When a Dollar General stocker named David Williams saw two of his co-workers struggling to subdue a would-be shoplifter who was carrying a knife in 2019, the then-33-year-old kept his mouth shut. Later, when a co-worker asked him why he did nothing, Williams told him the truth.
“I said, ‘No offense, but I only get paid one time, and that is to be a stocker,’” said Williams, who today makes $11.50 an hour filling shelves with diapers, ramen and discount shampoo at a New Orleans store. Some months, he said, he can’t make rent. ”So, sorry, I’m not about to put my life on the line,” he told his colleague.
What Williams needed, he thought, was a better job. He wasn’t looking to unionize his workplace — a tall order in the right-to-work South. He just needed things to change.
In 2022, Williams joined an organization that seemed, to him, like his best shot: Step Up Louisiana. Like several successful campaigns before it, Step Up organizes workers to improve their jobs, but stops short of calling for a union under the National Labor Relations Board. The approach, sometimes referred to as “premajority unionism,” is a natural fit for places like the South, with histories of public hostility to unions. Today, suggest experts, it may also be workers’ best bet for building power amid the hostility of the Trump administration.
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The United States is home to 20,700 Dollar Generals, 8,000 Family Dollars and 9,000 Dollar Trees. “Anywhere there’s a dollar store, from here to California to New York, the working conditions are the same, unfortunately,” said Kenya Slaughter, a lead organizer with Step Up. Founded in 2017, the group — which has no official ties to any union — organizes grassroots members around economic justice issues in Louisiana and Tennessee. “We’re not against unions,” she said, but starting off with a demand for one, she explained, doesn’t make sense given the dollar store model.
“We’re all fighting for the same thing,” said Williams. “You know you’re sick and tired of how you’re being treated.”
Williams, like most workers in the dollar store campaign, complains of short-staffing; researchers say Dollar General employs an average of eight employees per store. Other complaints include constant turnover; low wages; crumbling and filthy stores; and security so poor that several workers have been slain on the job.
Dollar General did not answer questions about wages or its treatment of workers, but said in a statement, “Ultimately, we strive to create a work environment where employees have opportunities to grow their careers, serve their local communities and feel valued and heard.”
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The traditional remedy for workers like Williams has been to organize a union, including filing for an NLRB election, a process standardized in the 90-year-old National Labor Relations Act. But the act was not written with the 15.6 million U.S. retail workers in mind.
“The NLRB works best for single-site companies with one clear owner,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research and a senior lecturer at Cornell University.
While most dollar stores have a single corporate owner, their workers are spread in tiny clusters across the country. Under U.S. labor law, each dollar store would have to unionize individually, or face the additional challenge of an election across multiple stores. Today, only 4% of retail workers in the U.S. are unionized. That is even lower than the private sector average of just under 6%.
David Williams works at the DG Market in the Hollygrove neighborhood of New Orleans. DG Markets are Dollar General stores that carry fresh groceries.
Even before the second Trump administration, Bronfenbrenner said, the National Labor Relations Board had evolved over decades into an agency with little enforcement power.
“Before we basically dismantled the regulatory state, which is what’s happening now, the NLRB could force an election, but they can’t force a contract because there’s no penalty for employers who refuse to bargain other than a piece of paper saying, ‘Go bargain.’” she said.
Employers have long dragged out negotiations with impunity, with first contracts taking an average of 459 days to negotiate. Indeed, workers at Starbucks and Amazon won NLRB union elections in 2021 and 2022, respectively. They have yet to get a contract — and the improvements to their jobs one would bring.
The NLRB’s limitations are no secret to unions — even those successful in organizing under it. “If your campaign is relying on the National Labor Relations Act, you will not win because the employer knows how to defeat it,” said Kurt Petersen, co-president of UNITE HERE Local 11. His 32,000 member union has grown by strategically pressuring employers into agreeing to remain neutral during organizing drives and to recognize unions under card check. (Disclosure: UNITE HERE is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)
The National Labor Relations Board has become even more challenging for workers since Donald Trump reassumed office, said Bronfenbrenner. “It’s totally dysfunctional,” she said of the agency. It has effectively been paused since January, when Trump fired Biden appointee Gwynne Wilcox from the board. The move left it without the quorum required to issue decisions. In the months since, at least one anti-union law firm has begun instructing clients to consider resuming illegal captive-audience meetings, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the NLRB’s authority is unconstitutional, further eroding the agency’s legal status.
Indeed, after a surge in NLRB elections under President Joe Biden, the rate of workers unionizing appears to have plummeted since Trump reassumed office, according to National Labor Relations Board data analyzed by Kevin Reuning, a political scientist at Miami University of Ohio. In the first nine months of 2024, 80,434 workers formed new unions, according Reuning’s site, Unionelections.org. During the same period a year later, only 47,085 workers had done so.
Williams sits on the steps of his home in New Orleans.
For Mckenzie Midgette, a four-year Dollar General veteran who now works full-time organizing dollar store workers in Tennessee, the situation is clear. The NLRB is not going to save dollar store workers. Instead, she said, “We need to learn how to [organize] ourselves.”
In New Orleans, Step Up’s organizing yielded raises in local stores after about 18 months. After launching their campaign in mid-2020, workers held rallies, marched on Dollar General’s annual shareholder meeting and took their plight to the media. In 2023, Dollar Tree (which at the time owned Family Dollar) announced national wage increases of up to 25%, raising wages by $2 an hour; Step Up says Louisiana Dollar Generals followed suit. The following year, Dollar General approved a proposal that Williams made at a shareholder meeting that called for a company-wide safety audit.
But there are limits to how much workers can achieve without a union, cautioned Bronfenbrenner. Without a contract guaranteeing basic work conditions and a voice for workers, every improvement can be taken away without notice.
“The goal of this whole thing is to change workers’ lives, and that’s done by having a union contract in the workplace.” said Local 11’s Petersen.
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Moving forward, experts say workers are going to have to work outside of NLRB elections to improve their jobs. “That absolutely has to happen,” said Bronfenbrenner. And in some places, it already is.
In the Carolinas, Alabama and Georgia, another worker group called the Union of Southern Service Workers (backed by the Service Employees International Union) has been organizing retail workers (including dollar store workers), workers at low-paying restaurants like Waffle House, and home health care aides. After demanding $25 an hour and safer working conditions, and staging walkouts, they saw success at Waffle House. Last June, the company announced a pay increase from $2.13 an hour to $5.25 an hour by 2026. (Disclosure: SEIU is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)
In New York City, app-based delivery workers, typically classified as independent contractors and therefore without the right to organize an NLRB union, have also had success without calling for a union. In 2023, two years of intense organizing by Los Deliveristas Unidos yielded a new city law mandating a $21.44 (as of 2025) minimum wage for app-based restaurant delivery workers. This year, the law was expanded to include grocery app delivery workers.
These nontraditional campaigns are only likely to become more appealing given the Trump administration’s current posture, said Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board during the Biden administration.
“Workers are taking matters into their own hands,” she said. “The board isn’t functioning, and workers are educated about their rights and recognize their power. You’re going to see unions and workers, even without unions, perhaps not filing charges with the NLRB, but taking up the issue themselves by ticketing or protesting or striking.”
Copyright 2025 Capital & Main.
Photos by Fernando Lopez.
