in a kind of purgatory as they weigh their future and that of the business.

“It’s hard not to get worked up and emotional about this stuff. Being here all day, every day, it’s very tense,” said Daniel Salazar, one of Urban Ore’s operations managers, as he led a tour of the yard. Salazar has circulated an open letter in English and Spanish addressed to the union, the ownership, and the larger Berkeley community, imploring both sides to come together.

“I’m better, but apprehensive because there’s still so much pressure and a lot that hasn’t been agreed to,” Salazar said after the strike pause was announced. “Who really knows what could happen in 45 days?”

Founded in 1980, Urban Ore was primarily the brainchild of Daniel Knapp, a sociologist who saw an opportunity to scavenge items at Berkeley’s landfill to resell. 

Knapp, who came to the Bay Area after hitchhiking from Oregon, later added his wife, Mary Lou Van Deventer, as a co-owner. Both are known for their evangelism of Urban Ore’s environmental ideals. The business has evolved through the decades before landing at its current location at 900 Murray Street in 2002. The company’s 3-acre facility spans a massive corrugated metal warehouse, as well as an outdoor expanse of building materials, including hundreds of appliances and fixtures.

The couple see themselves, plausibly, as key figures in Berkeley’s history of environmentalism and the larger zero waste movement nationally. Now both in their 80s, Knapp has limited mobility and Van Deventer acts as his primary caregiver. “Stubborn” and “forgetful” were among the adjectives offered unsolicited by employees to describe the two.

It’s fair to say that resentment has developed after two years of stalled negotiations and back-and-forth accusations of unfair labor practices and abusive treatment. An early bargaining session where union members cut Knapp off from sharing Urban Ore’s founding story curdled the relationship. Things have only deteriorated further as the strike action and targeted insults have offended the owners’ progressive self-conception.  

“Theirs is a binary world: us and them,” Knapp wrote in an email where he shared the organizing manual for the union. “Management, no matter how enlightened, is the enemy.”

Knapp and Van Deventer hold some mild contempt for a union made up of relatively new employees purporting to tell them how to run a business they’ve been successfully operating for more than four decades. 

“They’re asking for financial control and to do the budgeting for the company. That’s an unreasonable ask,” Van Deventer said. “We’ve been running this company successfully for 44 years, and if that’s the ask, that’s not going to happen.”

Increased demand for home renovation and cheaper goods during the pandemic ended up being a boon for Urban Ore, a business that always struggled with profitability. But Covid also raised workplace issues and brought in a new cohort of younger workers with limited history at the company.

Workers formed a union in 2023 through the Industrial Workers of the World, citing issues including understaffing, unequal treatment, and retaliation. One of the main complaints was around wages, which fluctuate because of a twice-monthly income share of store revenues. A more stable structure was agreed to as part of the initial negotiations to end the strike.

All employees at the company are hourly and at-will. But the company also offers twice-yearly bonuses based on its profits and benefits like a Kaiser Permanente health plan, vision and dental insurance, a retirement plan, and three weeks of paid time off. There’s also a 50% off discount and the ability to set aside merchandise they would like to reserve. Workers on both sides of the picket line admit their homes are furnished with Urban Ore finds.

To hear it from Van Deventer and Knapp, a full concession to the union’s demands represents an existential threat to the business and the philosophy they’ve invested their life into. The couple says they’ve been using their retirement funds to make payroll and that their nest egg is already half depleted. The strike, which started on March 22, cut sales by as much as 90% on some days. 

“We’ve put our life savings into this. Talk about skin in the game, we’ve been flayed,” Knapp said. He raised the possibility of working together with the union on advocacy around the housing issues, which he said was the “driving force” behind the union’s formation.

For years, the couple has broached the idea of retirement and passing along ownership of the business to a worker-owned cooperative. The possibility has been dangled for so long that most employees take it with a heavy grain of salt. Urban Ore’s stability has at times felt precarious, but longtime employees say this is the closest they’ve ever felt to seeing it shut down entirely. 

Though he wasn’t scheduled to work over the weekend, Chris Amado was hanging out off-duty amid the sea of refuse, just like he had for nearly his entire adult life. Leaning on a pallet jack in front of a graveyard of old toilets, he seemed resigned to the fact that the place might not have long left. “There’s going to be a lot of people that are going to have a really hard time finding a job after this, right?” said Amado, a few tears sliding down from behind his Ray-Bans. “If it goes away, it’s not coming back.”

Spencer Jordan, one of the union’s leaders, characterized the closure threat as a “disappointing and undignified rhetorical attack.” “I think that the ownership does not want their legacy to be, we crushed our workers’ attempts at workplace democracy and fucked everyone in the process,” Jordan said.

The last week of the strike had the feeling of the last day of school, where everyone is going through the motions. One receiving yard worker, Kurt Caudle, apologized to his colleague for taking the previous day off. Besides potentially losing his job, he is also on the verge of eviction. “The combined emotional distress was overwhelming,” said the typically cheery Caudle. “I just had to stay in my pajamas and watch some stupid videos on my laptop.”

Away from the customers is Urban Ore’s salvage and recycling operations, where different metals and scrap like cables and wires are sifted, sorted, and separated by hand. The ugly labor-intensive process is far from a money maker, but key to the company’s founding ethos.

Elias Soto, a 69-year-old who works in the salvage yard, has been at Urban Ore for 21 years. At his age, Soto fears he won’t find another option to feed his family. “It feels like they’re doing it for them, not for us,” Soto said.

During his lunch break, Soto was standing beside Alfonso Gallegos, who is part of the union’s collective bargaining unit and voted to approve the strike action. One month into the boycott, he said he now disagrees with the union’s aggressive methods that have threatened to sink the business and threaten much-needed health benefits for himself and his family. 

“They haven’t realized we’re all going into the same hole, and none of us will be able to get out when we want to,” Gallegos said in Spanish through a translator. 

Sarah Mossler, one of the union’s leaders who was laid off earlier this month, expressed some skepticism about the ultimate state of the business in part because the owners have refused to share financial documents. In any case, she said, the choice is with Knapp and Van Deventer.

“I don’t have the key to this place,” Mossler said. “I don’t have the ability to lock the door.”

Nearly everyone agrees they’ve been frustrated at times with mismanagement and disorganization at Urban Ore, but airing out the conflict in public has led to battle lines that won’t easily be erased.

During the strike, Timmy Smith kept up breezy conversation with his co-workers across the fence. But after 30-odd days on the picket line and without a paycheck, his nerves are frayed. The strike has also taken a personal toll. He’s already lost one of his best friends, who originally got him the job at Urban Ore.  

“You can’t unring that bell,” Smith said of the unionization push. “The first thing you have to understand is this is the way things are now. We have to move forward; we can’t go backwards.”

When the boycott’s temporary pause was announced, there was an “everything is fine” celebration at the business meant to present a united front to the public. One of the agreements for the end of the strike is that no one will be treated any differently because they participated. 

“Now that the union has gotten back to negotiating with the company, there’s the possibility of building that camaraderie back and the possibility for us to recognize that we all share something in common, which is that we all want this place to succeed,” said Benno Giammarinaro, a lead negotiator for the union.

But as any veteran employee of Urban Ore can tell you, it’s not so easy to glue together something that is broken. 

“There’s this idea they can flip a switch and everything’s just going to go back to the way it was before,” said Sam Essex, a worker in the building materials department. “You’ve played chicken with everybody’s livelihoods. Do you really think everyone is just going to go back to be co-workers and friends again?”