The Long Road to Union Recognition: Trader Joe’s Workers Press On

Maximilian Alvarez: All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network. Produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. 

We’re talking today with Alec Plant, a worker organizer at the Lincoln and Grace Trader Joe’s store in Chicago, and a member of Trader Joe’s United. It’s been a little while since we checked in with workers who have been fighting to unionize Trader Joe’s, but it’s really important that we do, because workers’ struggles don’t just go away when their store votes to unionize, and workers’ struggles at a company as big as Trader Joe’s don’t just go away when a few stores vote to unionize. 

In many respects, sadly, the opposite is true. It was two years ago, in 2022, when workers from several different Trader Joe’s grocery stores voted to unionize, starting at a store in Hadley, Mass., where workers not only voted to unionize, but opted to form an independent union, Trader Joe’s United. Other stores in Minneapolis, Louisville and Oakland also voted to unionize under the banner of Trader Joe’s United, while workers in Boulder, Colo., and at the Trader Joe’s New York City Wine Shop were working to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW).

The New York City Wine Shop was abruptly closed the same week workers were planning to go public with their union campaign, in a suspected act of retaliation that the company denies, of course. And workers in Boulder withdrew their election petition one day after UFCW Local 7 filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), saying that the company was illegally coercing and intimidating workers, which the company also denied.

Like with Starbucks and Amazon, union busting –  – or alleged union busting –  – has been part of the Trader Joe’s unionizing story from the jump. Rather than be compelled to follow the law and play by the rules, Trader Joe’s is flipping over the table and challenging the NLRB’s very existence, like so many other companies are doing now that the judiciary all the way up to the Supreme Court is stacked with corporate-serving Trump-appointed judges.

Let’s not forget that at the center of all this, always, is working people bravely exercising their rights and trying to improve their lives and their jobs for themselves and their coworkers. And not only has Trader Joe’s been fighting that tooth and nail, but they are now fighting the very foundation upon which workers in this country –  – not just at Trader Joe’s but across the board –  – can exercise those rights. And so we need to continue to care about this and show solidarity and lift up workers’ voices, like Alec Plant’s. That’s what we’re here to do today.

Alec Plant: I’m Alec. I am a crew member employee at Trader Joe’s on Lincoln and Grace in Chicago. I’ve been on the organizing committee for probably six or eight months now. We had our union election, and we’re still in the middle of a campaign to make sure our store gets unionized. 

Alvarez: Well, Alec, thank you so much for joining us on the show today, man. I know you’ve got a lot going on with the union drive and with your working life, so I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and chat with us. Really excited to get an update on where things are with the Trader Joe’s United struggle. 

This is a crucial, pivotal struggle — not only in the sense of workers standing up for themselves and working together to improve their lives but also in how the Trader Joe’s United struggle has really taken an important place in the imagination of the labor movement today. The backlash from Trader Joe’s in the courts and the ways that they’re trying to union bust like Starbucks and Amazon –  – these are stories that have really been at the forefront of the labor discussion over the past couple years. I wanted to start by asking if we could take a quick step back, because this has been a protracted struggle, right? Give our listeners a bit of refresher on the union drive itself, where it came from, what role Covid played in that, but also what the long-standing issues were that preceded Covid but really came to a head in this union drive. 

Plant: Some of the long-standing concerns have to do with healthcare. It used to be you could work, I think, two or three days and get healthcare, and now they’ve significantly increased the number of hours you need to work. And that’s been going on for a long time. In a lot of stores that have unionized, there have been big issues with captains, or general managers, treating people inappropriately. There have been complaints of sexual harassment at stores. There have been complaints of LGBTQ+ people not being treated appropriately, especially for trans workers, who have been dead-named and harassed at work. So those have been two long-term issues. During Covid, there was a sense that we were part of the essential worker category, and we actually got a pay bump. And then, basically as soon as Covid started receding, they took that away. There were a lot of workers who also weren’t satisfied with the sort of Covid protection measures that they had put in place. And I think a lot of that led to the first wave of union activity in 2022 at the Hadley store. 

Alvarez: I mean, to be clear, Covid is still here, right? Workers are going to continue to get sick and die, and employers are going to continue to not be held accountable or responsible for that. One of the things that I learned in doing this work and interviewing workers like yourself throughout the Covid pandemic, was the thank-you pay grift. Other companies called it different things –  – I think Amazon called it ​“hero pay” –  – but they explicitly did not call it hazard pay, because then you gotta keep paying it as long as the hazard persists. If you call it something like ​“hero pay” or ​“thank-you pay,” it’s this thing that the bosses are giving us out of the kindness of their own hearts. But they can rip it away whenever the hell they want, which they did. 

Looking back, are there things that you and your co-workers experienced during Covid, that you really want our listeners out there to remember and not forget?

Plant: I think they had to tell us when someone in the store got Covid. It would be like 10 people a week. It was very scary just to know that people were getting Covid, and the company knew it was happening. You sort of got this sense of, ​“When is it going to be me?” and ​“What’s going to happen?” We had no choice but to keep going to work. It was an incredibly high-stress time to be at work, and we just had to live through that, and it sucked.

