"it's clear that we're gonna gain a lot by unionizing because they're fighting us so hard": workers fight union busting at an LES trader joe's
NYT investigates nude dinner parties, Hell Gate asks why you are seeing "gross viral recipes" on the subway, and I wonder if Nick Braun is the luckiest man in the world
Happy Earth Week! Welcome to the Knife Bloc, a newsletter about the politics of food and sustenance in NYC.
Last week, I went to a pre-showing of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” a film adaptation of Andreas Malm’s Verso book of the same name. After the film, environmental lawyer Steven Dozinger moderated a panel with the director, Daniel Goldhaber and his co-writers/producers Jordan Sjol and Ariela Barer (who also played one of the leading roles), and a couple of their other collaborators. I enjoyed the film, and felt it largely succeeded at accommodating critiques of sabotage while ultimately siding with the saboteurs.
The panelists then provided the compulsory salacious insights into what it takes to get a movie like this made (i.e the producers sneaking into festival parties to court donors and the lead actress taking over music supervision), but my favorite moment was when an audience member asked about Malm’s thoughts on the script, to which Goldhaber answered: “Malm didn’t have a lot of feedback, but he did say he didn’t think that there were any punks left in America in 2023.” People laughed. “We told him he was wrong about that.”
I first read the book because it was recommended in two of my classes for my MA at the New School last spring (“Climate Change” with Leo Figureoa Helland and “Political Writing and Reporting” with Tash Lennard), in which we discussed, among other things, capitalism, alienation, neoliberalism, fascism, and how they’ve converged into a state of perpetual polycrisis. Doing so sitting in a capitalistic, gentrifying, institution (the New School), complicit in the same neoliberal logic, felt like an exercise in futility, or, as Fred Molten and Stephano Harney write, “self-hatred.”
In many ways, this project, the Knife Bloc, came out of a desire to minimize my time “hating” myself in a classroom and instead maximize my time covering issues and communities I care about outside of it. I’d say, so far, it’s been a success — so I’m glad you’re here.
This week we have an update on the union drive at the LES Trader Joe’s store — they vote later this week on whether to join Trader Joe’s United (TJU) and are facing aggressive union busting tactics from corporate. As always, stick around for some links about food justice happenings around the city, and a round of up food news links you might have missed from the last month or so!
union busting is in fact disgusting, according to organizers at LES trader joe’s
On March 22, workers at the Trader Joe’s Essex Crossing store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan announced their intention to unionize with Trader Joe’s United (TJU). Since then, organizers allege that the grocery store — favored by Millennials and Gen Z for its affordability and irrepressible, friendly branding — has responded with aggressive union-busting tactics.
According to workers, crew members have been repeatedly pulled into “captive audience meetings” with management, pro-union posters have been torn down, and the company has spread misinformation about unions. Employees have been told that if they unionize they will no longer be able to transfer stores and that union dues could be as much as 10% of their paycheck (when in reality it’s closer to 2%), according to organizer and Essex Crossing crew member Bridget Arend.
“They make the union seem like a very scary legal entity that you're signing away a lot of your agency at work to, instead of something that we run, we're in control of, and we're a part of,” Arend said.
“Trader Joe's has a really strong reputation for being a progressive company,” says TJU Press Rep Maeg Yosef. “But when it comes to dealing with union efforts they are pretty much using the same playbook as Starbucks or Amazon.”
To fight back, Essex Crossing organizers are doing their best to keep energy up at the store — they’re making sure co-workers know where and when to vote, combating misinformation via text, and counting potential votes for the union election. They’ve also invited the LES community out to a rally at the store on Tuesday, April 18.
Crew members (Trader Joe’s choice term for non-management employees) will vote on whether to join TJU later this week, and in the meantime, the union has filed multiple charges of unfair labor practices on their behalf with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). (I reached out to Trader Joe’s for comment on it’s response to the union drive and got no response.)
Organizing at the Essex Crossing store began during the pandemic when it became clear that the corporation, which owns 560 stores nationwide, “had no real plan for the emergency,” Arend said. “We wanted more say over our working conditions, because we are the ones actually facing those conditions.”
At the beginning of the pandemic, crew members weren’t allowed to wear protective equipment on the job, and even after mask mandates went into effect, policies about cleaning and customers masking were left to each store manager’s discretion. Stores also repeatedly ran out of cleaning supplies and at one point, workers at the Essex Crossing store resorted to cleaning the bathrooms with an industrial floor cleaner, which they had not been trained to use properly and did not know needed to be diluted in order to be used safely. This resulted in one worker nearly fainting from the fumes and another sustaining chemical burns.
After efforts to resolve disputes about hazard pay, frozen wages, and benefits with their store managers went nowhere, it was clear to Arend and others that they needed to deal directly with corporate. To do so, workers would need to unionize.
w LES store hopes to join other unionized Trader Joe’s stores, including one in Hadley, MA and another in Minneapolis. The Hadley store workers filed their union election paperwork on May 14, 2022 and won their vote in July. The Minneapolis store quickly followed, voting overwhelmingly to join TJU 55-5 in August. They began the bargaining process in early November. The following January, a Louisville KY store also voted 48-36 to join TJU, though Trader Joe’s has appealed the results with the NLRB.
