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‘I had a target on my back’: Judge orders fired Trader Joe’s worker reinstatement
Trader Joe's is appealing the ruling.
A judge ordered the reinstatement of a Trader Joe’s employee in Houston, Texas, Jill Groeschel, who was terminated in April 2022.
Groeschel had filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) over retaliation she experienced leading up to and including her termination for speaking out about the removal of Covid-19 protections in the store and health and safety concerns she and other workers had over the removed protections.
“Prior to her safety complaints in 2021 there is no record of management questioning her fit for the position even when they corrected other behavior,” the ruling states. “I conclude that Respondent’s suspension and termination of Groeschel was motivated by Groeschel’s protected activity of filing and participating in the investigation of the charge in this matter. I further conclude that Respondent has failed to establish that it would have discharged her absent that conduct.”
The judge described how Trader Joe’s management collected worker testimonies in opposition to Groeschel leading up to her termination and how a Regional Vice President presided over her termination that was determined by the judge to be in response to protected concerted activity.
Jill Groeschel had worked at Trader Joe’s in Houston, Texas for 8 years and said she never received any negative performance reviews, write-ups, or incident reports against her until she began pushing back on Trader Joe’s rolling back COVID-19 protections in her store in Summer 2022. Groeschel worked morning shifts, distributing pallets throughout the store, stocking, merchandising, cleaning, and helping out in the front end of the store.
At the time, the store began removing signage referring to COVID-19 and removing plexiglass barriers. In July 2021, Harris County, Texas raised COVID-19 threat levels due to a surge of hospitalizations in the area.
“At this time, crew morale is plummeting,” Groeschel told The Guardian. “Our store manager announced that Trader Joe’s wanted to return to their pre-pandemic business model, while displaying no empathy for the crew who were concerned.”
She explained that her manager began demonstrating animosity toward her for criticizing the removal of COVID-19 protections and pushing for management to respond to concerns her and some other employees had as well, by talking to her about vague complaints and reports about her in meetings with her and telling her that Trader Joe’s may not be the appropriate workplace for her if she didn’t like how the company was handling COVID-19.
“What was really egregious in my case was how lacking Trader Joe’s was in respecting legitimate employee health concerns, and their aggressive way in shutting me down. It was really at this point in time when Trader Joe’s manager began more concerted efforts to make me resign,” said Groeschel. “I really felt intimidated, and I felt like he didn’t want me in this store. I really felt like I had a target on my back.”
In February 2022, Groeschel said she received a negative performance review and was denied an annual raise because of it for the first time during her employment at Trader Joe’s, but that no details were provided on her negative reviews. She filed a charge with the NLRB alleging the performance review and denial of a wage raise were retaliatory.
Shortly after doing so, Groeschel was informed she was being suspended pending an investigation over a claim she was aggressively using a pallet jack, a tool she used every morning for years to transport and stock merchandise before the store opened. In the NLRB judge ruling, the judge argued this complaint was unfounded as the worker it alleged to have occurred did not corroborate the allegation. Groeschel was later informed by a regional manager that the investigation was completed, and she was going to be fired as a result.
“When I entered that meeting, I naively felt confident that I would return to work, because I knew the allegations against me were unfounded,” argued Groeschel. “Trader Joe’s made me feel like I was in the wrong for speaking up about health and safety protocols and defending employees’ rights. It was intense and the intimidation factor is real. I think Trader Joe’s overlooks the fact that their success is owed to the dedicated crew who come in every day and give exemplary customer service.”
Trader Joe’s has until 29 March to file exceptions to the ruling and are represented by the anti-union law firm Littler Mendelson.
“From personal experience, I believe that the best way for employees to fight for their rights is to unionize,” added Groeschel, who expressed support for Trader Joe’s United, a union campaign that has won union elections at three Trader Joe’s stores in Massachusetts, Kentucky, and Minnesota over the past year and recently filed to hold union elections at two more stores, in Oakland, California and New York City.
A Trader Joe’s spokesperson said the company is appealing the ruling.
“We are appealing the decision of the administrative law judge on a number of grounds. The termination of this Crew Member was unrelated to any protected conduct and had nothing to do with comments about removing COVID-19 protections,” they said in an email.
