Unionization Is Starting to Spread Across the Retail Sector
Inspired by the recent wave of union campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon, retail workers at major chains like Target are launching new organizing drives across the United States.

Workers at about a half-dozen Target stores across the country are reported to have “active but early stage campaigns” to unionize. (TaarusEmerald / Wikimedia Commons)
“Because we’re the best, that makes those of us at Target a target ourselves,” says the woman in a 2011 Target corporate video about unions. Noting that the retailer has entered the heavily unionized grocery industry while resisting unionization, the speakers lay out the stakes for the company, offering up a standard fare of anti-union talking points distinguished only by the appearance of a particularly villainous-looking company lawyer.
At the time, the retailer was facing a union drive at one of its Long Island stores, under the aegis of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which represents grocery workers across the country and was hoping to launch a multistore organizing campaign at Target. That attempt ultimately failed, with workers in Long Island voting 137-85 against unionization.
“Not one group of team members, not one anywhere in the whole company, has ever decided that they need a union,” says the man toward the end of the video.