Trader Joe’s Workers Are Carrying Out an Experiment in Independent Unionism
Steve Andrade at an organizing event for Trader Joe's United. (Courtesy of Trader Joe's United)
Independent unions are a real rarity in the US labor movement. But at multiple stores across the country, Trader Joe’s workers are organizing outside of established unions.
aeg Yosef was watching Superstore, an NBC television show about retail workers, when she had an idea. The show features a season-long union-organizing arc, and at the time Yosef and her wife, Sarah, were watching the series in late 2021, Starbucks Workers United (SWU) had just won their first union election at a store in Buffalo, New York.
Yosef and Sarah have each worked at Trader Joe’s for around twenty years. In late 2021, the pair had just finished an extended unpaid COVID leave, which they had taken to help care for their son as he attended school remotely. While they’d been away, they say the job became worse. The two worked at a store in Hadley, Massachusetts, and though the state had introduced a policy offering workers up to a week of paid leave if they had COVID-19, Yosef didn’t find out about the policy until eight months after the state implemented it. She says none of the workers at her store knew about it.
Trader Joe’s had relaxed its COVID policies, too. Workers squeezed through crowded aisles and stood in close proximity to customers as they bagged groceries. Trader Joe’s has always emphasized workers’ friendliness with customers, urging crew members to walk customers to items they can’t find and reach into customers’ bags to ring up items instead of using conveyor belts. The employee handbook instructs workers to offer a “wow customer experience,” defined as “the feelings a customer gets about our delight that they are shopping with us.”
But now, that emphasis meant greater risk for workers, and employees say such changes were implemented without their input. The situation threw into stark relief just how little power they had, even in matters of their own health and safety.
Plus, there was the end of the pandemic pay bump. At the height of COVID, localities mandated pay increases for essential workers; spurred by those ordinances and public support for frontline employees, workers at Trader Joe’s saw a $4-an-hour raise. But in May 2021, just three months after implementing the raise, the company ended all hazard pay except where mandated by law.
Where the company’s relations with its workforce had once been relatively harmonious, in recent years, Trader Joe’s workers say they have grown frustrated. Employees at the company’s flagship location in Pasadena, California, filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in 2021. Another worker, this time at the company’s location in New York City’s Upper West Side, alleged that he was fired for failing to smile enough. While the company denied that worker’s claim, John V. Shields Jr, CEO of Trader Joe’s from 1988 to 2001, once said that he didn’t hire job applicants who failed to smile in the first thirty seconds of an interview.
In their home, watching Superstore’s characters unionize, Yosef turned to her wife. “I was like, ‘We could do that,’” she remembers.
Sarah wasn’t so eager.
“She said, ‘Please don’t do this, because it will take over your life,’” says Yosef. “She’s already seen me have ideas that took over my life, which also took over her life by extension. But she got on board, and I said, ‘OK, I’ll just do it if people are interested.’”
Shortly after that conversation, Yosef approached Tony Falco. Falco has worked at Trader Joe’s for nearly twenty years, working in locations across New England and New York before arriving at the Hadley store in Western Massachusetts. He has watched benefits decline since he began at the company in 2006.
Whereas Trader Joe’s once offered health insurance to part-timers, around a decade ago, it raised the weekly hours required to qualify for the plan from twenty to thirty, though the company has since reduced the threshold to twenty-eight hours. Retirement contributions have been subject to a similar squeeze: the company used to offer contributions of 15 percent of a worker’s earnings, but after lowering that amount to 10 percent, then 5 percent, it now doesn’t specify any amount.
“At 6 a.m. one morning, I said, ‘Tony, come over here,’” remembers Yosef. “We stood in the grocery aisle, and I was like, ‘Did you hear about Starbucks? We could do that here.’ He said, ‘I’m down, but you should talk to Jamie.’”
Jamie Edwards has been at Trader Joe’s for ten years and had previously tried to organize the Hadley store. Edwards describes themself as a socialist with an anarchist background, and their politics were no secret at the Hadley store: their metal water bottle bears stickers with the insignia of the CNT, the anarchist federation during the Spanish Civil War. their politics meant that supporting organizing was a given, but they also attribute such commitments to their personal background: they’d grown up poor and at one point slept in their mother’s hair salon. Those experiences led them to an awareness of the possibility that even if they were not struggling, those around them might be. They say that at Trader Joe’s, they were.
Edwards’s prior union efforts at the company petered out, with many of those they had organized alongside having left the store. But they were still there, and when Yosef and Falco approached them about organizing, they quickly joined the effort. Soon, other members of what became a union organizing committee signed on too.
Yosef’s wife was right: the union campaign took over her life. In the year and a half since the campaign began, the Hadley store has won a NLRB election, as have three other Trader Joe’s locations: Minneapolis, Oakland, and Louisville. Trader Joe’s has filed an exception to the NLRB’s recommendation to certify the Louisville union; the company did not respond to Jacobin’s request for comment by the time of publication.
