Posts tagged Trader Joe’s
Op-ed: Trader Joe’s union is not what we bargained for
June 13, 2023 // First, as reported by the Freedom Foundation, SEIU and Workers United have also targeted my previous employer, Starbucks, with a multimillion-dollar unionization campaign featuring some of the very organizers involved in the Hadley Trader Joe’s campaign. Untold numbers of paid union “salts” — many fresh out of college with little to no work experience — have been deployed to get jobs at targeted employers and covertly organize them from the inside. Second, few resources are available to workers skeptical of or opposed to unionization. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) staff I’ve contacted have shown they only care about workers that want to unionize.
Federal labor regulators say Minneapolis Trader Joe’s illegally removed pro-union literature
June 7, 2023 // Workers from the four stores unionized with Trader Joe’s United continue to negotiate with the company over a first labor contract covering wages, benefits and working conditions. Ryther says discussions have been halting. Workers want to negotiate a single contract across all four stores and do so with a virtual option. The company wants to treat workers at each store as separate bargaining entities and has refused to bargain with a virtual hybrid option, Ryther said. Trader Joe’s United has filed a complaint with the NLRB alleging the company has bargained in bad faith for not coming to the table when union representatives tried to bargain with a virtual option.
Focus organizing drives on workers without college degrees, US unions told
May 8, 2023 // n contrast, unionization hasn’t taken off nearly as rapidly at many blue-collar, lower-paid workplaces. No other Chipotle restaurant has unionized since workers in Lansing, Michigan, voted last August to make theirs the nation’s first unionized Chipotle. Only one Amazon warehouse is unionized in the US, just two Apple stores and four Trader Joe’s. Those companies have mounted fierce anti-union counterattacks to slow and they hope stop the spread. Chris Rosell, the Teamsters’ organizing director, says one reason unionization of blue-collar workers often doesn’t catch fire is that it’s frequently easier for anti-union consultants to scare and deter those workers. “Blue-collar workers often aren’t as educated about this union-busting stuff,” he said. “They could be more susceptible to these kinds of tactics.” Rosell said the Teamsters often run elaborate campaigns that seek to inoculate workers from the pressures and propaganda from anti-union consultants. He said the Teamsters’ president, Sean O’Brien, hopes to double the union’s membership and focus organizing on such area trucking, warehouses and sanitation work. Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs with Justice, a labor rights group, says it’s often harder to unionize blue-collar workers because they tend to have less economic security than educated workers and have greater fear of what will happen to them if they’re retaliated against, perhaps getting fired, for seeking to unionize.
Tied vote stymies union effort at Lower East Side Trader Joe’s
April 24, 2023 // A two-day union vote at a Lower East Side Trader Joe’s ended in a tie, handing a loss to workers who supported the effort, the union announced Friday. The final vote at the Essex Crossing Trader Joe’s was 76-76, legally marking a win for the company, worker-led union Trader Joe’s United said in a news release. Despite the tie, however, worker-organizers at the store said they would continue to fight for a union.
Will more Trader Joe’s workers vote to unionize?
April 20, 2023 //
Ben & Jerry’s workers in flagship Vermont store file for union election
April 18, 2023 // The company's stance on this recent unionization push isn't yet known. In 1998, the company challenged a unionization attempt made by maintenance workers in its Vermont plant, arguing the union vote should be held among all plant workers.
Barnes & Noble Education Workers Seek to Unionize, Extending Organizing Wave
April 10, 2023 // Workers say they’ve signed up most of the roughly 70 employees at the store on Rutgers University’s campus. After announcing their organizing campaign to local management, they plan to submit a filing Thursday asking the US National Labor Relations Board to conduct a unionization election. Employees are petitioning to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which currently represents retail workers at Macy’s Inc., H&M Hennes & Mauritz AB and, most recently, Recreational Equipment Inc., where it first secured a foothold last year in New York City. Barnes & Noble Education didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The company, which retailer Barnes & Noble Inc. spun off in 2015, operates 785 physical bookstores for students and hundreds of online bookstores. It also has exclusive deals with schools and universities to distribute course materials.
You may have heard of the ‘union boom.’ The numbers tell a different story
March 2, 2023 // Headline writers began declaring things like, "Employees everywhere are organizing" and that the United States was seeing a "union boom." In September, the White House asserted "Organized labor appears to be having a moment." However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released its union data for 2022. And their data shows that — far from a resurgence — the share of American workers in a union has continued to decline. Last year, the union membership rate fell by 0.2 percentage points to 10.1% — the lowest on record. This was the second year in a row that the union rate fell. Only one in ten American workers is now in a union, down from nearly one in three workers during the heyday of unions back in the 1950s.
Opinion: Labor unions, workers and the need to think outside the box
February 23, 2023 // The California Policy Center reports that as of December 2022, 27.1% of eligible public employees in California have chosen not to pay into government unions. Last November, employees of the local union SEIU 2015, a statewide union representing public employees in California, went on strike alleging unfair labor practices at SEIU 2015. Every two year election cycle hundreds of millions of dollars worth of membership dues from public sector unions in California alone are spent financing elections and lobbying efforts. And, because of a longstanding California employment law, employees from the University of California system are now being forced to repay wages they received while on strike last fall. These examples point to a larger issue: traditional unions are not protecting and supporting their own members.