'Those bonds and solidarity are missing': Fernando León de Aranoa on workplace power dynamics
Starring Javier Bardem, the latest film from Spanish director Fernando León de Aranoa, The Good Boss, picks apart the myth of the benevolent employer
From recent Oscar winners and nominees Parasite, Nomadland, The Florida Project, and Roma, to recent TV hits like Severance and Netflix’s Squid Games, films and television series with workplace depictions and underlying economic issues as driving themes have become increasingly popular.
Writer and Director Fernando León de Aranoa has often explored economic and class issues in his films. A few examples include his 2002 film Mondays in the Sun, also starring Javier Bardem, about a group of unemployed shipyard workers, the 1998 film Barrio about three teens living in a poor neighborhood of Madrid, Spain, and his 2005 film Princesses which features two sex workers as the protagonists.
Spain’s 2022 submission for the Academy Awards Best International Feature category and the most nominated film in the history of the Goya Awards is Fernando León de Aranoa’s The Good Boss. The film takes a different approach to recent films with workplace depictions, choosing to focus on the boss, the individual in power over a workplace. The Good Boss’s titular character is named Julio Blanco and played by Javier Bardem. Blanco is the boss of a small manufacturing factory and depicts himself as a good boss, characterizing his relationships with his employees as ‘family.’ Over the course of the film, Julio dispels that familial illusion in his pursuit for profit and prestige by prioritizing his business over the people who keep it running.
The film, which is currently available to rent or buy on streaming services, explores the inherent abuses and veneer of this archetype of a ‘good boss,’ and the attempts of employers to manufacture a narrative around an ideal, caring, beneficial leader overseeing and controlling the labor of workers.
It’s a film he’s wanted to do for years, he explained, after witnessing the state of workers in the wake of the 2008 global economic recession in Spain and the drastic decline of trade union membership. “For the workers in the film, there is no union between them. There is no solidarity, there is no support between them,” said De Aranoa. “For this particular film I was trying to bring different ideas about how this is something that I feel it's happening, how 10 years later, those bonds and solidarity are missing. It’s not as strong as it used to be 20 or 40 years ago and I was trying to tell what happens when you don't have those bonds of solidarity and class and how you’re really in trouble when you don’t have that support.”
Without a union and that solidarity, Blanco’s workers are subjected to the whims of his decisions, and his kindness and generosity is exposed throughout the film as a means to assert control over his workforce, contingent upon compliance.
Employers frequently utilize familial comparisons in depicting their relationships with employees to interfere in their personal lives to an unsettling degree. The film explores common tropes utilized by bosses to establish a sense of camaraderie and complacency in the workplace. This camaraderie is illusory at best and is designed to pressure workers into accepting and adhering to the whims of management for the sake of maximizing profit for those at the top.
“Each character in the film has a different position and a different kind of relationship with Blanco, and for Blanco, he has a different kind of power over each one of them, and depending on what is he looking for, he will use a different approach using this power that he, for sure has over all of them by the end, because he's the owner,” said de Aranoa. “I felt that this idea, this character, was giving me a chance to explore those kinds of dynamics of power and abuse inside the workplace, but at the same time, provided this strong humor I felt was good for the film and the issue I was dealing with.”
Blanco repeatedly oversteps the boundaries into his employees’ personal lives and becomes infuriated whenever he meets resistance. His relationships with employees are predicated on leveraging them for profit and power and extend to leveraging power over local elected officials and media publications.
De Aranoa uses Blanco’s frustrations as a way to inject humor into an otherwise serious issue of examining workplace power dynamics. These issues, he noted, are ones that many people suffer from not just in Spain, but around the world.
“The dynamics are the same. The film, the plot, and what's happening in the film, to me is almost like a microcosm of something which happens in society, not only in the small factory. Having the action in this small town, the owner of the factory can, he can call the media, he can call the owner of the local newspaper asking for a favor, or he can also reach the mayor, the political power in the town. And I think these are how things work on a bigger scale,” explained De Aranoa. “Blanco is the kind of person who's not used to dealing with frustration. He is used to getting whatever he wants since he was a kid. He’s used to that; he’s not used to people saying no to him. He uses violence because of that, he gets very angry because he’s not used to this kind of behavior, people always say ‘yes’ to him.”
