The firing last week of an employee at the Hadley Trader Joe’s store, where staff last year became the first in the company’s history to unionize, has sparked a complaint from the union that the grocery store violated federal labor law.
While Trader Joe’s management said they fired the employee — Stephen Andrade — over a safety violation, members of the Trader Joe’s United union believe the man was let go due to his outspoken support of the unionization effort.
“It’s pretty clear the company was just trying to move him along and they couldn’t find any actual misbehavior on his part,” said Maeg Yosef, a Hadley Trader Joe’s employee and the union spokesperson.
Trader Joe’s did not respond to a request for comment.
Andrade had worked for Trader Joe’s for 18 years, and most of the last decade of that was at the Hadley store on Route 9.
He was fired last Thursday, ostensibly in regard to a power saw left in the back of the store, which employees sometimes used to construct the store’s custom signs, product labels and decorations. A store manager said Andrade was told to remove the saw from the building in October and that his failure to do so disregarded the company’s safety practices.
Andrade said the saw was packed away safely in the back of the store, “out of sight, out of mind,” and was never his to begin with. It predated his time at the Hadley grocery store and was used by him and other employees involved in handcrafting the artful signage trademark to Trader Joe’s, he...
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