Maeg Yosef was watching Superstore, an NBC television show about retail workers, when she had an idea. The show features a season-long union-organizing arc, and at the time Yosef and her wife, Sarah, were watching the series in late 2021, Starbucks Workers United (SWU) had just won their first union election at a store in Buffalo, New York.
Yosef and Sarah have each worked at Trader Joe’s for around twenty years. In late 2021, the pair had just finished an extended unpaid COVID leave, which they had taken to help care for their son as he attended school remotely. While they’d been away, they say the job became worse. The two worked at a store in Hadley, Massachusetts, and though the state had introduced a policy offering workers up to a week of paid leave if they had COVID-19, Yosef didn’t find out about the policy until eight months after the state implemented it. She says none of the workers at her store knew about it.
Trader Joe’s had relaxed its COVID policies, too. Workers squeezed through crowded aisles and stood in close proximity to customers as they bagged groceries. Trader Joe’s has always emphasized workers’ friendliness with customers, urging crew members to walk customers to items they can’t find and reach into customers’ bags to ring up items instead of using conveyor belts. The employee handbook instructs workers to offer a “wow customer experience,” defined as “the feelings a customer gets about our delight that they are shopping with us.”
But now, that...
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