[[{“value”:”Trader Joe’s United union buttons. (Trader Joe’s United)
By: Chris Brady
Hadley, M.A. – The sleepy town of 5,000 next to Amherst is usually known for its annual asparagus festival and university move-in day traffic. But in mid-2022, Hadley shocked the nation when workers at the town Trader Joe’s voted to certify a union election, the first in the country. A Minneapolis location soon followed and stores in Oakland and Louisville after that, rounding out the independent Trader Joe’s United (TJU). Several worked with the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), co-organized by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE), to organize their workplaces.
However, three years after the favorable unionization vote, the Hadley store still doesn’t have a contract. Trader Joe’s has proven a vicious negotiator and union-busting innovator. TJU’s founding president Jaimie Edwards was fired on May Day, 2025, after ten years at the store.
From High Turnover to Interstate Independent Unionism
Retail workers face egregious working conditions sector-wide. Inconsistent scheduling, inconvenient hours, and minimal workplace protections or benefits are common. The precarity of workers’ employment and high staff turnover has made these sectors historically more difficult to organize.
According to crew member Ellie Arsenault, management targeting employees with bogus write-ups for trading shifts is common.
Management plays this game of setting people up to kind of get them in trouble and get them fired, essentially. There were a lot of things like that, and I think people are just kind of tired of it. We need protection and we don’t want management to just arbitrarily decide these things.
Arsenault added to Working Mass that identity can play a role in harassment from management. Some crew members made transphobic comments that management left unaddressed especially during the TJU organizing drive, often targeting queer workers, an authoritarian company culture recently exposed in a January 2025 report from Fast Company showing how Trader Joe’s has allowed rampant sexual assault and physical safety issues to go completely unaddressed in the workplace.
When Trader Joe’s workers began organizing in 2022, the union wasn’t popular with all workers. Unionists faced major obstacles in persuading older coworkers with better interpersonal relationships with management. Earning their support required hard, one-on-one conversations from organizers to make sure the vote made it over the line. Some workers even pursued a “de-unionization” effort through the NLRB, which ultimately failed, but was backed by the influential National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and culminated in a written testimony for the House of Representatives.
These challenges to solidarity were unsuccessful. While one Trader Joe’s shop that organized under the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) in New York City was shut down on the eve of going public as a unionbust from the boss, working together, the Minneapolis and Hadley stores both voted to unionize and have been embroiled ever since in contract negotiations.
Three Years Without Contract
Trader Joe’s has no interest in bargaining in good faith, or for that matter, bargaining at all. The company is going for blood by targeting the jugular of American labor law itself: the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). While the NLRB has always been limited, the attack by Trader Joe’s illustrates the ferocity and finality with which the company intends to fight the union. Trader Joe’s won’t stop at busting one union; they want to bust the entire system of American unions’ legal apparatus, too.
Union negotiators know the bosses’ inventory well, and though Trader Joe’s is attacking on multiple fronts, they also use tried-and-true tactics. The boss will obfuscate, delay, and deny any attempt at negotiation rather than follow the law – common union-busting tactics to break rank-and-file morale. Trader Joe’s would rather talk in circles about meeting logistics instead of pay and benefits and find any way to manufacture delays.
Robert Hönisch, a worker-organizer at the Minneapolis location, noted to Working Mass:
Trader Joe’s has engaged in numerous delay tactics to try and delay bargaining and try and make us argue about stuff that’s just not true. This is kind of the nature of their legal council, the law firm that represents them, and how anti-union in this company can be. Examples include them bringing up stuff that’s just not pertinent to bargaining, not wanting to engage in good faith on very small issues, and management demanding that we have in-person representatives at bargaining, while showing up to bargain without bringing their own in-person company representatives.
Trader Joe’s has reprimanded employees for wearing union pins, fabricated stories about pro-union employees assaulting management or overcharging customers, and created a culture of surveillance and disparagement of any union activity. Trader Joe’s even offered lower retirement benefits to unionized stores.
Targeting Organizers
Former TJU national president Jamie Edwards was not the only anti-union target. Emerson Azevedo was also fired.
Azevedo suffers from a history of seizures. In May 2025, he had a seizure at work. Emerson’s union colleagues called an ambulance. A week later, Emerson returned to the store to receive paperwork to be medically cleared by doctors, a condition necessary for him to return to work. Although he was still experiencing residual nausea, Emerson informed Hadley management he wanted to return to work but couldn’t pursue medical leave because he didn’t have a primary care doctor yet. Management seemed amenable to Emerson’s wish to come back to work.
The doctors, however, would not clear Emerson because management filed for involuntary medical leave despite Emerson’s explicit non-consent. The doctors insisted that they could only clear him when the medical leave claim finished filing. Trader Joe’s was holding up his medical leave paperwork, forcing Emerson to scramble to find a primary care doctor within a limited timeframe, leaving him completely vulnerable in a time of need. In other words, the boss weaponized healthcare to create a series of hoops for the unionist to jump through to keep his job.
When asked if Emerson’s paperwork limbo was in retaliation to his union organizing, Ellie responded, “most definitely.”
Due to public outcry and TJU organizing, Emerson was finally reinstated at work with backpay in June 2025. Emerson’s story resonates with workers with chronic conditions everywhere. Corporations will use any leverage they have to crush worker power.
Trader Joe’s treated former TJU union president Jamie Edwards with a death by a thousand cuts method of unionbusting. They reprimanded Jamie twice for overcharging customers. When Jamie asked if management had looked at the alleged transactions to verify the overcharge, they said they had not. They failed Jamie’s performance reviews, pretended Jamie punched their manager, and screamed at customers. Jamie’s coworkers testified to management that these instances never occurred, but that wasn’t the point. Trader Joe’s was not interested in truth, and was merely looking to take out its most prominent opponent and shop floor worker leader.
Two weeks after stepping down as TJU president, Jamie was illegally fired. Unfair Labor Practices (ULPs) have been filed with the NLRB for both Jamie and Emerson’s cases. This tactic has been replicated across the country as different Trader Joe’s locations struggle for union rights, most notably in the Essex Crossing, New York location – where a union vote ended in a contested tie after Trader Joe’s cracked down on organizing activity hard. It’s clear that the boss continues to develop new and more underhanded methods to target workers for organizing, as workers continue to weather the storm in their fight for a contract that paves the way for genuine dignity in the workplace.
To support the union, readers can contribute to Trader Joe’s United and to Jamie’s solidarity fund.
Chris Brady is a member of Boston DSA and contributing writer to Working Mass.
The post Trader Joe’s United Fights a Third Year Against Unionbusting Tactics appeared first on Working Mass.
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