The narratives Blanco weave in establishing and perpetuating a good boss persona collapse throughout the film, with Blanco frequently attempting to justify his decisions as ‘what’s best for the company’ and claiming his inheritance of the company is its own responsibility in pontificating over a dinner about the difficulties of management.
With his wife in one of the early scenes in the film, they look disdainfully upon one of Blanco’s workers, Fortuna, who works odd jobs on maintenance at his home, with both of them annoyed by his presence in fixing their pool on Sunday. The worker, a frail old man who has worked at Blanco’s factory for years, is touted in front of an award committee as an exemplary worker, but Blanco’s greed and position of power not only directly results in this worker losing his son’s life and having to continue to work throughout that loss without any contrition from his boss.
He reminisces with one of his employees of a memory he has of the two of them getting in trouble after their fathers were hunting and the worker took the fall for playing with one of their guns. The worker initially accepts Blanco’s framing, only later in the film dispelling it as his father was only there to serve Blanco’s father, who owned the factory before he inherited it, and Blanco set up the worker to take the fall on playing with the guns, forced it on him rather than an act of friendship as Blanco claims it was.
While Blanco is awarded with the prestige of a business award that comes with the facilitation of government subsidies, his misdeeds leave a wake of displaced and discarded longtime workers; an initially proclaimed ‘longtime’ friend who is blackmailed into accepting his firing quietly, Fortuna, the loyal, elderly employee who devotes time outside of work to work for Blanco at his home in addition to working in manufacturing at the plant who lost his son, the fired worker who Blanco instigated a group of kids to assault in attempts to have removed from outside the plant and is imprisoned after defending himself, Blanco’s marketing director who is demoted to pacify Blanco’s young mistress intern and his wife who remains unaware of the affair, having invited the intern to stay with the couple.
The film ends with Blanco unscathed, winning his award, with the audience teased of a final possible moment of introspection from Blanco, who disrupts that anticipation with a deep concern for the possibility that his award isn’t perfectly aligned on his wall, blind and willfully ignorant to the pain and suffering of the exploited and broken employee in the room with him.
According to De Aranoa, depending on the individual viewing the film, the perception of Blanco and his merits as a boss varied widely.
“What I was looking for was to bring this discussion about what a boss is or should be,” concluded De Aranoa. "This is a question to the audience, how far would you go in order to get what you want when you have this power over people? And this is what the film is about, what we do with that kind of power.”
Judge grants preliminary injunction to block historic California fast food worker bill AB257
The largest fast food retail chains are spending millions of dollars in opposition to California bill AB257
A Sacramento Supreme Court judge granted a preliminary injunction on AB257, halting the implementation of AB257, the FAST Recovery Act, a bill that would allow the creation of fast-food sector councils with workers representatives to oversee the industry statewide and at county levels.
The ruling halts the creation of fast-food sector councils before a voter referendum to overturn the bill is scheduled for Election Day 2024 if petition signatures that were filed to hold the referendum are verified by January 25. The fast-food industry has long been criticized for paying workers poverty wages, poor labor practices from wage theft to union busting, being assaulted on the job, rampant sexual harassment
Fast food corporations, including McDonald’s, Starbucks, Chipotle, and franchisees raised $12.7 million in 2022 to oppose AB257, which was passed by the California legislature and signed by Governor Gavin Newson in September 2022. The US Chamber of Commerce called the bill “radical.’
Mary Kay Henry, President of the Service Employees International Union, said in a statement responding to the ruling, “Corporations like McDonald’s, Starbucks and others would rather sink millions of dollars into repealing progressive laws than simply invest in creating good jobs and meeting their workers at the table. These fast-food corporations’ efforts to stymie progress for half a million Black, brown and immigrant workers are not just anti-union, they are anti-democracy. We will not let this stand.”
She added, “No lawsuit and no threat of a referendum will stop workers from organizing in their workplaces and speaking out about the violence, discrimination, harassment, wage theft and retaliation they face on the job while being paid some of the lowest wages in the state. Every day AB 257 is delayed, these issues will continue to fester across the industry. The cooks and cashiers who make fast-food corporations’ profits possible know better than anyone that their industry is broken, and they know they need a seat at the table through AB 257 to fix it.”
