Trader Joe's Disputes Union's Election Win, Files Another Appeal

An attorney for the union called the company’s challenges a “replay of the 2020 presidential election.”

Trader Joe’s on Wednesday escalated a fight with union members in Kentucky by filing another appeal of their union’s January 2023 election victory.

A regional director for the National Labor Relations Board rejected the company’s objections to the vote to unionize and found that the union, Trader Joe’s United, had won fair and square. But Trader Joe’s challenged that determination in its new filing and asked the NLRB’s board in Washington to review it.

The California-based grocer, which has been trying to stamp out the union’s organizing campaign for a year and a half, still insists that the union improperly influenced the vote at a Louisville store.

The union and its supporters “engaged in pervasive, coercive, and intimidating conduct that precluded the conduct of a free and fair election,” the company wrote in its appeal. Trader Joe’s asked that the NLRB, which oversees private-sector collective bargaining, conduct a “rerun election.”

Seth Goldstein, an attorney for the union, said that the company’s stance amounted to election denialism, calling it a “replay of the 2020 presidential election” that then-President Donald Trump tried to overturn.