Two stores have lost elections: one in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and another, in a tie vote, at Essex Crossing in lower Manhattan. All of them have done so under the umbrella of Trader Joe’s United (TJU), an independent union first formed in Hadley. The union says it is in touch with around a dozen additional stores whose workers are interested in organizing.
Yosef is the union’s communications director, Falco was the first organizing director, and Edwards is the president. All three still work regular shifts at the grocery store. None of them have prior union-organizing experience. TJU has TJU has no outside staff, and the only non-“crew members,” as Trader Joe’s employees are called, are their lawyers — though, notes Yosef, one of their members intends to go to law school, so maybe someday the union will have a lawyer who started at the store, too.
Trader Joe’s has some five hundred locations nationwide, employing fifty thousand people. It’s a subsidiary of the German company Aldi, owned by one of the wealthiest families in the world. In 2022, the company netted around $16 billion in sales, putting it on par with Whole Foods. TJU has a long way to go to organize the company or even the proportion of stores SWU has organized. And they hope to do so as an independent union, unaffiliated with any existing unions.
Such a structure is unusual. Independent unions received renewed interest with the NLRB election win by the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) at JFK8, a gigantic Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island. But that organization has yet to win additional union elections, and the difficulties inherent in building a union from scratch, without resources to help battle a corporate behemoth, have contributed to immense internal pressure on the members. Yet TJU is growing and grappling toward sustainability.
“We’ve pulled off something wild and amazing,” says Yosef. “As people, we’re about as regular as you can get. We bag groceries. And now we have created this thing that has taken on a life of its own.”
Surface Bargaining
TJU began bargaining for a first contract with the grocery chain in Hadley in November 2022. Bargaining has begun at the three other unionized stores as well, and TJU leadership flies to as many bargaining sessions as possible, no matter the store. They sit across the table from lawyers from one of the most infamous union-busting law firms in the United States, Morgan Lewis. Workers say those lawyers have no idea what it is like to work in one of the stores and thus frequently appear confused as workers lay out their proposals.
“If we’re talking about the way shifts are scheduled and I’m talking about my log — the log lists what you’re doing by the hour — I can see that everyone on Trader Joe’s side suddenly gets extremely confused,” explains Edwards. “If they’re trying to figure out what I’m talking about by context, that’s a problem.”
Workers have asked representatives from the stores’ management team to be present in bargaining, but to no avail. It’s a familiar problem: workers from Hollywood, California, to Erie, Pennsylvania, voice the same frustrations about wasting time explaining how their jobs work to corporate attorneys. TJU members say that in one bargaining session, a Trader Joe’s representative admitted to having never entered the store over whose contract they were bargaining.
Trader Joe’s United members at a rally in Boston. (Courtesy of Trader Joe’s United)
As for the substance of bargaining, TJU members say there is little to speak of.
“Trader Joe’s is surface bargaining,” says TJU vice president Sarah Beth Ryther, who works at the unionized Minneapolis store, referring to the strategy of merely going through the motions of negotiating with no intent of reaching an agreement. “Trader Joe’s is showing up to the table in a show of bargaining in good faith because they want to separate themselves from the really nasty union-busting campaigns of Amazon and Starbucks by actually coming to the table. But truthfully, they do not want to accomplish anything.”
TJU members have presented a number of proposals. On wages, they want a $30-an-hour minimum, up from the current starting wage of around $18, along with cost-of-living adjustments. They say the company has offered no counterproposal with concrete numbers. They have also proposed guaranteed retirement contributions for all crew members, health insurance for all members under the same plan offered to management, with the employer covering all costs, and additional paid time off.
Regarding matters of workplace discrimination, TJU members say that they have presented detailed proposals, but that the company’s response has been to argue that the employee handbook is sufficient, despite worker testimony to the contrary.
For several months now, workers say Trader Joe’s representatives have refused to enter the bargaining room. In late March, the NLRB dismissed a complaint by Starbucks against SWU over its desire for hybrid bargaining, in which workers can bargain via Zoom as well as in person. TJU members see that as giving them the right to hybrid bargaining as well, so at an April bargaining session, they brought a computer. The company objected and has refused to bargain since that date.
To illustrate corporate cluelessness, Edwards shares an exchange they say took place during a bargaining session for the Minneapolis location. The two sides were discussing racial discrimination: specifically, hats workers must wear while giving out free samples to customers (a “demo” in Trader Joe’s parlance). Workers say the hats do not work well with black employees’ hair.
“The lawyer gets really flustered and her response is, ‘Well, maybe they just don’t have to work on demo,’” recounts Edwards. “By ‘they,’ she was referring to black people. We were like, ‘Excuse me?’”