Trader Joe’s Employees in Massachusetts Want to Remove Union Officials
Trader Joe’s employees at the Hadley, Mass., store location have submitted a petition seeking a workplace election to remove the Trader Joe’s United union. The Hadley store created a lot of buzz as the first unionized Trader Joe’s when it voted to form Trader Joe’s United in July 2022.
In an effort to decertify said union, Trader Joe’s employee Les Stratford submitted the petition to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Region 1 in Boston. The NLRB is the federal agency responsible for enforcing federal labor law, which includes administering elections to install and remove unions. Stratford submitted the petition with free legal aid from staff attorneys at the nonprofit National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation.
Stratford’s decertification petition contains employee signatures over the 30% threshold needed to trigger a decertification vote under NLRB rules.
According to the Springfield, Va.-based National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation, a successful decertification vote strips union officials of their monopoly bargaining and forced-dues powers in the workplace.
“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,” noted Stratford. “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.”
Meanwhile, Michael Alcorn, a worker at the Hadley store, testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce in May that union organizers tried to foist union control of the workplace through “card check” – a process that bypasses the NLRB’s secret ballot election system and lets union officials solicit “cards” that are later counted as votes for the union – and refused to meet or talk with workers who were skeptical of the union’s agenda.
[RELATED: Trader Joe’s Workers in Chicago to Vote on Union]
Alcorn alleged before the committee that the union’s campaign also included “inaccurate and incomplete press releases creating false narratives about our workplace, to promote [union officials’] own agenda and personal vendettas” and a general message that “if [employees] don’t vote for the union, they don’t care about their coworkers.”
Stratford described the situation similarly, saying that “immediately the workplace dynamic became a ‘two-side’ thing where if you weren’t going to put a [union] pin on …then you were not going to be acknowledged.”
Trader Joe's told Progressive Grocer: "We fully support our Crew Members’ right to choose whether they want to be represented by a union or not. We welcome a free and fair election that allows them to exercise those rights."
With more than 500 stores in 40-plus states, Trader Joe’s is No. 33 on The PG 100, Progressive Grocer’s 2024 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America. PG also named the company one of its Retailers of the Century.
