Labor Board To Trader Joe’s: Reopen the 14th Street Wine Store

By Arthur Schwartz

On January 12, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint alleging that the closure of Trader Joe’s Wine Shop on E. 14th St. was an act of labor retaliation. The NLRB seeks to reopen the store, with employees made whole for lost wages.

The wine shop, located just down the street from Union Square on the northern edge of the East Village, was the only branch of Trader Joe’s wine spin-off in New York.

The NLRB has taken the position that the company’s August 2022 closure was carried out to quash union organizing. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), a national labor union running the organizing drive at the time, filed the unfair labor practice charge.

UFCW released a statement: “These workers showed up every day, delivering the knowledge and service that Trader Joe’s is so famous for, only to wake up and find out that their store had been closed overnight. Trader Joe’s shamelessly and illegally engaged in union-busting to scare Trader Joe’s workers across the region and stop these workers from having a voice on the job.”

This was the first store that UFCW tried to organize. Previously, Trader Joe’s United (TJU) has only been certified by the NLRB at four of the company’s roughly five hundred locations nationwide, which employ around fifty thousand people.

One reason for the lack of success is the aggressiveness with which Trader Joe’s has sought to crush employees’ efforts.

Trader Joe’s–which has opposed union organizing drives at other Manhattan stores, not to mention nationally–has now taken issue with the very existence of the NLRB.

The National Labor Relations Act, enacted during the Great Depression in 1935, provides remedy to workers affected by what the NLRB considers to be unfair labor practices.

Trader Joe’s response to this NLRB Complaint, which is scheduled to be heard before an Administrative Law Judge, caused Trader Joe’s to join with Amazon and Elon Musk’s Space X in a lawsuit to declare that the National Labor Relations Act is unconstitutional—89 years after it was put in place by Congress and FDR. Seth Goldstein, a lawyer representing the Trader Joe’s United, told the Huff Post that he finds this argument “insidious.” If upheld, he said it would take labor rights “back to 1920.”

Trader Joe’s may be a nice place to shop, but the corporation is pushing to destroy what few rights not only its workers, but all US workers have.