Bargaining Update 3/7-3/9/23 Hadley, MA
We just wrapped another bargaining session in Hadley, with Bargaining Committee members from Minneapolis and Louisville joining us at the table for three days of negotiations. It was our most productive (and possibly most interesting) bargaining session yet. Some highlights:
We signed our first tentative agreements on issues including Jury Duty Leave, Military Leave, and Severability, and made progress on several non-economic issues including Non-Discrimination. We had movement where we did not before, and that’s something to celebrate.
While we are encouraged by this progress, we are disappointed in our employer’s resistance to discussing economics and other major issues in a meaningful way. There’s a common thread running through TJ’s proposals: adherence to the status quo. For example…
When it comes to Paid Time Off, we’ve proposed more, so that the crew have adequate sick time, vacation, personal days, & bereavement. The employer presented a counter that would give unionized stores the exact same amount of PTO as non-union stores, just in a different format.
TJU brought a robust grievance & arbitration proposal where an independent third party can help resolve grievances when needed. The employer’s response? A grievance proposal with no arbitration, where the company would review its own decisions in a corporate echo chamber.
On wages, we carefully crafted a proposal that would raise the wage floor and provide living wages for crew members. Our employer wants starting wages to remain the same–
–and brought forth a proposal that would roughly DOUBLE how long it takes for the average bargaining unit member to receive a raise. The employer then admitted they hadn’t really examined the numbers they presented.
While Trader Joe’s United proposed increasing retirement and health care benefits within the current plans offered to crew members, our employer proposed removing bargaining unit members from both plans and contributing an unspecified sum toward new union-sponsored plans.
At the end of the session, TJ’s announced the company is rolling out a new national policy: across the country, crew members “who feel misgendered” will be able to order nametags with their pronouns. These are available for crew to order now.
When we asked TJ’s legal team about the problematic language limiting pins to crew “who feel misgendered,” we were assured that ALL crew would get a pronoun pin if they asked for one. However, we’re already seeing reports online of crew members being refused these pins.
We’ve been asking the company to agree to an effective pronoun pin proposal for months. We know this new policy is a direct response to the work we have done at the table– much like the extra benefits announced one week before the Hadley union vote was a direct response to our organizing.
Before we could finish the discussion about pronoun pins, negotiations were cut short when the employer’s bargaining team left for the airport. We look forward to continuing this discussion next week in Minneapolis.
While we continue to hold out hope that Trader Joe’s will bargain in good faith around the issues that matter most to crew members–wages, benefits, and safety–our employer’s actions this week fall short of those hopes. We’d filed two ULPs by the time this session was over–
Charges for direct dealing, after the company’s representative admitted to speaking with bargaining unit members about bargaining, and charges for bad faith and surface bargaining.
