Photo courtesy of Maeg Yosef. Trader Joe's crew members at the Hadley store wore their union buttons together in March 2023.
By Tara Monastesse ’25
News Editor
Nine months after successfully unionizing at a store location in Hadley, Massachusetts, the Trader Joe’s United independent labor union has continued to advocate for workers’ rights. Since becoming the first Trader Joe’s location to have a formally recognized union following a 45-31 employee vote last July, the Hadley store and its workers have served as key players in the ongoing effort to negotiate a national contract between Trader Joe’s and the workers at its over 500 locations.
“I feel like every worker benefits from a union because it’s the only thing that gives you a legal power at work,” Maeg Yosef, communications director for Trader Joe’s United, said in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. “When we sit down at the negotiating table, we’re sitting down as legal equals with our employer to bang out a contract, which is incredible because in most cases your employer has power over you.”
Currently, only two Trader Joe’s locations have formally unionized — these include the location in Hadley whose vote took place last summer and a location in Minneapolis for which a union was certified two weeks later. A third location in Louisville, Kentucky voted 48-36 to unionize in January but has been obstructed from official certification after Trader Joe’s filed an objection with the National Labor Relations Board, the government agency which oversees union elections. Two additional locations — one in New York City and one in Oakland, California — filed for union elections on March 22. A union election can be triggered when at least 30 percent of employees at a workplace sign union authorization cards.
Located on the outskirts of the Hampshire Mall complex, the Trader Joe’s store in Hadley is especially popular among Five College students for its variety of dorm-friendly snacks and meals. The store’s push to unionize began in January 2022 when a committee of workers organized a protest in response to dissatisfaction with how the company had handled pandemic protocols, as well as what a background information sheet for the union describes as, “the steady erosion of benefits and wages over the past decade.”
Yosef said that Trader Joe’s United seeks to address major concerns related to health and safety, as well as wages and benefits.
“Wages have stagnated — they’re not keeping up with the cost of living or inflation,” Yosef said. “There’s a number of situations where veteran crew members are making the same, or sometimes even less, than more recent hires. And there just isn’t wage transparency.”
According to the company’s Inside Trader Joe’s podcast, as of December 2022, approximately 36 percent of crew members had been employed for five or more years. Yosef, who has worked at Trader Joe’s for over 18 years, said that the current bargaining process feels as if the company is “dragging its feet.”
“They just want to maintain the status quo, because [they think] what we have is good enough. But we unionized because it wasn’t. And there’s just a lot of surface bargaining where we don’t feel like they are really digging in to negotiate in a serious way.”
Trader Joe’s provides its own updates regarding union contract negotiations on mytraderjoes.com, a portal accessible by crew members. A brief notice at the top of the page notes that Trader Joe’s “remains committed to treating all of its Crew Members fairly and bargaining in good faith with unions.” An update posted on March 20 that summarized union negotiations taking place on March 7, 8 and 9 described the union’s own update as “mischaracteriz[ing], in three important ways, what occurred at the bargaining session.”
Yosef mentioned that the lawfulness of these updates is currently under investigation by the NLRB, stating that they have a potential “chilling” effect on crew members seeking to organize.
While not yet formally certified as a union, workers in Louisville are currently working alongside workers in Hadley and Minneapolis in an effort to secure a national contract.
“According to the NLRB, anyone has seven days to file objections to the election on certain grounds,” Connor Hovey, a worker and organizer in Louisville, said in an interview with Mount Holyoke News. “And the company filed objections saying that union supporters were threatening and coercing and intimidating employees to vote ‘yes.’” Holvey noted that it could potentially take additional weeks or even months for the union to be certified or rejected, describing it as an example of company retaliation against union supporters.
Originally from West Springfield, Hovey has been employed at the Louisville Trader Joe’s location for roughly four and a half years after relocating to Kentucky. While Hovey had believed that a union would benefit the store prior to last summer, the public announcements in Hadley and Minneapolis inspired him and other organizers to start taking official steps toward unionization.
“We all kind of stand in solidarity with each other because we’re trying to fight for one national contract instead of hundreds of individual store contracts,” Hovey said. “So that way we can bounce ideas off of each other, and we can really make sure that everything we’re doing is in good faith and in good standing with what our collectives at our stores want.”
While a hearing with the NLRB concluded on March 31, there is no set date for the Louisville union’s status to be finalized. At time of writing, the results of the union elections in New York City and Oakland are anticipated to be announced soon.
Trader Joe’s Hadley did not respond to MHN’s media inquiry request placed through a submission form on their website last week.