Two years ago, workers from several different Trader Joe’s grocery stores joined the wave of unionization efforts spreading across the country. Workers in Hadley, Massachusetts, made history in 2022 by not only becoming the first Trader Joe’s store to vote to unionize but also by opting to form an independent union, Trader Joe’s United (TJU). However, like with Starbucks, Amazon, Medieval Times, and other companies where workers have been exercising their right to organize in recent years, rampant union busting has been part of the Trader Joe’s story from the beginning. What’s worse, as Alex Press writes in Jacobin, rather than be compelled to follow the law and play by the rules, the supposedly progressive grocery chain has joined Elon Musk’s SpaceX in attacking the very constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board. What is the current state of the union drive at Trader Joe’s? What issues are employees (“crew members”) still dealing with on the job, and what can supporters do to help? In this episode, Max speaks with Alec Plant, a worker organizer at the Lincoln and Grace Trader Joe’s in Chicago and a member of Trader Joe’s United.

Additional links/info below: 

• Trader Joe’s United website, Twitter/X page, and Instagram
• Lauren Kaori Gurley, The Washington Post, “As Chicago Trader Joe’s votes on unionizing, grocer fights other efforts”
• Alex Press, Jacobin, “Trader Joe’s rejects the New Deal”
• Dave Jameison, HuffPost, “Trader Joe’s threatened workers ahead of union vote, feds allege”
• Talia Soglin, Chicago Tribune, “Workers at North Center Trader Joe’s are first in Chicago to file for union election”
• Steven Greenhouse, The New Republic, “How corporations crush new unions”
• Steven Greenhouse, The Guardian, “Major US corporations threaten to return labor to ‘law of the jungle’”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “Want to unionize your workplace? These worker-organizers have some advice”

Permanent links below:

Featured Music:

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian 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 within 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. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we are doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends and family members. Lead positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you got recommendations for folks you’d like us to talk to on the show or topics you’d like us to investigate and please support the work that we do at The Real News Network by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got a great episode for y’all today. As you guys heard there at the top of the episode, 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 and that we keep checking in 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 as we know. It was two years ago in 2022 when workers from several different Trader Joe’s grocery stores voted to unionize, starting with workers at a store in Hadley, Massachusetts where workers not only voted to unionize, but opted to form an independent union Trader Joe’s United.

Now other stores in Minneapolis and Louisville and Oakland also voted to unionize under the banner of Trader Joe’s United. While workers in Boulder, Colorado and workers at the Trader Joe’s New York City wine shop were working to unionize with the UFCW or the United and Commercial Workers. Now, the New York City Wine Shop store was abruptly closed. The same week workers were planning to go public with their union campaign in a suspected act of retaliation, which the company of course denies and workers in Boulder withdrew their election petition. One day after UFCW Local seven filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board saying that the company was illegally coercing and intimidating workers, which the company also denied. Now, like with Starbucks, like with Amazon Union busting or alleged union busting has been part of the Trader Joe’s unionizing story from the jump. In a HuffPost article from March of this year, Dave Jamison writes, quote, prosecutors at the National Labor Relations Board say, trader Joe’s illegally interrogated workers and threatened to take away their pay raises when they were trying to form a union.

Last year, the alleged threats came in the runup to a January, 2023 election at a Louisville Kentucky store where workers voted in favor of joining a new union. Trader Joe’s United. The company has challenged the election results by claiming the union illegally influenced the vote. But according to the complaint filed Monday, prosecutors say it was Trader Joe’s that committed unfair labor practices meant to sway workers against unionizing. And these types of rulings against Trader Joe’s for rampant union busting have become a near constant affair. As Alex Press writes in Jacobin in March of 2023, the NLRB ruled that Trader Joe’s had illegally asked another worker this time in Houston, Texas for raising concerns about working conditions. The board ordered the company to rehire the worker with back pay. In May, the board issued a complaint against Trader Joe’s for removing union literature for the employee break room at a unionized Minneapolis Minnesota location.

