A little over two weeks ago, a budding union campaign, Trader Joe’s United, won an election in Massachusetts to form the grocery chain’s first union. But the independent group of Trader Joe’s employees has already proven that the win was no accident.
The union won its second election Friday at a downtown Minneapolis store, where workers voted 55-5 to join Trader Joe’s United. Like their Massachusetts counterparts, the Minnesota workers are urging the chain to come to the negotiating table to negotiate an initial contract.
Trader Joe’s has resisted union efforts at its stores for years, but back-to-back victories could encourage more workers at the chain to engage in collective bargaining. Organizers say they’ve heard from Trader Joe workers across the country and plan to unionize more of the grocer’s more than 500 locations.
Sarah Beth Ryther, an employee at the Minneapolis store involved in the campaign, told HuffPost ahead of the vote that pro-union workers are increasingly confident they can take on the company.
“We talk to people about this movement all day,” Ryther said. “I think it’s just about time.”
Trader Joe’s United is not affiliated with any established working group. The workers did the organizing on their own, with the help of lawyers helping out for free. Minneapolis workers joined with workers in Massachusetts in May after the latter went public with their campaign.
The group’s past success — like that of Starbucks Workers United and the Amazon Labor Union, both of which recently founded the first unions at those companies — reflects a moment of opportunity for the labor movement at large after decades of decline. Today, only about one in ten US workers is unionized, down from about one in three in the post-World War II years.
The Minneapolis store is the second Trader Joe’s to unionize.Trader Joe has a week to contest the results of the Minneapolis election. The company decided against it after the union’s victory in Massachusetts, saying it would begin negotiations with Trader Joe’s United immediately and was willing to use other food industry contracts as a framework.
Organizing the US retail space has been difficult for unions, but unions have made progress in recent months. In addition to Starbucks, workers at REI and Apple also formed the first unions. Though unions have been gaining a foothold in the food industry for decades — the United Food and Commercial Workers union represents hundreds of thousands of store workers — Trader Joe’s managed to keep them in check until recently. In addition to being organized by Trader Joe’s United, the UFCW has petitioned for an election at Trader Joe’s Store in Boulder, Colorado.
Trader Joe’s has long had a reputation for decent pay and benefits, but many workers have complained that the California-based company has become stingier in recent years. Management quietly informed workers in January that the 401(k) contribution would be halved for workers with less than 10 years of service, a decision many workers cited in their decision to unionize.
Shortly before the Massachusetts vote, Trader Joe’s informed employees that certain benefits would be improved, including offering bonuses for working on Sundays and holidays. The company did not respond to HuffPost’s question about whether the new rules would apply to stores that have unionized or filed a ballot.
Hannah Nybakken, who works at the Minneapolis store, told HuffPost ahead of the election that she sees the improvements as a clear response to the ongoing organization.
“We were quite shocked to see that they were willing to answer so many of the things we had been looking at by just saying ‘union,'” she said.