Following up successful unionization efforts at places like Starbucks and
Amazon and others.
Hey, trader Joe's, welcome to the team.
You've got workers at a store in Hadley, Massachusetts, they voted 43 to 31 to
unionize, becoming the first store in that company to do so, according to the NLRB.
There is another store that's in the process, I believe right now.
And so this might start to spread as it has for others.
We have some reactions from those who are taking part in this effort,
which by the way is going through Trader Joe's United,
an independent union that formed not too long ago.
A message from Skylar, who's been there for 3.5 years,
saying I'm Skylar and I'm voting yes for the union at Trader Joe's in Hadley.
My amazing coworkers are the reason Trader Joe's is a great place to shop, and we
deserve a seat at the table in determining our compensation and working conditions.
Tony Falco, who's worked there for 16 years,
says when workers stand together, we have the power.
That's why I support Trader Joe's United.
And Sarah has been there for 18 years,
says I'm voting yes because as a captain and a crew member,
I watched the company put profit over the well-being of the crew repeatedly.
It's time for us to have a say in the decisions that affect our lives.
That means a union, and that means a contract.
And there's a lot of information floating around about some of the issues people
have Hadley store as well as others have with Trader Joe's.
They have a robust retirement plan for many years,
15% of the earnings being contributed.
But starting about a decade ago,
the company lowered its contribution to 10% last year.
It lowered it again to 5% for many employees.
It has since announced that it would no longer specify a set contributions.
So there, it's not just that the benefits never existed and
a contract might afford you them, they did exist.
People had it for many years, and it's slowly been whittled away.
They had health-care benefits that have been reduced for part-time workers.
They used to offer benefits to part-time workers but raised the weekly required
hours to qualify from 20 to 30 hours a week after Obamacare was passed.
They had some additional measures that came about at the beginning of
the pandemic, safety and health related measures, as well as additional pay.
And all of those were dialed back as well.
Many of the employees at these stores saying they
were dialed back way too early in the pandemic.
So there's a lot that lead into this store,
let alone others deciding to unionize.
But as a person who shops at Trader Joe's,
I like the idea that one of the local ones might be union soon.
What do you both think about it?
>> Yeah, it's great news.
I'm really one of the sort of themes that I've been most,
just like my heart has been warmed by over the last two years has been
the emergence of these unionization drives and movements.
I think it's really notable, and
kind of we need to understand where this comes from, right?
This comes from a couple of really,
really troubling statistics that are occurring in this country.
The youngest generation in this country, where I guess one might say Gen Z,
is the first generation in the history of this country to make less than its
parent's generation.
If you account for inflation and other kind of control for
various other economic variables, that's very indicative.
And life expectancy is decreasing in this country.
So we've seen across the board, Amazon workers, Starbucks workers.
We saw the movement for $15 minimum wage at Disney, McDonald's, and so on.
These are really, really important movements that are occurring, but
there are major threats that they face.
Consider, for example, how Starbucks said that their workers could, they would
fund them to travel to get abortions, but not for those who are unionized.
Consider how many of these companies, especially Amazon.
But I wouldn't put it past some of the retail giants are experimenting
with both gig work, which is extremely insecure and extremely precarious,
as well as with automated technologies, especially Amazon, right?
People wearing fitbits, drivers being monitored by all sorts of biometric and
other surveillance systems.
This is also train robotic systems to replace workers.
So work and workers are precarious, and this is all part of
the larger story of the incredible displacement of wealth and
power and the incredible sort of fragmentation of an economic polity
at all sort of rational or reasonable in any democratic nation.
And so these are the things that are occurring.
And just the last quick thing I'll say is, John,
I worked on Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign and I was so honored to be part of that.
And one of the things I think that's just been super cool about Bernie is
how he has been showing up at a bunch of these protests and
a bunch of these unionization drives.
And it's a good reminder that political change doesn't just come obviously
from progressives in Congress or maybe some liberals, but
it also can come from people standing up for their rights.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, we've got two former Bernie 2020 folks on the panel tonight.
