Less iterative than his feelings about the "intellectually bankrupt Left" on his blog are his notions about that part of the Left that presents the most immediate threat to his interests: unions.  Not that Mackey is shy about his contempt for the labor movement, having publicly compared unions to herpes ("It doesn't kill you, but it's unpleasant and inconvenient and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover.") and having published a libertarian screed called "Beyond Unions" that compared unions to parasites.

On his Yahoo postings, under cover of anonymity, Mackey dispenses with the euphemism of political philosophy and bares his teeth as a straight up boss.  In one exchange, he pillories a worker at the only unionized Whole Foods store in the country, in Madison, Wisconsin.  In response to the workers' pro-union remarks on the thread (and with no apparent sense of irony), Mackey screams:

You folks in Madison sure seem to have Delusions of Grandeur! I doubt Whole Foods Market's National Leadership thinks about the Madison store very often at all. Why should they? Just like unions everywhere--you always take credit for the progress that happens in society for employees even though unions don't have anything to do with it. It is not by accident that Whole Foods was named one of the best companies to work for 6 years in a row. They obviously care about their employees and want to do right by them.

The very idea of the founder and CEO of a major national corporation hiding behind a pseudonym to lambaste one of his own hourly wage earners on an online message board says something about the personal moral integrity of union-busting executives.  To further clarify the ideas of corporate citizenship embodied by Whole Foods, later in the thread, Mackey offers this gem:

I probably admire Wal-Mart more than any other company in the world (except for maybe Whole Foods!). What a great, great company! Wal-Mart has single handedly driven down retail prices across America. They have improved the standard of living for millions and millions of American people. Also Wal-Mart is crushing the parasitical unions across America. I love Wal-Mart! Damn straight that they should be on this list. Sexual discrimination lawsuits? Sexual harassment lawsuits? Racial discrimination lawsuits? What company doesn't have those? The Trial Lawyers (the richest professional class in the United States and the largest contributors to the Democratic Party--even bigger than labor unions which are #2) sue Wal-Mart. They sue Whole Foods Market. They sue every business which makes any money. They are probably even a bigger threat to our country than labor unions are (if that is possible?).

Whole Foods built its brand identity and customer loyalty by projecting a vision of a different kind of capitalism, one that puts sustainability and human health on an equal footing with creating profits (Mackey has even taken issue with Milton Friedman for identifying profits as the one and only "social responsibility" of business).  When it comes to workers organizing, however, Whole Foods' capitalism looks a whole lot like the capitalism wage earners have lived with since the first wave of peasants were driven out of the English countryside to work in manufactories.   Workers at Whole Foods' Madison store, as well as those at other stores who have undertaken ultimately abortive attempts to organize, have known for some time just how not-different their employer is from every other anti-union retailer.  With any luck, Rahodeb's online temper tantrums will get some press and lay bare the company's retrograde politics for all of its progressive-minded clientele to see.

In a pithy if not trenchant observation on his blog, Mackey notes that "In short, corporations and capitalism are not generally in favor, and both have serious branding problems in the larger world today."  Certainly the first part of the statement is true, but the problem is a whole lot bigger than a "branding" issue.  It's more of a "diametrically opposed interests of labor and capital" issue, and one that Whole Foods has done everything possible to antagonize.