Two months later, trader Joe’s sued TJU for trademark infringement taking issue with the union’s logo, which is designed to evoke Trader Joe’s branding. Vera, a judge for the US District Court of the central District of California threw the case out earlier this month of the company’s claim that customers might accidentally purchase union merchandise from the Union website under the assumption that they were buying official Trader Joe’s merchandise. Vera judged it so ludicrous as to constitute an attempt to weaponize the legal system against Trader Joe’s United for the purpose of gaining advantage in an ongoing legal labor dispute. Vera, that Trader Joe’s litigation strategy came close to deserving sanction for its improper claims. Another judge dismissed a similar case brought by medieval times against Medieval times performers united the workers union at that company. But that’s not all. I mean. Now, rather than be compelled to follow the law and play by the rules like so many other companies are doing, now that the judiciary all the way up to the Supreme Court is just stacked with corporate serving Trump appointed judges, trader Joe’s is flipping over the table and challenging the nlrbs very existence. Trader Joe’s. Alex Press writes, the supposedly progressive grocery chain has joined Elon Musk’s SpaceX in attacking the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board.

Let’s not forget that at the center of all of 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 across the board, not just at Trader Joe’s can exercise those rights. And so we need to continue to care about this and to show solidarity. We need to continue to follow up on this story and to lift up the voices of workers themselves, workers like Alec Plant, and that’s what we’re here to do today.

Alec Plant:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Alec, again, thank you so much for joining us today on the show. Man, I really appreciate it. I know you got a lot going on with the Union Drive and also with your working life and all that stuff, so really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and chat with us and really excited to get an update on where things are with the Trader Joe’s United struggle because this is a crucial, pivotal struggle, not only in the sense of workers standing up for themselves, working together to improve their lives, but also the Trader Joe’s United struggle has really kind of taken an important place in the imagination of the labor movement today and the backlash from Trader Joe’s like in the courts and the ways that they’re trying to union bust like Starbucks and other companies like Amazon. I mean, these are stories that have really been at the forefront of the labor discussion over the past couple years. And of course, we’ve had a fellow Trader Joe’s workers on the show before. We’ve done some live shows with the great Sarah Beth Ryther out there in Minnesota. Shout out to Sarah Beth.

Alec Plant:

Love Sarah Beth.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, Sarah Beth’s a g man. So if you guys haven’t definitely listened to those live shows we did with Sarah Beth, we’ll link to them in the show notes. But yeah, as I said in the intro, it has been a minute since we’ve been able to really check in with you guys and see how things are going and what folks out there can do to continue to support y’all. And so I kind of wanted to start there and ask if we could just sort of take a quick step back and give folks a refresher here, because this has been a protracted struggle. I mean, the Trader Joe’s Union Drive is one of those crucial stories that emerged out of the COVID-19 pandemic, the first story unionized in 2022 amidst as we were all reeling from CO. But so I wanted to ask if you could just sort of 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 longstanding issues were that proceeded Covid that really came to a head in this union drive. And then we’ll talk a bit more about your own kind of personal path into working at Trader Joe’s and being involved in that campaign. But I guess for folks who haven’t checked in a while, yeah, give us a little refresher here.

Alec Plant:

So some of the longstanding concerns have been to do with healthcare. They’ve increased the number of hours we need for healthcare, and that’s been going on for a long time. 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. There have been problems in different stores with management. At our store we call our sort of general manager, the captain, and in a lot of the stores that have unionized, there have been big issues with captains, treating people inappropriately. There have been complaints of sexual harassment at stores. There have been complaints of L-G-B-T-Q, people not being treated appropriately, especially for trans workers. They’ve been deadnamed and harassed at work.

