Elon Musk is a terrible human being who does terrible things. Thus, when a lawyer representing SpaceX went and tried to claim that the National Labor Relations Board was unconstitutional, it wasn’t all that surprising. Of course lawyers representing Elon Musk would advocate for something so ridiculous and, frankly, offensive, as that.
Unfortunately, a lawyer representing Trader Joe’s grocery stores argued that same nonsense in court last week.
Despite its progressive-seeming image and cute recycled reusable bags, Trader Joe’s has been engaged in some pretty serious union-busting activity in the past few years. Thus, they ended up in front of the NLRB last week to defend themselves against charges of illegal retaliation and union-busting, including firing at least one worker for supporting the union and punishing stores that have chosen to unionize.
Here are just some of the complaints the company is being charged with, according to a transcript of the hearing.
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Starting 20 days before the Hadley, Massachusetts store’s union vote (Hadley was the first store to unionize), “store managers discriminatorily enforced its overbroad appearance policy, threatening to send home and threatening to issue negative appraisals, which typically result in the denial of a raise, 18 times” and even sent two employees home for wearing pro-union buttons
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The “Captain” of the Hadley store and a vice-president from corporate told employees that joining a union would ruin their relationship with management and that “the composition of the stores managers would change and conditions would deteriorate should the employees choose representation.”
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They immediately gave one of the workers unionizing the Hadley store his first write-up in the 13 years he’d worked there, for accidentally missing a package of deli meat when wringing a customer up. The employee in question was a particularly compelling advocate, as he had lost his Trader Joe’s health insurance after being diagnosed with cancer.
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You know the hand-drawn signs everywhere around the stores? Well, the company announced that it would no longer allocate time for sign-making, and yet somehow still expected it to get done. Sign artist and union supporter Steven Andrade, who had only ever received glowing reviews, was written up for leaving the cash register during a slow period to go make the signs. Andrade was also denied a raise, he was told, due to his “skepticism” about the new approach to sign-making. He was ultimately fired for not removing a “small power tool that had been in the store for nearly a decade, that had been purchased by the store, and had last been used by a store supervisor” from the back room.
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The company punished unionized stores by purposely providing them with lesser 401K packages than stores that did not unionize.
Rather than suggesting that the charges themselves do not have merit, Christopher Murphy, the lawyer representing Trader Joe’s at the hearing, announced that his defense will be that the NLRB should not exist and is unconstitutional.
“The National Labor Relations Act as interpreted and/or applied in this matter, including but not limited to the structure and organization of the National Labor Relations Board and the agency’s administrative law judges, is unconstitutional,” Murphy said.
NLRB Judge Charles Muhl (who specified that his name is “pronounced like Martin Mull”), was not amused.
“I’m certainly not going to be ruling on my own constitutionality anytime soon,” he told Murphy. “So you’ll have to take that up with the board and the federal courts.”
This comes on the heels of the Supreme Court agreeing to hear a case challenging the Chevron deference doctrine — which gives federal agencies like the EPA and the NLRB the right to rule on issues specific to their purview. This ensures that a judge hearing a labor complaint is an actual expert on labor law, which all judges may not be. It’s all part of a right-wing effort to dismantle regulations, so that companies may poison the water we drink and screw over their workers in peace.
No one wants to feel gross about going to Trader Joe’s, especially given that they are one of the more affordable options for grocery stores right now. The fact is, there’s no chance they will win this and every chance they will turn a lot of customers off in the process. So sure, maybe they saved some money somewhere by firing or punishing unionizing workers, but they may end up losing a lot more in the long run if people feel like they’re exploiting workers while they’re just trying to buy their orange chicken and cookie butter ice cream.
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