TRADER JOE’S WORKERS FILE FOR ELECTION
If vote successful, Mass. location would be first in company to unionize
In a sign that service industry workers continue to have a strong interest in unionizing after successful votes at Starbucks, REI and Amazon, employees at a Trader Joe’s in western Massachusetts have filed for a union election. If they win, they will create the only union at Trader Joe’s, which has more than 500 locations and 50,000 employees nationwide.
The filing with the National Labor Relations Board late Tuesday seeks an election involving about 85 employees who would form an independent union, Trader Joe’s United, rather than affiliate with an established labor organization. That echoes the independent union created by Amazon workers on Staten Island, N.Y., and the worker-led organizing at Starbucks.
“Over the past however many years, changes have been happening without our consent,” said Maeg Yosef, an 18-year employee of the store who is a leader of the union campaign. “We wanted to be in charge of the whole process, to be our own union. So we decided to go independent.”
Yosef said the union had support from over 50 percent of workers at the store, known as crew members.
“We have always said we welcome a fair vote and are prepared
to hold a vote if more than 30 percent of the crew wants one,” said a company spokeswoman, Nakia Rohde, alluding to the NLRB threshold for an election. “We are not interested in delaying the process in any way.”
The company shared a similar statement with workers after they announced their intention to unionize in mid-May.
In explaining their decision, Yosef and four colleagues, all of whom have been with the company for at least eight years, cited changes that had made their benefits less generous over time, as well as health and safety concerns, many of which were magnified during the pandemic.
“This is probably where we get to all of these things coming together,” said Tony Falco, another worker involved in the union campaign, alluding to COVID-19.
Falco said the store took several reassuring steps during the first 12 to 15 months of the pandemic. Management enforced masking requirements and restrictions on capacity. It allowed workers to take leaves of absence while continuing to receive health insurance and gave workers additional “thank you” pay as high as $4 per hour.
But Falco and others said the company was too quick to roll back many of these measures — including additional pay — as vaccines became widely available last year, and noted that the store had suffered COVID outbreaks in the past several weeks after masking became more lax. The store followed the policy of the local health board, which altered its mask mandate at various points, lifting it most recently in March.
Trader Joe’s has generally resisted unionization over the years, including earlier in the pandemic. In March 2020, the chief executive, Dan Bane, sent employees a letter referring to “the current barrage of union activity that has been directed at Trader Joe’s” and complaining that union advocates “clearly believe that now is a moment when they can create some sort of wedge in our company through which they can drive discontent.”
The company’s response to the current campaign appears somewhat less hostile, though union organizers have recently filed charges of unfair labor practices, such as asking employees to remove pro-union pins.