So those have been two long-term issues. Obviously during Covid, there was a sense in the whole country that workers were essential, that we were part of the essential worker category. And we actually, we got a pay bump during Covid, which was we got, they called it Thank you pay. And then basically as soon as Covid started receding, they took that away. There were a lot of workers who weren’t satisfied with the sort of covid protection measures that they had put in place. It took ’em a long, long in most stores, or at least in the store I worked at. Eventually we got a little glass thing in front of the registers, but for a long time we didn’t even have that. So it was just sort of people breathing on us all day. So that made people upset. And I think a lot of that led to the first wave of union activity in 2022 at the Hadley store, which was the first store to unionize. They also had a lot of individual problems that weren’t quite as broad as the whole company, which stores tend to have. But there are big company wide problems like that that are, I dunno, good enough reason for any Trader Joe’s store to unionize, I think.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man. I think one of the biggest and most infuriating grifts that emerged during the intense covid period, I mean, to be clear, COVID is still here, right? I mean, we’re in the midst of a wave now. I was just at the DNC covering that for the Real News, and that was a bonafide super spreader event. So we fucked up here. Now 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. We’ve talked about that ad nauseum on the show, but I just wanted to underline that here for folks as we move forward. But yeah, one of the things that I learned in doing the work that I do, interviewing workers like yourself throughout the Covid Pandemic, doing a book of interviews with workers in year one of Covid was the thank You Pay Grift or 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 got to keep paying it as long as the hazard persists. If you call it something like hero pay or thank you pay, it’s this sort of 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. But it’s just one of those things that I really feel like folks are forgetting about those first couple years of covid that was so egregious and awful that we just ended up accepting and we shouldn’t have. But I wanted to just ask about that a little more. Looking back, are there sort of things that you and your coworkers experienced during Covid or saw you saw the nature of the company you work for in Covid that you feel like folks out there are forgetting, but they shouldn’t? Are there parts of that experience that you really want our listeners out there to remember and really not forget?

Alec Plant:

Yeah, there are some things I think they had to tell us when someone in the store got covid. So we would just get messages through our scheduling app and it would be like 10 people a week would get covid. And that was at a time when we still didn’t know how bad it was. That was terrifying. It was very scary to just know that people were getting covid and the company knew it was happening, and it was, you knew these people, they were your friends, and it was just like, okay, come back to work. It was scary. It was just message after message after message, so you sort of got the sense of when is it going to be me and what’s going to happen? So that was horrible. I guess just life under a pandemic is that uncertainty, but we didn’t have that. We felt like it was happening to us.

It was inevitable and we had no choice but to keep going to work. And then also it was just hard because customers, it was hard to work with customers too, because customers were, you got to go to the grocery store, you don’t have a choice most of the time, but customers were going nuts. When I say nuts, I don’t mean to disparage anybody for being scared of covid, but all the fears that people had were our sort of burden to deal with. So we would have people who would yell at us if we weren’t wearing gloves or if our hands touch stuff, we work at a grocery store, sometimes stuff falls on the ground or I don’t know, just things happen at a grocery store and if anyone interpreted it as any violation, we would get yelled at, even though obviously we’re all doing our best to keep everything safe and clean. So it was an incredibly high stress time to be at work, and that just was just part of our experience and we just had to live through that. And it sucked. I dunno what else to say

Maximillian Alvarez:

About it. Yeah. Oh man. I mean, what else needs to be said? We saw a lot of ourselves in the past four years, and a lot of those things you can’t unsee. I mean, I think we saw the best and worst of humanity over the past four years, and that’s a complicated thing to sort of deal with. But I think there’s no going back. 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. And so many of our brothers, sisters and siblings lost their lives just trying to keep a roof over their heads and make a paycheck because they had no other option to say nothing of all the political bullshit that we saw, pardon my French, we don’t have to get into that now.

The point being just that we revealed a lot to ourselves in the past four years, and I just really wanted to impress upon people out there listening that when you go back into your grocery store, when you go in and talk to a service worker, or when you are going to a medical facility and talking to healthcare workers, or you’re on a plane talking to flight attendants, keep that in mind. Keep in mind what our fellow workers have had to endure over the past four years and the impression that our actions, our government’s actions, our media’s actions, think of the lingering impression that that shit leaves on you. And at the very least, be kind respond to that with kindness and solidarity and sincerity and just remember how much we’re all going through and how little we’re actually talking about it together as fellow workers.

That is essential, especially as we go further into the gullet of a horrifying 21st century where we encouraged at every step of the way to see one another as enemies and their powers that be are constantly trying to pit us against one another. So apologies for Soapboxing. It’s just something that obviously is very near and dear to my heart. And I wanted to pick up on that Alec and ask, when did you start working at Trader Joe’s? Let’s take a step back and kind of talk about that because curious to know what it’s been like as a worker there for yourself. Did you start at Trader Joe’s before Covid?

Alec Plant:

I started right in the middle.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Okay. Okay. So tell me about that. So walk me through the path that led you to being an employee of Trader Joe’s in the middle of Covid and then what that experience was like. Okay.

