Trader Joe's Dirties Its Image

I've been a fan of Trader Joe's since I discovered the grocery chain while living in Boston. Now that I live in the suburbs, it's a bit of a drive to find one, but I still shop there when I can. Still the company's response to a coalition working to address labor abuses in tomato fields, might change that.

Last week in The Atlantic, Barry Estabrook reported that when about 400 workers' rights advocates from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) showed up at Trader Joe's headquarters to present a letter asking the chain to sign a Fair Food Agreement, no one would open the door. Estabrook writes:

For the last several months, the coalition has been trying to persuade Trader Joe's, a 360-plus store chain that brands itself as a worker- and customer-friendly bastion of all things sustainable, organic, and fair-trade, to sign a Fair Food agreement. Companies who sign the agreement promise to pay one penny more per pound for tomatoes harvested by the workers (the difference between $50 and $80 a day for a worker) and insist that growers who sell to them abide by a code of conduct that mandates no slavery or sexual harassment in the fields, accurate time keeping, a grievance procedure, first-aid training for workers, and tents to provide a bit of shade. Complying with the agreement would cost the billion-dollar company about $30,000 a year.

You'd think that "no slavery" would be a superfluous request, but apparently not: as Estabrook reports, "In the past 15 years, seven cases of slavery involving more than 1,200 workers in Florida agriculture, including tomato workers, have been successfully prosecuted."

But when the group, which was accompanied by about 20 religious leaders, showed up at Trader Joe's headquarters, they were met by a security guard who said that no one at the company would accept the letters. Then police arrived, and ordered the group to disperse, which they did.

Trader Joe's image is one of a socially conscious company - in fact, that's often the reason people attest to shopping there. So its strange that the company would respond to the CIW in this way.

Estabrook had a chance to interview Matt Sloane, Trader Joe's vice-president of marketing, who decided to disparage the CIW rather than talk about the issue:

The reason that no one from Trader Joe's accepted the letters, he said, was that "the group was behaving more for effect -- street theater -- not an invitation for serious discussion."

It would nice if Trader Joe's could fill everybody in on how they'd like the issue of labor abuses to be brought to their attention. Until then, I'll be shopping elsewhere.