This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Call Zone Media.

Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about what workers can do when they try.

I am your host, Beowong, and with me today to talk about a company known i guess in portland for being a place

where you shop and known most other places for being the people who make pens is morgan and rene from

bougie workers united morgan rene welcome to the show thank you hi thank you mea yeah, Mia. Yeah, so, and obviously, I guess as you may

have gotten from the word union and the title probably containing the word union, I don't know,

we haven't written it yet, is that, yeah, one of the, one of the Moji stories in Portland is unionizing.

Can you talk a little bit about, like, what Mugi is for people who are unaware of

this slash don't follow pens and or haven't been to the store? Yeah. So Mugi is probably,

I would describe it as a worldwide Japanese minimalist lifestyle department store. And that's a lot

of words to say it's a department store

that is for essentially basics. Mugi is short for a full name that essentially translates to no brand.

And that's the idea that they're trying to push for. And they're trying to show to people that

it's like an eco-friendly company, and they try and push

like high-quality products. And at our location in Portland, it's the only one on the American

West Coast, and we have a relatively small shop. There's only 32 people in our bargaining unit,

and this is a wall-to-wall bargaining unit, which essentially means that everyone below the lowest management level at this location is involved with the union.

Yeah, which is A, really cool, and B, so we're talking about how this is the only one in the West Coast.

This is mostly a Japanese company that operates a little bit in the U.S. and does things here, right? My understanding?

So it is a Japanese company. It actually primarily operates like all over the world. It was began in Japan in the 80s, I believe, if I know my company history correctly, but they pretty

...