Free range workers

The crew at the Trader Joe’s store on the Lower East Side, called Essex Crossing, have filed to unionize with the independent Trader Joe’s United organization, which already represents workers at some of the grocery giant’s stores in Massachusetts, Minnesota and Kentucky. If the National Labor Relations Board approves their application and the organizers win a vote, they will be the chain’s first unionized workforce in New York. They should be allowed to make their case fully and fairly, without bad-faith encroachment by management.

Organizers at the store have highlighted certain specific issues, such as the abrupt end of COVID-related hazard pay in 2021 and the alleged lack of processes to deal with health and safety issues, as motivators for the union drive, but there doesn’t need to be any special reason to launch a unionization effort. Despite what some companies might say, workplaces are not families, and employees of businesses large and small have had for nearly a century the right to determine how they want to be represented before management.

This doesn’t mean that the workers at the Delancey St. location will decide to join TJU — and in fact, a prior effort at the company’s store in Williamsburg failed — but it does mean that the location’s 150 or so employees should be given the option to make their choice without interference, subterfuge, misleading marketing, endless captive audience meetings, or whatever other union-busting tactic is fashionable these days.

It certainly means that Trader Joe’s — a company that markets itself as a sort of socially and environmentally conscious corporation that rejects the base and profit-maximizing ways of its cutthroat peers — should not resort to dirty tricks like closing down the grocery store, as it did with its 14th St. wine shop suspiciously close to when employees had been planning a union effort. That was ostensibly in order to relocate the store somewhere else, more than seven months ago now. Where is that new wine store, by the way, Trader Joe’s? We haven’t seen it.