Dive Brief:
- Workers at a unionized Trader Joe’s location in Hadley, Massachusetts, have petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to hold a vote to determine whether to remove Trader Joe’s United from its role representing employees at the store, according to a Monday announcement from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which is assisting the workers.
- The petition includes signatures from “well over” 30% of workers at the store — above the threshold the NLRB requires to trigger a decertification election — the foundation said.
- The effort to oust Trader Joe’s United from the Hadley location represents the latest bump in the labor group’s effort to encourage workers at the chain to formally organize.
Dive Insight:
The workers behind the decertification drive claim that agents for the union used “controversial and deceptive tactics” to build support for Trader Joe’s United at the store, which became the first of the grocer’s locations to unionize two years ago.
“Officials of this union have sowed division and smeared both our workplace and anyone who dissents from the union’s agenda pretty much from the time the campaign began to unionize the store,” Les Stratford, a worker at the store who submitted the petition, said in a statement. “This isn’t what I believe the majority of my coworkers want or deserve, and despite the union’s pushback on this effort, we will fight to ensure that our colleagues can exercise their right to vote on whether we want to be represented by this union.”
Trader Joe’s United did not respond before press time to a request for comment about the Hadley workers’ effort to remove the union.
Ahead of their 45-31 vote to unionize in July 2022, employees at the Hadley store laid out a series of grievances against Trader Joe’s, asserting that the grocer cut retirement benefits, didn’t provide sufficient time off, sacrificed safety and subjected them to “mysterious or inconsistent” performance reviews.
But in written testimony before Congress in May, Michael Alcorn, a worker at the store, said organizers publicly misrepresented working conditions at the Hadley Trader Joe’s location.
“Our customers who had always seen our smiling faces and positive attitudes were surprised and horrified to hear claims that we were being mistreated. They were supportive of our rights to organize which I appreciated, but I wanted them to know that the union campaign was not representative of all of us,” Alcorn told a U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education & the Workforce subcommittee.
“Workers deserve an opportunity to petition for a vote to oust a union that they feel has unfairly ascended to power or simply isn’t serving workers’ interests,” National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix said in a statement.
Trader Joe’s United has faced a bumpy road in its bid to unionize workers for the chain. Employees at Trader Joe’s locations in Oakland, California; Massachusetts; Minneapolis; and Louisville, Kentucky, have opted to join the labor group. But workers in other stores, including two in New York City, have rejected efforts to convince them to join Trader Joe’s United.
