Average Joes United

By Soren Anderson-Flynn

People get a lot of fantastical ideas when they sit down to watch TV. Grown men think that they could be better football players than professional athletes and children start to imagine that they’ll grow up to be superheroes. When Maeg Yosef turned on the TV, she started to genuinely believe that she could unionize her workplace.  

What was her source of inspiration? The NBC sitcom Superstore. 

Superstore, a recent comedy about a fictional big-box retailer in St. Louis, was the show of choice for Yosef and her wife during a period of weeks in 2021. The show’s 4th and 5th seasons center around an employee unionization drive. Crucial to the drive were issues of corporate cruelty, intimidation, and exploitatively low pay and benefits. 

During the nights and subsequent mornings after watching Superstore, Yosef — who has worked at the Trader Joe’s (TJs) in Hadley, Massachusetts for nearly 20 years — couldn’t get the fictional workers’ bravery and willingness to stand up for each other out of her head. For days on end, she would discuss the storyline with her wife during their dark early-morning drives to work. Eventually, the reason that the arc stuck in her mind crystallized for her: the show was telling her that her workplace could unionize, too. 

Initially, Yosef was hesitant about the idea. She worried that she’d be ridiculed for talking about unionizing, and even worse, she knew that if she broached the subject with the wrong people at Trader Joe’s, her job would be at risk. She promised herself that if no one seemed interested, she’d drop the idea. But unable to quash her hope, she pushed forward and began the process of organizing. 

In early 2022, Yosef began having hushed conversations with her fellow Hadley TJs workers about the possibility of starting a union. She discovered that other members of the store shared concerns she had about low wages and how workers had been mistreated during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Unionizing soon became a group effort, and a number of the store’s workers formed into an organizing committee. The committee featured workers with all levels of experience at the store: from people like Yosef and longtime Hadley TJs employee Jamie Edwards, to Mitchell Redfield, who had only been at the store for a couple months. 

Organizing was not a straightforward process, but according to Redfield, the young employees of the store were almost universally on board. “Of the people in our store that are anti-union, the youngest one of them is probably in their 40s or 50s. Everybody who's been against the union is way older.”

On July 28th, 2022, spurred by people like Yosef and Redfield and made possible by the store’s young workers, the Hadley Trader Joe’s won its union election, becoming the first of the chain’s 564 locations to unionize.

There’s been an uptick in U.S. labor organizing in recent years, including high-profile unionization drives at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. According to Harris Freeman, a professor of labor law at Western New England University and the UMass Amherst Labor Center, these drives have dramatically increased in the past few years because of the pandemic. He said workers  have gained “a different sense of their own importance and impact on the economy,” after being forced to risk their lives so their companies could turn a profit. 

Wanting to take advantage of their importance, many workers have turned to unionization because of the collective power that it provides. “If you go to your boss individually and say, ‘Boss, I want a raise,’ your boss can say, you're so unappreciative, you're fired,” Freeman told me. “But if two of you go to your boss and say it together, the very same thing that is protected by law, as union activity.” 

Reinforcing a point that Redfield made, Freeman believes that young people, in particular, are trending towards unionization. “[Unionization] is just the systemic response to the perception that one isn't being treated fairly. And this perception is especially common among young people who have undergone a pandemic, multiple economic crises, and skyrocketing income inequality during their short working lives,” he said. 

Despite the fact that unionization drives are becoming more frequent, they’re still incredibly difficult endeavors. According to Freeman, companies regularly attempt to make winning a union election an uphill battle for workers. “It’s just very challenging to engage in an organizing drive because it’s pretty normative [for workers] to experience intimidating conduct. Workers are routinely subjected to an anti-union diatribe from their employers, which is protected as free speech under the law.”

Redfield says that workers in the Hadley TJs were required to attend “captive audience meetings,” where they were told that unionization would impose “outlandish rules and regulations” on the store and that it would “mess up” the atmosphere of the workplace. Further, workers also came under fire by store management for wearing pro-union pins on their uniforms. 

Despite these obstacles, the Hadley TJs voted to successfully unionize in July. The final tally was 45-31 in favor of unionization, and after this, the store’s workers decided to form their own independent union, Trader Joe’s United (TJU). Edwards became TJU’s president, Yosef became the communications director, and Redfield took the role of recording secretary. 

And they weren’t alone. Just two weeks after Hadley unionized, a Trader Joe’s in Minnesota voted to unionize with TJU, and the union has been adding more stores to its membership ever since. 

However, nearly 18 months later, Trader Joe’s is still fighting TJU tooth and nail. In fact, the company has still refused to offer TJU a first contract. The union has accused Trader Joe’s of negotiating in bad faith. Union leadership believes that this is a purposeful tactic. “A common union busting strategy is to drag things on and then push for a decertification vote, hoping that peoples’ morale will have broken,” said Redfield. 

“Labor law in the United States lets employers engage in practices that are marginally legal,” Freeman says, “and it allows companies to use illegal tactics that don’t result in much penalty or remedy for the workers in those situations.” Essentially, labor law ties workers’ hands behind their backs during unionization drives. 

Trader Joe’s attacks on organized labor also go beyond simply hampering TJU. On January 26th, 2024, Trader Joe’s joined Elon Musk’s SpaceX in filing a lawsuit that seeks to deem the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) unconstitutional. The NLRB is a federal body that enforces labor law in the United States, protects workers, ensures that companies don’t unfairly hinder union organizing, and punishes them if they do. TJU has filed numerous complaints against Trader Joe’s with the NLRB for the company’s unfair union-busting tactics. The lawsuit is a “frontal attack on the administrative state,” according to Freeman, which would cause these complaints to vanish and “roll back progress in labor law.” 

But still, since TJU has already overcome captive audience meetings and anti-union sentiment to get to this point, nothing — neither Trader Joe’s losing its lawsuit nor TJU securing its first contract — is impossible. 

After conducting my interviews, I took a final trip to the Hadley TJs in late November. By happenstance, I stumbled upon Mitchell Redfield stocking the store’s shelves. Wearing a pink Trader Joe’s sweater and adorned with pink hoop earrings and two silver nose rings, she walked up and down a refrigerated aisle filled with dairy products and drinks, moving crates of new produce and straightening bottles of coconut water. The liquid in the bottles made sloshing sounds as she moved them, so she didn’t notice me standing a mere few yards away. 

I wanted to walk up to her and follow up with her about my reporting, but out of fear that she’d be reprimanded for chatting with a customer, I left her alone. I stepped away and let her move to another part of the store.

After I made sure that she was in another aisle, I walked to where she had been working and picked out a bottle of organic Trader Joe’s brand coconut water. I brought it to a cash register and exchanged pleasantries with an older gentleman who rang up the beverage for me. After I purchased the bottle, I asked the man if he happened to have a Sharpie I could borrow. He said “yes,” and handed me one. Using the sharpie, I scribbled the word “organic” from the bottle and replaced it with something more meaningful: “united.” I then gave back the marker, took a sip of some Trader Joe’s United coconut water, and walked out into the brisk November night.