Alvarez: I think we saw the best and worst of humanity over the past four years, and that’s a complicated thing to deal with. I mean, just the sort of harassment that frontline workers faced during Covid, the open admission by so many employers that they did not care — that workers’ labor was essential, but their lives were not.

What do you wish customers knew –  – or just considered –  – about the work that you and your co-workers do?

Plant: I think a lot of people who work at the store have a sense of like, ​“Oh, this is the sort of a job that anybody can do. We can’t ask for more.” People think we’re just putting stuff on the shelves, but a lot of them don’t realize that we do have personalities and special characteristics that make us valuable for this job, and people don’t value that. I kind of try to communicate to people that you’re not just a replaceable drone here. You really are bringing something to the table, and they can’t just fire us all at the drop of a hat.

Alvarez: That’s the burning core at the heart of organized labor’s message, right? We are worth more than this. The everyday heroism of workers standing up and fighting for better is just a constant source of inspiration. 

I wanted to ask a little more about the union drive itself. Can we talk about your store and where it fits in this struggle across the country, starting in Hadley and now expanding to multiple stores that have voted to unionize? 

Plant: Hadley organized in 2022, and four total stores are unionized, I think. The Hadley store won with like [60%]. It was an incredible union victory. The elections since then have been a lot closer. When the elections are very close, the company usually contests them. So that means that the union has to go through a lengthy court process: We have to pay lawyers and put people on the stand, and it’s arduous. The stores that are unionized right now are trying to negotiate, and the company is just stonewalling: They’re not opening the books, they’re not making reasonable responses to any proposals that the union is making. We’re sort of in limbo because we need more stores to organize before we can really start effectively bargaining. 

At my store, we basically won our election; it just has to get officially certified. But because the company is challenging it, it may [take time] before we’re certified. Just in a moral sense, it’s a wildly unfair thing to do to people who’ve chosen to organize. We think they’re just stalling to try and make our lives more difficult and beat the union by attrition, by wearing us down with time and resources.

Alvarez: That’s their go-to strategy: wait folks out. Delay, demoralize, tie things up in the courts. I wanted to talk about that response from Trader Joe’s at the national and local level, because this has been really nuts, right?

Plant: So in previous Trader Joe’s organizing campaigns, there have been a lot of very obvious violations of the National Labor Relations Act, like when management will force workers to have one-on-one meetings. They’ll threaten people with their jobs. They’ll do transfer freezes. And that’s all illegal. Under the law, you’re not allowed to penalize anybody for wanting to be in a union. 

When we did our campaign, there had been a change in the law. So now, if the company starts violating labor practices, but the union has already gathered enough cards to trigger an election, meaning people have signed a card saying they would like to have a union. Courts can say, ​“We’re not going to have an election. We’re just going to say that this is a union.” Since that decision, Trader Joe’s has been a lot more careful about violating the National Labor Relations Act and doing unfair labor practices.

But after the election, they can start violating and doing all the unfair labor practices they want to. They can still get fined, but we have to go through court. And, I mean, they don’t care that much. They get fined. So since then, we’ve had transfer freezes and firings of union supporters. 

Alvarez: You’re at a stage in this struggle where Trader Joe’s corporate is really trying to isolate the unionized stores. I wanted to ask if there are other lessons you want to communicate to folks about going the independent union route.

Plant: I was kind of concerned about having an independent union because we can’t collect dues yet, which means we can’t pay people to be a bureaucracy. It might be a few years before we can bargain, so that’s rough. I think it’s worth it to have the type of union we want to have, which is an active union with highly democratic features.

Alvarez: I did want to ask a big-picture question, which is about this labor resurgence, right? This new union wave, this new generation of organized labor energy. I absolutely do not want to discount that, but there are also sober realities here, right? A lot of people forget that even if you voted to unionize at your store, that does not mean you have a first contract. That does not mean your coworkers are not going to get fired and harassed, or even your store closed down. Folks out there are excited about this and want to see this labor upsurge succeed, but maybe they aren’t paying attention to the realities of the struggles that you and other workers around the country are dealing with. Like, where would you say we are in that moment? And what can supporters do to keep that momentum going if they really want to see it succeed and want to see you and your store succeed?

Plant: I mean, I’m more optimistic than I’ve ever been in my life. The sort of malaise and the sense of disinterest hasn’t gone away. It’s still there, but there is a sense that we can break through it. I don’t think we would have won this election 10 or 15 years ago, and we did.

If you want to support the movement more broadly, support politicians who don’t hate unions. Supporting somebody who won’t destroy the National Labor Relations Act or appoint a judge who will destroy it is huge.

And if you work in a place that needs to be unionized, start unionizing it, because as the old saying goes, a victory anywhere is victory everywhere. And the more people who start doing it, the more it will be normalized culturally and the more leverage we’ll have together.

If you can’t do any of that stuff and you’re just cheering for us on social media, we appreciate it. Even the tiny gestures: When people come through my line and see my pin, and they go, ​“Hey, stay strong, man.” Sometimes it’s that breath of air you need when you feel like you’re suffocating. And it really does matter to us.