Fredd Moore was fired from Trader Joe’s Essex Crossing on Feb. 12. One week prior, one of Moore’s coworkers was speaking loudly about him in the break room, calling him a homophobic slur and threatening to “drag his ass,” say workers who overheard the incident. 

“This morning as I came in to take my break after 8:00am I noticed three of my coworkers asking if I heard the threats made against me,” Moore wrote in a complaint on Feb. 5. “As I was alarmed I instantly left the premises just in case the threats were real. … Please respond as soon as possible as I’m very uncomfortable working under these conditions.” Moore says he never got a response.

This was not a one-off confrontation. There is an ongoing labor struggle at the Trader Joe’s on Essex and Delancey streets in Lower Manhattan, 10 months after union organizers lost a union election in a 76-76 tie vote. The stand-off at Essex Crossing is a part of a larger nationwide union drive at Trader Joe’s that has seen stores in several states vote to unionize with Trader Joe’s United, an independent union. 

Trader Joe’s United legal team has appealed the election results and is hoping to have them overturned under the precedent set in the recent Cemex ruling, which stipulates that if management tampered with an election the results can be reversed (rather than having to redo the election). 

The legal team is also filing an Unfair Labor Practice charge on behalf of Moore that claims that he was fired for his union involvement and labor organizing. 

Ever since workers began organizing themselves toward a union at Trader Joe’s Essex Crossing around three years ao — citing a decline in working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic — there has been a retaliatory anti-union force among the workers. 

“There are around 10 to 15 of them,” says worker-organizer Jordan Pollack. “They are a small but loud group.”

One of the morning-shift workers is virulently anti-union, and management has hired several of his friends and family members, resulting in the existence of a sort of union-busting clan, according to various worker-organizers that spoke with The Indypendent. 

“They truly believe that if we get a union, we will lose our jobs,” said Pollack when The Indy probed at why the workers don’t want a union. 

Moore has been pro-labor since workers at Essex Crossing began making noise about the need for a union at their store. In December he asked to be put on the morning so that he could experience the what the work environment was like during that shift, when many of the anti-unionists work. 

“The behaivor of the pro-union workers has been scrutinized way more ferociously than the anti-union workers. I moved on to the morning just to be able to point out the clear favoritism,” Moore told The Indy.

Moore was fired for allegedly having caused a disruption the morning of Jan. 29. Interestingly enough, that morning he had actually filed a complaint against an anti-union manager. Moore is judicious in documenting all incidents of unfair labor practice and union-busting at Trader Joe’s. This was his third time he had filed against her for singling him out for union activity and “repeated microaggressions,” says Moore. And he also would soon file the complaint against the other anti-union worker who name called and threatened him on Feb. 5.  

“Right before this, Fredd had filed an HR report against one of these managers who even I have witnessed being unnecessarily aggressive and rude to him,” worker-organizer Diego Ramirez told The Indy. “It was the same manager that he was filing this harassment report against who I believe is the one who tried to get him fired, and then not letting Fredd have the chance to give his side of the story of whatever they were concocting up.”

“Obviously Fredd was fired because Fredd was a union rep and engaging in protected activity,” says Goldstein. “He made a report to the employer, and it was up to the employer to do the investigation to see if there was a hostile work engagement, but instead it looks like he was fired not only for union involvement but for filing a complaint against what happened.”

The worker who filed the Jan. 29 complaint against Fredd has filed complaints against other pro-union workers and is herself opposed to unionizing, say worker-organizers. The worker claimed that Moore was smoking weed at the bus stop before he clocked in that morning, and that he came in tossing boxes and saying “I’m not the fucking one. Stop fucking with me. I’m not the one to fuck with,” according to a Trader Joe’s incident report viewed by The Indy. 

“Just to be very clear — I wasn’t saying this! This one anti-union worker has been on two other workers reports that ultimately got them fired,” said Moore. “It’s not that I don’t smoke weed,” he continued, “But I actually didn’t have any that morning.”

“Marijuana is a legal substance so I really don’t know why it matters,” says Seth Goldstein, one of the attorneys on Trader Joe’s United legal team. 

Moore and other worker-organizers say the anti-union workers receive preferential treatment from management. “They don’t really have to work, they can take breaks whenever they want, they sit down as much as they want, they curse all the time!” says Moore. “They’re allowed to say anything they want.”

In a discussion with The Indypendent, workers also underlined the fact that one of the reasons Moore was fired was for allegedly cursing, while his coworker who called him a hateful slur the week before is still on the floor, seemingly without having been reprimanded.

Don Mark Roxas, another worker-organizer, was on the way to the break room on the morning of Feb. 5 when his coworker burst out in anger: “I saw an anti-union coworker cursing and yelling at the top of his lungs to another coworker about Fredd. He was going on about how he’s going to beat up Fredd outside of work, and also saying homophobic slurs, which made me and my coworkers feel really uncomfortable.”  

As soon as Moore was notified of the incident, he filed a complaint with management, as did Roxas a few days later. Once Roxas found out that Moore had been fired, “Me and my coworkers were devastated by the news,” he said. So he printed out information about the unfair labor practice and the incident he witnessed and put it on the break table — activity that is protected under labor law. “Then management decided to interrogate me, because they said it’s not legal and I do not have the right to do this.” He was repeatedly denied a witness while he was being questioned about the incident. “Two managers hostily interrogated me even though I told them I have anxiety.” 

Roxas is currently under investigation, and Moore is fighting to get his job back. He hopes that this instance will inspire some of his other coworkers to fight for equal rights at the workplace.

Getting rehired through a ULP process, if successful, takes months, sometimes years. So while he waits to see if the NLRB agrees he should be reinstated, Moore wants to continue labor organizing in whatever ways he can to “be able to help people directly.” 

On Monday worker-organizers held a rally outside of Trader Joe’s in order to bring attention to the firing of a union leader and ongoing union busting. 

“Dear management, we, the workers in front of you are walking out in a concerted legal action in response to the illegal firing of our coworker Fredd Moore, the illegal investigation into Roxas and the consistent homophobia and threats in the workplace,” read a worker before a group of around 15 employees walked out of Essex Crossing on Monday. 

“We had to act fast, because we’re worried that they’re gonna start picking off the organizers one on one,” said worker-organizer Bridget Arend at the action. “They already found illegitimate reasons to fire Fredd. They fabricated the story. And we’re worried they’re going to do that to Roxas. So we knew we had to do an action to show support and to show them that they can’t keep picking us off. We do have strength in numbers.”

“Trader Joe’s doesn’t have to hire professional union busters to come in — they are just using the employees to do that work,” says Goldstein.

While there is an anti-union presence at the Trader Joe’s Essex Crossing, there is also a considerable pro-union presence, which has been fostered over the past three years by a committee of worker-organizers who have been in it for the long haul, as well as regular newcomers. Pollack, Don and Moore say the pro-labor force at Essex Crossing is actually stronger and more diverse than — but just not as loud as — the union busters. 

Lane Dibler contributed to this report.

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