Employees at a Lower East Side Trader Joe's have filed a petition to join the worker-led union Trader Joe's United, the union announced Wednesday.

If the union election is successful, the Essex Crossing store at the corner of Grand and Clinton streets will become the first unionized Trader Joe's in the state and the fourth in the country, the union said in a news release.

The 30,000-square-foot Lower East Side store opened in 2018. In a statement, Essex Crossing crew member Jordan Pollack said workers "should be able to have more agency at Trader Joe's and have a role in deciding standards of their own life necessities like pay, safety, and health and retirement benefits."

"I am organizing because it should not be a radical idea for workers to have a voice in the workplace," Pollack said. "I am organizing so that we feel like the collective the Trader Joe's once intended to be."

In a statement provided to NY1, a spokesperson for Trader Joe's said that Essex Crossing crew members "get to decide if they want to be a part of this [United Food and Commercial Workers International Union]-backed effort."

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union is a national union for grocery workers that has expressed support for efforts by Trader Joe's workers to unionize.

On Wednesday, Gothamist reported that "what appeared to be raw sewage seeped down from the ceiling" of the Lower East Side store earlier this month, causing "hours of confusion" and exposing some workers who disposed of spoiled food items.

The Essex Crossing store's announcement came on the same day workers at a Trader Joe's in Oakland, California announced that they planned to seek a union election, Trader Joe's United said in its release.

Trader Joe's workers in Hadley, Massachusetts and in Minneapolis, Minnesota voted in favor of joining Trader Joe's United last year, and in January, crew members at a store in Louisville, Kentucky voted to unionize. Trader Joe's has filed objections to that election.

Workers at a Trader Joe's in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, meanwhile, filed a petition to unionize in September, but crew members at the location eventually voted in October not to unionize, Trader Joe's United said.

The vote came around two months after the company closed its Union Square wine shop, days before workers there were set to file for an election, according to the union.