Alec Plant:

Yeah. So I was a bike messenger and I didn’t have any health insurance and I wasn’t getting enough hours, so I decided to get a new job. I had a friend who worked at Trader Joe’s, so I applied there. This was right in the middle of Covid. I got the job and when I first started working at Trader, I worked at a different store. I worked at the downtown location in Chicago, and it was a ghost town in the store. Nobody would come in. They were basically asking us every shift. They were like, alright, does anybody want to go home early? Because they were overstaffed and there was no work to do. We had a certain number of people that could be, we could only allow a certain number of people in the store at a time. So when it was busy, which was kind of rare, at that point, we would’ve a huge line out the door and we would have to have somebody who was basically a bouncer just being like, stop, you can’t come in. It was like a one in one out type deal.

So it was a strange, and then every day since I had just started, everyone was teaching me everything. Every single thing I learned about the job was always like, well, this is how we’re doing things right now. This is way different than how we normally do it, but this is how it is right now. So yeah, I guess, I mean, I just settled in and Trader Joe’s is an interesting place to work because people who work there are Trader Joe’s people. They’re all very incredibly exuberant all the time. So I had never worked in a place like that before. So that was kind of fun and interesting, and the coworkers at Trader Joe’s are generally really, really, really good. So that was a big plus. They’re nice people, and I dunno if you’ve been to Trader Joe’s, you probably know that.

So that was good. And then so Covid just sort of kept rolling. There’s a lot of high turnover rate at Trader Joe’s, so people are constantly sort of getting in and out, where was I going with that? And then we would get messages about people getting covid all the time, and you get that weird sense of like, huh, I hope everybody’s okay. I hope no one’s seriously getting damaged long-term because of this. But I mean, you just keep going to work. And that’s what we did during Covid for that whole period. We got Thank you pay, and then thank you Pay was interesting. It was like, oh, I guess they can pay us more money. And then that ended and that was gone. So that was basically how I got in. That was the vibe during the Covid era, it was a total state of exception. Everything is different. The store feels kind of like a ghost town. So it felt like that was, I feel like the vibe of Covid at large was like that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And when, for you as a Trader Joe’s employee, did that start to end and what has the job been like since, I guess, what are you dealing with on a day-to-day, week to week basis there in Chicago?

Alec Plant:

Well, let’s see, I don’t know the exact date for when that started. It felt like the same time everybody else stopped wearing masks. We stopped wearing masks, and our Covid protocols sort of melted away. So on a day-to-Day basis, I think it’s alienating work, putting stuff on a shelf for hours and hours at a time. And I like talking to people, so I don’t mind. So that’s half the job, half the job is putting stuff on the shelf and breaking down boxes, and the other half of the job is standing at the register and saying, hello, how you doing? Oh, you’re really going to love these peas. Which is, I don’t mind. It’s nice to talk to people, but it’s also, it can be grueling to do that for a lot of hours a day. So our day is basically split up. It’s half basically usually about half and half just putting stuff on a shelf and then standing at a register, checking people out.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that’s a big part of the job. I mean, like you said, there’s certainly a type of Trader Joe’s employee, and that’s one of the reasons so many people go to Trader Joe’s is they love the vibe. They’ve loved it for years and decades. You guys, one of the first interviews I ever did on this show was with Glen Chevlin. She works at Disneyland in Anaheim, and she talked about making the magic happen and all the workers there who make that magic that people from around the world tourists come to see every day of every year. I mean, there is a component of the work that you guys do that is that kind of emotional labor, the performative labor, the sort of social labor that people come to Trader Joe’s for. And as a former service worker, as a waiter there in Chicago, I used to work at Reza in Lincoln Park. The location’s not there anymore. But yeah, you’re putting on a performance for eight hours and then it’s like when you’re done, you get the come down a little bit. So I wanted to just sort of ask, what do you wish that customers and folks who come in to the stores every day new or just considered about what you and your coworkers, the work that you guys do, if you could just sort of give folks out there who frequent Trader Joe’s like a little, Hey, think about this next time you go in,

Alec Plant:

Boy, only sort of, there’s almost no customers that do anything wrong or have any problem or are rude to us in any way. The way a grocery store is set up, it’s like we all know the roles we’re supposed to be playing. Everybody acts nice and appropriate, acts nice and appropriate in that way. There’s a sense of that service workers hate customers and stuff. It’s like a very nineties attitude kind of where it’s like, ah, these stupid customers, most of us at Trader don’t feel that way because the customers are just normal people like us. It’s only in one in 500 people who are incredibly rude and there’s nothing I can tell them. There’s no advice I could give them because they’re the type of people who don’t care what I think and who don’t care about other people’s experiences. So it would be futile. But yeah, I don’t know. Most of the customers don’t bother us. We don’t have any problem with them generally. I don’t think so. I wouldn’t keep on doing your thing, guys.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Some people are just dicks the can be

Alec Plant:

Out. Yeah, I mean, those people got to worry about. Yeah, I think as far as the personality and the performance element of Trader Joe’s, I think a lot of the people who work at the store have a sense of, oh, this is sort of a job that anybody can do. We can’t ask for more because this is just a job. That’s sort of a job of Laughter resort because they don’t have a skill. They didn’t go to college to get a specific skill, or they’re like, we’re just putting stuff on the shelf. But a lot of them don’t realize that they do have personalities that people, and they do have special characteristics that make them particularly valuable for this job. And people don’t value that. And that’s difficult because it’s like you’re not just an irreplaceable person at this job, or you’re not a replaceable person at this job.

You actually do have a special trait that makes you special and worth being paid more than you’re getting and being valued more than just some cog. And it’s hard to get that across to some people that their personalities really are special in that way, but Trader Joe’s knows it because they go through a really elaborate hiring process. So yeah, that’s something, I don’t know, I kind of try to communicate to people is 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 the drop of hat or whatever because we’re special people.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I think that’s beautiful, man. I mean, that’s the burning core at the heart of organized Labor’s message is that we are worth more than this. You are worth more. And I think that that’s one of the things that I constantly marvel at the most doing this show, because I’ve only had one union job in my life, and I was as a grad student at the University of Michigan, I worked service jobs, I worked in factories, worked in warehouses, worked as a pizza delivery guy. I never had any idea that I had other options besides quit and try to find a better job or just stay at my current job, take the crap and accept that, yeah, I was worth as little as my bosses were telling me I was. And so when I meet folks like you, and when I talk to folks like your coworkers around the country, I am just constantly in awe of those who are taking that step that I never could or never thought to when I was working these jobs, which is to say, no, we’re worth more than this. We can in fact band together to improve our lives and our jobs and our workplaces, and we’re going to do something about it that is heroic in my view. And the everyday heroism of workers standing up and fighting for better is just something a constant source of inspiration. And I wanted to ask a little more about that. The Union Drive itself. Can we talk about your store and where it fits in this struggle across the country starting in Hadley and then now expanding to multiple stores that have voted to unionize?

Alec Plant:

So yeah, Hadley organized in 2022, and there are I think four total stores that are unionized now. There’s one store that lost an election, so that’s been in three years. There been four stores that have organized, it’s difficult. The people who work at Trader Joe’s, there’s a tendency to be that they feel an extreme loyalty to Trader Joe’s. So a lot of times they don’t think so that can make the organizing process difficult. So at the Hadley store, one with 90%, it was like an incredible union victory. The elections since then have been a lot closer.

There was one election in, I think New York where they won by I think one vote and the other two were close as well. When the elections are very close, the company usually contests the election. So that means that the union has to go through a lengthy court process and we have to pay lawyers and we have to put people on the stand and it’s arduous. So that’s where we are right now. Trader Joe’s United is we’re working on getting more stores organized because we’ve got four now. As we try to negotiate a contract, we have to negotiate. It’s hard because we need more leverage before we’re able to effectively start negotiating because the company won’t negotiate in good faith. 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.

So right now, things are tough because we’re sort of in a limbo because we just need more stores to organize before we can really start effectively bargaining. So that’s sort of the macro picture. How things are going at my store is our union campaign started I think two years ago. It was very small, and then within the last eight months or so, we had a worker from our store who helped do everything organized, and we got more serious and more organized with our campaign. We made lists and we made sure to talk to everybody. We went public in April. We had our election a month and a half later. The election was crazy. There are like 140 people in the store, and there were 70 against the union, 74 with one more vote for the union that is being challenged in court. And the challenge is ridiculous.