Yosef, who has been a crew member at the Hadley store for over nearly 20 years, has seen the company change significantly in that time. When Yosef first started, Trader Joe’s contributed 15.4% of eligible crew members’ annual earnings to their 401ks. In 2013, they went down to 10%, and by 2021, the company no longer guaranteed any contribution at all. In addition, once the Affordable Care Act passed, the company increased the number of hours required to qualify for health care benefits.
In terms of COVID safety, Yosef also echoes much of the Essex store’s concerns. The same month they announced their campaign, 25% of the Hadley crew tested positive for COVID, and management still didn’t tighten safety policies. Trader Joe’s handling of the pandemic confirmed her suspicion that it had drifted from its principles.
Instead of joining an already-established union, Trader Joe’s workers followed Amazon workers’ lead and established their own independent union. In an open letter to CEO Dan Bane, announcing their intention to unionize back in May of 2022, TJU wrote, “No union organizers came to us. We organized ourselves. With the same instinctive teamwork we use every day to break pallets, work the load, bag groceries, and care for our customers, we joined together to look out for each other and improve our workplace together.”
Yosef, who had no previous organizing experience and had never been a member of a union herself, finds TJU’s independence appealing. “We were able to write our own constitution and all the leadership of our union are crew members who are still actively working in stores,” she says. “It also gives us a chance to preserve the Trader Joe's culture that we do enjoy.”
Labor historian Gabriel Winant suspects that this trend might be generational. “[Established unions] are designed to stop the bleeding rather than organize new workplaces, or if they attempt the latter, to do it in as risk-averse a way as possible, given the expenditure of scarce resources,” he explained. “That's not all bad, but you can see why industries and workforces that are fresh ground for organizing might look out beyond the more familiar labor organizations.”
Not every result has gone the union’s way, however. New Yorkers may remember when, last fall, a Williamsburg store voted against joining with TJU 94-66. And in August of 2022, Trader Joe’s abruptly closed their popular Union Square wine store after they about to file paperwork to join UFCW.
Far from discouraging further organizing however, Yosef thinks the company’s aggressive tactics might have actually motivated workers to push back. “It's clear that we're gonna gain a lot by unionizing because they're fighting us so hard,” she says.
The election for the Essex Crossing store is scheduled for April 19 and 20. Essex Crossing workers plan to host a rally on Tuesday, ahead of the Thursday and Friday election for LES community members — many of the store’s regular customers are longtime-Lower East Side residents. “Customers will see our union pins and ask about it and there's been overwhelming support from the customers I've talked to,” says Arend. “It feels like the wider community is rooting for us.”
enjoy a balanced [media] diet:
Hell Gate has gone after the food news beat with unparalleled vim and vigor in the last couple weeks: so read this piece about a (seemingly very successful!) union drive at Blank Street coffee shops around the city, exploitation at Chipotle, why you’re seeing gross viral recipes on your subway commute (I was not before, for the record, and then once I read this I could not unsee, so proceed at your own risk), and, for good measure, read this about expensive airport food.
Luke Fortney rounds up April restaurant closings for Eater and muses that this might be the end of the city’s Korean Corn Dog hype.
The New York Times style section goes long on nude dinner parties.
Workers at “The Slutty Vegan,” a popular plant-based restaurant chain worth an estimated $100 million, are suing the owner for wage theft in Brooklyn, the Patch reports (rendering this piece in The New Yorker incredibly ill-timed, but that is not the point). According to the Patch, the lost tips and wages amount to nearly $27,000.
I'm sure that if you’re reading this, you’re already aware, but (in possibly the biggest NYC food news in YEARS) after her break up to actor (?) Joe Alwyn — Taylor Alison Swift went out for dinner in the West Village.
Swift’s lyrics regularly feature NYC landmarks (read this incredible feat of reporting by Vulture’s Rachel Handler on her fans’ pilgrimage to Cornelia Street after the news of the break up was confirmed), including “a dive bar on the east side,” where she would supposedly hung out with Alwyn. That same day, news impacting another (I assume, we don’t really know for sure lol) dive bar on the east side broke, when a young TikToker alleged that actor and co-owner of Ray’s (said dive bar), Nicholas Braun, was creepy to her at a festival when she was a minor. Other allegations quickly followed. The stories about Braun went viral just hours before the news of Swift’s break up, and, given that the Venn diagram of Nic Braun fans and Swifties is almost certainly a circle, one is left to wonder if Braun’s luck is rivaled only by his character on “Succession.” Either way, hardly anyone has mentioned the allegations against Braun since.
Finally, WaPo reports that workers at Ben & Jerry’s flagship Burlington, VA store are taking their first steps to form a union. (Not local news, but defs ~personal news~ iykwim).
events!
Earth Day Boozy Climate Change Group Talk! (I know nothing of what this is about but it is a lot of my favorite words so… someone go and tell me how it was!)
Local “eco rapper” and TikTok sensation Hila the Kila (who performs wearing an inflatable “Earth” costume) will be busking at (and headlining) an event at Rubuland on Earth Day.
Preview “Rhythms of the Land,” a love letter to generations of Black farmers here in the U.S. at the New School on April 20, at 6:00.
And finally — a shameless plug — come visit me at Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project on the roof of Metro Baptist Church at 410 W 40th on Saturday April 22. We will have snacks! (I think.) Cute lil seedlings growing in kiddie pools! Incredible views!