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Union-busting with a smile: Is Trader Joe’s the next Starbucks? [1]

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Date: 2023-10-10  

Trader Joe’s workers first began organizing their own union in 2022. They were partly inspired, they say, by the growing wave of union organizing at once-unlikely companies like Starbucks, Apple and REI. But they were also inspired by the divide between Trader Joe’s image and the way they say they were treated when customers were out of earshot.

Striking Starbucks workers hold signs and chant outside of a Starbucks coffee shop during a national strike on November 17, 2022, in San Francisco, California. Thousands of members of the Starbucks Workers Union are striking at over one hundred Starbucks stores across the country as workers try to negotiate a contract with Starbucks.

“Working at Trader Joe’s is physically and emotionally strenuous,” Custer told Capital & Main. “They ask the crew to provide a ‘wow’ customer experience, but there is this cognitive dissonance of them asking us to be super friendly-faced while treating us differently behind closed doors.”

Workers say the company has also added injury to that insult. Half a dozen workers across the four unionized Trader Joe’s locations cited common complaints that spurred organizing, including safety concerns. The rate of workplace injury among supermarket workers is 75% higher than the national average, and multiple workers said they had suffered repetitive stress and back injuries at work.

Yet according to the New York Times and workers interviewed by Capital & Main, the company has pared back its health coverage and cut retirement contributions. About a decade ago, health care kicked in once an employee averaged about 20 hours of work a week and the company offered retirement contributions of 15% of a worker’s earnings. Today, the threshold to qualify for healthcare is 28 hours a week and the company no longer offers a set contribution to retirement. Workers also say that wage rates now vary so widely that longtime employees can earn less than new hires. “Little by little, there was this erosion, and I began to experience more and more disillusionment with the company,” said Dominique Bernardo, who has worked at Oakland’s Rockridge store for 18 years.

Organizing Trader Joe’s could provide a corrective to the last four decades of plummeting union membership among supermarket workers, says Ruth Milkman, a labor sociologist at City University of New York who has studied the grocery industry. In 1983, one-third of grocery workers were unionized, the vast majority under the United Food and Commercial Workers. Today, unionization rates among supermarket workers are half that.

Much of the shift, says Milkman, reflects the introduction of new, non-union supermarkets that have rapidly gained market share: Walmart and Target at the scale of big-box stores; Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s at the neighborhood grocery level. “If Trader Joe’s were organized on a large scale, that would help to reverse the trend [of declining union density],” said Milkman.

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