Once that challenge vote is accepted, then we’ll be a certified union. So we basically won our election. It just has to get officially certified. But the process, because the company is challenging, it may be two years before we’re certified since we won our election, which is crazy. It’s so hard to keep the energy up during that time. We have to pay lawyers during that time. So it makes our life a lot more difficult. And I mean, it’s a wildly unfair, just in a moral sense, it’s a wildly unfair thing to do to people who’ve chosen to organize. So that’s where we’re at right now. We’re in court trying to get this ballot issue resolved. And also the company has some other objections to the election, which we think aren’t, they’re ridiculous. We think they’re just stalling to try and make our lives more difficult and try and beat the union sort of by attrition, just by wearing us down with time and resources.

Maximillian Alvarez:

That’s their go-to strategy. Man. Wait, folks out, delay demoralize, tie things up in the courts. If you guys listen to this show, this is the same script we hear everywhere. Again, whether it be Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, Amazon, Chipotle, I mean there’s all the same crap out of the same playbook. And I do want us to circle back to that at the end and sort of talk about the lessons that you guys have learned that other stores out there that are thinking of unionizing should take to heart and could use in their own struggle to unionize. But I guess before we get there, I wanted to talk about that response from Trader Joe’s at the national and local level, because this has been really nuts. I mean, trader Joe’s tried to get your Instagram taken down if we’re using the Trader Joe’s Insignia, right?

Yeah. They’re challenging. They’re among the businesses that are challenging the very premises of the National Labor Relations Act. Thus you’re right to organize. They’re putting at question. And then on top of that, we’ve heard stories from other folks around the country, right? About the local managers responses you mentioned, right? The long running issue of managerial harassment that folks have been dealing with. So I wanted to ask if you just talk a little more about that grueling slog and what you guys have been experiencing from Trader Joe’s, both at the corporate level and anything that you you’re going through on the local store level.

Alec Plant:

So I can talk about what happened during our campaign. So in previous Trader Joe’s organizing campaigns, there have been a lot of very obvious violations of the National Labor Relations Act, which we call unfair labor practices. So that’s things like when management will force workers to have one-on-one meetings, they’ll threaten. They’ll threaten people with their jobs, they will do transfer freezes, and that’s all illegal because you can’t, under the law, you’re not allowed to penalize anybody for wanting to be in a union. It’s a legal thing and it doesn’t have anything to do with management. It’s a decision we make among ourselves. So Trader Joe’s got, in those previous campaigns, they had a lot of LPs, unfair labor practices filed against them. When we did our campaign, there had been a change in the law, and this is a Biden thing, it’s called Cemex. It’s a supreme, I can’t remember if it’s a Supreme Court decision or a law, but the legal environment changed.

So now if there’s an unfair labor practice during the election and the union has already gathered enough cards to trigger an election, and when we say gather cards, that means people sign a card that says, yes, I would like to have a union. So if we’ve got the cards and then the company starts violating labor practices, the courts can say, we’re not going to have an election. We’re just going to say that this is a union. So since that decision, trader Joe’s has been a lot more careful about violating the National Labor Relations Act and doing unfair labor practices. So in our election, we did not have the same level of egregious ULP violations that they had at other stores. And this was different for us because we prepared really hard for all this sort of heavy handed management intervention in our union campaign, and we really didn’t get it.

All of our anti-Union stuff was spearheaded by coworkers at the store, which was a totally different ballgame, and which was really hard for us because we weren’t prepared for it. And it was shocking because I hadn’t considered it that the people who would be opposed to the union, it would be that vociferous about it, would be that angry about it and would spearhead a whole campaign about it. I sort of assumed it would be a type of thing where some people, I assume I knew people wouldn’t want to be unionized, but I thought it would be a type of thing where it was like, okay, we would just sort of respect each other’s opinions, but wasn’t how it turned out. So our effort, the sort of struggles we faced, or the opposition was, it wasn’t company led, which was new and surprising for us and very tricky, I got to say.