That's exciting.
Yeah, was also.
>> [LAUGH] I didn't do nothing.
>> [LAUGH] Okay, I have four points on the Trader Joe's Union.
First and maybe most importantly, hot labor summer, very important.
Secondly, I love Trader Joe's, and
I would feel better about shopping there if the workers had a union, pretty simple.
And three, the commodification of everything for
profit will not be successful unless workers are paid living wages, fair wages.
They will have no money to spend to buy your products if you don't pay them well.
And it's a weird chicken or the egg situation,
where they keep raising prices but they don't wanna pay higher wages.
And eventually, they're going to piss enough people off that people are just
going to refuse to participate in the economy because it's not worth their time,
and they're gonna learn to grow their own food or something.
The last point on this.
>> Add agriculture at summer, [CROSSTALK] 2027.
[LAUGH] >> Plants and vegetables,
plants and fruits.
Okay, also, I know it's really easy to
publicly support all of the front of the house workers, right?
The cashiers at Trader Joe's that we love, the baristas at Starbucks.
But it's very important to remember that Trader Joe's packages a lot of their own
products, they make a lot of their own products.
There are people in warehouse working for Trader Joe's that I'm sure are not
experiencing much better labor conditions than the folks who work in the stores.
And so I would like to see the warehouse workers get a union as well.
>> Yeah, 100%.
>> And we should remember, by the way,
that while we do segments like this to spotlight successful efforts and
to even the attempts, I wish bear in mind, it's not easy and it's not automatic.
These things are difficult, there could be a lot of pushback.
Ramesh was alluding to one.
They'll sometimes say, here's a set of benefits that we'll give, but
only if you don't unionize.
We've had stores, even in Southern California, grocery stores have been
entirely shut down because they had started moving in that direction.
Sometimes it's not as explicit, but even in this case, there were mandatory
meetings, where managers try to dissuade them for voting for the union.
Some were told explicitly to vote no.
One worker said a manager sent him home in late May for wearing a union pin to work.
But interestingly, successful unionization can improve the quality of life,
the benefits and the pay.
But it isn't even just for those people, for union workers or
those who work in union stores, there's ripple effects from these sorts of things.
We've seen that throughout the last year, and we see it here, too.
Less than a week before workers began voting in Hadley, Trader Joe's announced
in an internal memo that it was increasing benefits nationwide.
Raising Sunday and holiday pay by $10 an hour, as well as the rate of accrual for
paid time off.
It did say it would give out raises to employees with more tenure at the company
to increase pay equity across the company.
So basically, every worker in America was born and
raised in a country that has done everything it can in terms of the news and
popular culture to get them to hate the very idea of unionization,
to hate the very idea of collective action, those sorts of things.
But thankfully, it doesn't seem like it's stuck, at least for
some of the youngest generations.
And so there's another store in Minneapolis that's gonna be having a vote
next month.
Workers at a store in Colorado have actually filed an election petition just
this week.
So Trader Joe's is the next frontier apparently.
And I wanted to mention one quick thing, John, which is,
I think we need to recognize how the working class in this country increasingly
is not just described as sort of alienated white, rural peoples, for example.
We're often talking about women of color, and we're actually talking about Gen Z.
And many of these people are affected by the, what I call
the part-timization of work, the gig work, gig economy, and digital labor.
And so it's really important that we advance progressive movements,
legislative possibilities that allow people who have fragmented types of work,
eight hours for TaskRabbit, 10 hours for Uber.
This kind of hustle of trying to live amidst massive amounts of student debt,
mind you, and debt in general that these kinds of folks who are in precarious and
fragmented within these systems that no longer offer any sort of economic
security have an ability to have collective power.
>> Exactly, yeah.
Yeah, student loan debt that could be canceled right now or
right now, or Biden could do it now.
That would be a good time, maybe later today.
Maybe he's eating, maybe he's biking, maybe he's falling off a bike.
I don't know what he's doing, but he could do it after that.
That would be great.
Get up, dust yourself off, cancel student loan debt.
I'd love to see it.