2022 saw a surge in strikes, with 374 strikes starting in 2022, an increase of 39 percent, and the NLRB reported an uptick in union election petitions of 53 percent in Fiscal Year 2022.
Approval of unions is at the highest point since 1965, according to a 2022 Gallup poll, with 71 percent of Americans approving of labor unions.
In January 2022, over 8,000 Kroger workers in Colorado went on strike as the grocery chain saw record profits during the pandemic.
Among the biggest stories of the labor movement this year is the explosion of union organizing at Starbucks in the face of aggressive opposition by the company, of which billionaire Howard Schultz returned as CEO as the number of Starbucks stores winning union elections boomed from a single store in Buffalo, NY in December 2021 to over 270 stores by the end of 2022. During that time, Starbucks Workers United have filed numerous unfair labor practice charges against Starbucks as the company has been dragging out bargaining a first union contract with workers.
Starbucks workers have held numerous major strikes throughout 2022 over unfair firings, cuts to hours, dragged out bargaining, store closures, and safety issues.
Working conditions deteriorated at Starbucks during the pandemic as workers started organizing the first Starbucks union at a corporate run store in 2021
Starbucks workers in New York are organizing to form first US union | US unions | The Guardian
‘This is a national movement’: union drives surge at US Starbucks stores | Starbucks | The Guardian
Union drive at Manhattan roastery shows spirit of Starbucks workers | Starbucks | The Guardian
Revealed: Starbucks fired over 20 US union leaders in recent months | Starbucks | The Guardian
Starbucks workers hold strikes in at least 17 states amid union drive | US unions | The Guardian
Workers at over 100 US Starbucks stores strike on ‘Red Cup Day’ | Starbucks | The Guardian
At UPS, workers represented by the Teamsters have been ramping up the pressure on UPS ahead of their contract expiration set for August 2023 with demands to increase pay for part-time workers
Amazon workers at JFK8 in Staten Island, NY won a historic union election, the first Amazon warehouse to unionize in the US. Amazon has tried to overturn the results, unsuccessfully, as the union has faced staunch opposition from the company in efforts to expand and win a first union contract. Amazon Labor Union lost subsequent elections at LDJ5 in Staten Island and at a warehouse outside of Albany, NY. Union organizing campaigns at Amazon are underway at an Air Hub outside of Cincinnati, a warehouse in Shakopee, MN, and a warehouse in North Carolina. Amazon Labor Union pulled a petition from a warehouse outside of Los Angeles, California, but are working on being able to refile soon.
‘The model is listening’: union’s win at Amazon hatched in a small apartment | Amazon | The Guardian
Every few months or so, a labor story explodes into the mainstream, where everyone is suddenly a labor reporter and the railroad strike threats at the end of 2022 was one of those stories. Workers have been fighting against labor cuts and grueling working conditions and schedules as railroad carriers have made record profits in recent years to the tune of billions of dollars.
‘Completely demoralized’: US railroad workers pushed to the brink | US unions | The Guardian
48,000 academic workers throughout the University of California went on strike at the end of 2022, the largest strike in the history of US higher education, and won tentative agreements (postdocs/researchers have approved their agreement, other workers are currently voting on theirs)
University of California workers continue strike amid threat of arrests | US unions | The Guardian
Fast food workers in California won a historic bill, AB257, which paves the way for creating a fast-food industry council with worker representation. Workers are currently fighting back against fast food corporations’ efforts to try to overturn the bill through a voter referendum.
Two Trader Joe’s stores unionized this year, with another store in Louisville seeking to join them, as the company has been fighting unionization efforts
Workers at Apple stores have faced similar opposition after workers at 2 stores won union elections this year
15,000 nurses in Minnesota went on a brief strike and won a new contract after threatening to strike again
Minnesota nurses’ strike vote puts safety and conditions in spotlight | US healthcare | The Guardian
2023 is set for another big year for the labor movement as the NLRB is still in dire need of adequate funding and resources, big contracts at companies like UPS, GM, and Caterpillar are set to expire, and the gap between corporate profits/executive pay and wages continues to rise
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