Very, very, very tricky. And those are our coworkers. So when management does all this heavy handed stuff, it’s easy to say, oh, these are the bad guys. This is management. This just proves they don’t care about us with your own coworkers, those are people that you still work with in a lot of cases. Those people you still like. And I still do a lot of those. This is why it’s tricky. I still like a lot of those people, a lot of them don’t want to have a union. I still like those people. And not only do I still ’em personally, we still want to win ’em over to our side because we still think a union’s a good idea.

So that was very tricky for us. So that was during the election, we had this worker led anti-Union campaign that was very hard. Then after the election, after election is over, the whole Cemex thing is over. So after the election, they can start violating u ps if they want to, and they can start doing unfair labor practice if they want to. They can still get fined or whatever, but we got to go through court and I mean, they don’t care that much if they get fined. So since then we’ve had hiring transfer, we’ve had transfer freezes, we’ve had firings of union supporters that have never been explicitly for supporting the union. There’s always a pretext, but it’s union supporters who are getting fired. So we do, and we’ve had this dislike absurd court cases. So now it feels like, okay, now that the election is over, now they’re free to clamp down a little bit.

And yeah, different stores have different relations. I don’t know. A lot of stores have the atmosphere gets turns very sour. And we had that happen at our store, which was very rough. And then that’s something that could be used against you and your campaign is things used to be fun and now things feel kind of sour, even though we don’t think we were the ones who are trying to make everything sour. So yeah, that’s sort of how things have been. That’s sort of the character of the campaign and then how things have been going on after that. Now everything, there’s a lot of legal stuff that we’re going through. So as an organizing committee, we have less control over that. So we’re trying to control act in the sphere we have control over, which is trying to make sure that just win more people over, try and improve the environment at the store use. This time we have to build relationships and counter a lot of the untrues that we’re told by people who have something against the union.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I want to kind of pick up on that because like you said earlier, you’re at a stage in this struggle where Trader Joe’s corporate is really trying to isolate the unionized stores. And this is again, something like we’ve seen in the Starbucks campaign. The more stores unionized, the more power they have to put pressure on the company and the less capable Starbucks is to say like, oh, there’s just a few outlier stores. No, there’s like 300 plus stores. There’s something happening here. So it’s kind of that principle, more stores that unionize more pressure that the corporate office feels to address this. So I wanted to ask for folks out there listening, especially folks out there who are working at Trader Joe’s, are there lessons that you are imparting to other employees around the country when you talk to them that say like, Hey, learn from what we went through or be prepared for this. I wanted to ask if there are other lessons there that you’d want to communicate to folks and also specifically about going the independent union route. I mean, trader Joe’s United is part of this independent union movement within the broader kind of labor upsurge that we’ve been seeing in recent years. So if you could say a little bit about where that has benefited or hampered you specifically, but also any other lessons that you’d want to impart to folks out there who were thinking of unionizing their store?

Alec Plant:

Well, yeah, so 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. And I was concerned about whether or not we’d be able to have, how do we even have lawyers if we don’t collect dues and questions like that. So far it’s been great. The lawyers we have are fantastic. I think that the people who are involved there are a lot more active and interested in doing the work. So it doesn’t feel like there’s some bureaucracy that you have to sort of appeal to. It feels like we’re doing it, so that’s great. It’s harder because it, it’s a harder case when you have to tell people 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, a union with people who are not to denigrate any other unions, but this is what we’re trying to do is have a really active one with highly democratic features. So that’s great. If you’re at another store and you’re thinking about organizing, I mean get in touch with TJU, the change in sort of strategy between, in a post MX world where it does feel like Trader Joe’s is more reluctant to of bring the hammer down from the side of management.

That’s what I would tell ’em is it makes your campaign tricky. You’re not going to be fighting the bosses, or at least not as openly, it won’t. Yeah, that’s what we’ve learned from our campaign.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, and I mean, another that you already mentioned is be prepared for some of the most virulent, anti-union opposition to potentially be coming from other rank and file members and just understanding that that is a reality and that it’s going to require one-on-ones talking to your coworkers, no shortcuts as the great late Jane Alvy once said.

