[ Workers at three stores all in a row in this Western Mass. town
are forming unions]
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HOW A STRIP MALL IN HADLEY BECAME THE CENTER OF THE MODERN-DAY LABOR
MOVEMENT  
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Diti Kohli
September 7, 2023
The Boston Globe
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_ Workers at three stores all in a row in this Western Mass. town are
forming unions _

Once heralded for asparagus farms and flower stands, Hadley — the
town where Jamie Edwards works — has a new claim to fame in union
elections., Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff

 

HADLEY — Picture a sprawling suburban strip mall, and Route 9 in
this Western Massachusetts town may come to mind. The busy commercial
corridor is dotted with curb strips and parking lots, with neatly
painted lines and weeds pushing through cracks in the asphalt.
National brands fill the low-lying storefronts one after another: Home
Depot, Whole Foods, Marshalls, Ulta.

But a half-mile stretch of the roadway between Amherst and Northampton
is unusual for one reason: It has become a hotbed for labor activism.

Starting last year, workers at three big-box stores — Trader Joe’s
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Barnes & Noble
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and Michaels — formed unions in and around the Mountain Farms mall.
Each became the first freestanding location in their respective
national chains to organize, transforming an anonymous shopping center
into a hub of the next-generation labor movement.

“A lot of people don’t expect this to happen in Hadley,” an
agricultural hamlet better know for its asparagus farms and flower
stands, said Jamie Edwards, president of Trader Joe’s United and a
night crew member at the grocer. “I mean, why would it happen in
this small town with as many cows as humans? It’s just that here,
people saw what was possible.”

The simplest explanation for the boom is word of mouth, said Clare
Hammonds, a professor of practice at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst Labor Center.

In the private sector, unionization was traditionally reserved for
industries like coal or construction, where skilled workers could
organize en masse for better pay and working conditions. But since
COVID struck, service and retail workers have taken cues from one
another and started to organize industries typically seen as
lower-skilled and more transient. It’s a big reason why the number
of unionized workers nationwide grew by 2 percent last year, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics
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“Call it a contagion effect with labor activity,” Hammonds said.
“When workers actually win a union and start that process, it raises
expectations at nearby places that are similar in a sense that
they’re corporate retail jobs.”

That story matches Maeg Yosef’s experience to a tee. Early in the
pandemic, the 42-year-old Trader Joe’s employee felt that the
company had neglected safety standards and withheld information about
government-subsidized COVID sick leave from her and her co-workers.
Those complaints bubbled inside her when she watched the NBC sitcom
“Superstore” and saw the characters unionize
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and again when Starbucks baristas organized at one location
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after another
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nationwide. If they can do it, Yosef thought, why can’t we?

Early last year, she and Edwards introduced the idea of a union to
their Trader Joe’s colleagues. By that July, the vote came down
45-31 in favor. Their drive inspired the Barnes & Noble workers across
the street in May; Barnes & Noble gave hope to Michaels five doors
down in August; and so on.

“We can’t take credit for all of it,” Yosef added. “But when
those folks say they’re inspired by what we did, it feels good. What
comes of it is this trio of solidarity. We may not talk all the time,
but we support each other on social media. We go to each other’s
rallies. We see each other in the parking lot.”

Workers and researchers alike said the culture of Hadley is a factor,
too.

It helps that the Pioneer Valley is home to five colleges — UMass,
Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, Smith, and Amherst College — and thousands
of progressive students, said Drew Weisse, an organizer at UFCW Local
1459, who represents workers at both Barnes & Noble and Michaels. Many
retail workers are college students or recent graduates, educated
about the economy and the dizzying cost of food and housing. Add that
to persistent worries about higher education debt, and you’re left
with a contingent of radicalized young people, ready to demand more.

“They have little to lose when going for something like this,”
Weisse said. “The alternative is to take minimum wage and just hope.
They’re done hoping.”

Just ask Peter Boots-Faubert, a framer at Michaels who graduated from
UMass Amherst last year with a stockpile of knowledge about political
activism, union busting, and the intertwined history of labor and folk
music. When a union began to surface, Boots-Faubert jumped in
“without a thought.”

Or Alex Sussman. The 19-year-old cashier at Michaels and part-time
student at Holyoke Community College noticed what needed to change at
work immediately after starting there in November. The company
schedules employees erratically and provides scant training,
particularly when it comes to janitorial duties. On top of it all,
Michaels wages sit below the $16 to $18 averages given to workers at
nearby stores, Sussman said.

(Representatives for Michaels did not respond to requests for
comment.)

“I’m a Gen Z college student,” Sussman said. “I feel like the
world is going down in flames around me, and I don’t have much hope
for the future. Going to another job is not going to change anything.
But I can change my work and make it better for the people working
there now and the people who work there in the future.”

And they’re doing it in a place with a deep history of labor
activism. Western Massachusetts was once at the forefront of the
abolitionist movement and often positions itself at the forefront of
the crusade on LGBTQ+ issues. Thousands of Stop & Shop workers in
Massachusetts have long been organized, and growers and trimmers at
the Pittsfield cannabis company Berkshire Roots joined a union in
2020. As far back as the early 1900s, the region burst with union
activity, said Elisabeth Armstrong, a professor of women and gender at
Smith College.

That’s when Western Massachusetts was a hub for metal workers,
making everything from cutlery to weaponry in the Connecticut River
Valley. By the 1930s, those skilled employees turned to the United
Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union, Armstrong
added. And the most surprising part? They avoided a “closed-rank
system” and included everyone — women, immigrants, and employees
of all races.

The union eventually weakened, but “the concentration of UE union
workers created a kind of radicalism that permeated the culture,”
said Armstrong, a two-decade resident of the region. “When you live
here, you can feel the old pro-union base. It’s quiet and subtle,
almost bubbling below the surface.”

Now, many of the Hadley workers hope that spirit perseveres as
Michaels employees get ready to vote on forming a union next week. And
workers at Trader Joe’s and Barnes & Noble are weeding through the
difficult process of negotiating their first contracts, each against a
company with the time and money to drag things out.
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Trader Joe’s workers have also filed multiple complaints against the
company with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging it bargained
in bad faith and terminated a union employee without cause. (The
company did not comment on the allegations.)

Yet hope persists for a fairer Hadley, where the everyday worker is
king. Clarke Daniels, a Barnes & Noble senior bookseller, imagines a
future where the town turns into a union mecca, where the rural mall
among the stables and barns becomes a destination of thousands of
organized workers — perhaps at the Marshalls or Panera Bread.

“My dream,” they said, “is for every store in that plaza to be
union.”

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Diti Kohli can be reached at [email protected] her
@ditikohli_ [[link removed]].

* New Union Organizing
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* Mass; Mountain Farms Mall;
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