Alec Plant:

Yeah, yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let me ask you this, because this has been so great, and I really appreciate you taking the time to lay this all out for us, and I promise I’ll let you go here in a second. But I did want to kind of ask a big picture question here. As someone who’s been in the middle of a thing that all of us have been talking about for the past couple years, which is this labor resurgence. I mean this new union wave, this new generation of organized labor energy, which I’ve had the privilege and honor of covering on this show on the Real News Network for breaking points, so on and so forth. So I’ve gotten to hear from folks like yourself when the Buffalo Starbucks unionize or when Hadley Trader Joe’s unionize, right? Or when Amazon Staten Island unionize. I mean, I’ve seen just as you have the kind of excitement that people have had around the country about this labor upsurge, the independent unions that are emerging, the unions like the Union of Southern Service workers that are really changing the paradigm for how to organize workers in the service industry.

There is a lot going on, and there have been a lot of strikes and a lot of new union filings with the NLRB. So I absolutely do not want to discount that. But I wanted to ask, there are also sober realities here. I mean, because people have been cheering on, they’re like, rah, rah, rah, the labor resurgence is happening. General strike is next. But then a lot of people forget. They 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. I mean, that doesn’t mean that we’ve won everything. And so I guess I just wanted to ask you, as someone who’s there on the front lines of this story, I guess how much of it is real or where do you think we are right now? Where do you think folks out there who are excited about, who want to see this labor upsurge succeed, but maybe aren’t paying attention to the realities of the struggles that you and other workers around the country are dealing with? Where would you say we are in that moment and what would you want folks out there supporters to know about what they can do to keep that momentum going if they really want to see it succeed and they want to see you and your store succeed?

Alec Plant:

Well, I mean, I’m more optimistic than I’ve ever been in my life. Been, yeah, because been following labor stuff for a long time. I’m more optimistic than I’ve ever been. It’s still an uphill battle in a lot of ways. There’s still a lack, a general sense of the sort of malaise and the sort of sense of disinterest. It hasn’t gone away. It’s still there, but there is a sense that we can break through it. So for the first time, it does feel like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, which is enormously appealing, but it also feels like we’re still just sort of striking embers.

So it’s still hard. So a lot of my thinking about it is just colored by my experience in my own store. So you can’t generalize it that much, but that’s fine. But the process of organizing can be incredibly difficult. And there are times when you’ll feel incredibly down when you’re on Twitter or just watching the news and seeing this labor stuff. It’s so easy. Just be like, yeah, yeah, everything’s going good. When you’re actually doing it, it can be devastating. So that’s still part of the process is there are times when it will still feel hopeless, but then there are times when you do truly feel inspired. And I do feel like we are making progress. I don’t think 15 or 10 years ago we would’ve won this election, and we did. And to me, that’s incredible. And that’s one of those things that allows me to stay optimistic about the movement, even when it gets really, really, really hard.

If people out there want to help, you can donate to TJU if you want to support the movement more support politicians who don’t hate unions, obviously it’s super hard to find the good politicians out there because I mean, darn for everybody. But supporting somebody who won’t destroy the National Labor Relations Act or appoint a judge who will destroy the National Labor Relations Act is huge. The legal environment is important for us. So it’s really important that we have people who support us in that way. And I mean, if you really want to support and you work at 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 that start doing it, the more it’ll be both sort of normalized culturally and the more leverage we’ll have together.

And I mean, maybe you can’t do any of that stuff. Maybe you live in a red state, you can’t vote for anybody good, and maybe you work in some field that’s impossible to organize or you’ve tried to organize it or you just have some job where that won’t work out if you can’t do any of that stuff, if you’re just cheering for us on social media, Hey, you know what? It’s not much, but it’s something and we appreciate it. It’s really like no gesture is too small because there are some, maybe just not in a position where you can really do anything that’s going to help that much. But even if that’s the case, we really do appreciate even the tiny gestures, at least I know I personally do. When people come through my line and they 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. So that stuff helps. It all helps.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our amazing guest, Alec Plant. Alec is a worker organizer at the Lincoln and Grace Trader Joe’s in Chicago, and a member of Trader Joe’s United. Be sure to keep up to date with Trader Joe’s United and their organizing efforts around the country, and we’ve included links to their website and their social media accounts in the show notes as well as to the articles that we’ve been referencing throughout this episode. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. If you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon. Check out all the awesome bonus episodes that we put out there for our patrons over the years, and go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and become a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever

Related