Posts Categorized: Stories from the Field

Labor Day Float

Our Labor Day float was the brainchild of one of our e-board members, Rick Ruth, who had access to a trailer.

It was in rough shape, but he fixed it all up and then he and some staff guys got together one wretchedly-hot day and built the benches, painted it and allowed me to pick out some decorations.

Members whose legs are ruined from many years working on cement shop floors had been asking for a float for a long time, and it was a fellow member who made it happen.

 “Weapons of Mass Percussion”

The drum line came about in a couple of brains somewhat simultaneously.  Bryan Bond, Director of Representatives and a drummer, has always said that we needed a beat for our actions.

Then Tony, the President of our local, experienced drums during an action in Argentina and realized that Bryan was on to something.  Bryan got busy calling all of his former high school band drum mates and rounded up drums that were stored in barns all over Lost Creek, WV.  Most were in pretty sad shape, and we spent a weekend cleaning and repairing for a big event on March 3, 2014.

Through Facebook and other outlets, we rounded up drummers.  The guy who played the bass for us that day is actually the drum major at Robert Morris University and works part time at one of the stores represented by our local.

The “drum line” isn’t a team of the same members all the time, as we have to deal with work, school and other schedules, but there are some who we can count on fairly often and often a surprise drummer surfaces!

Many of the local’s SPURs are called into action.  Often, who participates relates to what/where the action is.

Bryan is a great drummer and coach and manages to carry whatever ragtag percussion ensemble we come up with and they always sound great.

We’ve had probably 20 members participate on and off.  They don’t have a name – we just call them our “Weapons of Mass Percussion.”

We’ve used drums for marches on employers, Walmart protests, public actions and events with other unions, and in the Labor Day Parade.

One member-driven internal organizing effort that I recall happened in one of my stores, surrounding tattoos and piercings.  There was an outdated policy regarding tattoos and piercings, but the company, Giant Eagle, hadn’t enforced it for many years.  One day, rather suddenly, a manager at one store decided to be vindictive and said that going forward, all tats and piercings on employees in his store would have to be covered.  We had a grievance filed, but everyone realized that it would likely take a long time to settle and they were miserable with this idea.

So the members decided to cover them rather creatively. A member with wrist tats came in with gauze wrapped around her wrists with duct tape, leading customers to look at her sadly, thinking she had attempted suicide.

Two women in the bakery wore ear muffs to cover multiple ear piercings and scarves to cover their neck tats.  Because they wore all white uniforms, they looked very much like snow men, which was especially attention-getting because it was the middle of summer. Customers – those with and without their own tattoos – made comments to managers about how ridiculous it was.  Not only were some offended with the idea that vets with military tats couldn’t show them off proudly, but they found it to be unnerving that people who were handling their food were bandaged.  The crackdown on tattoos and piercings was basically over by noon and was finalized by a grievance settlement soon after.

During our grocery negotiations, we were getting really close to a strike vote.

All of us reps were assigned to make sure our stores were ready to walk at any time. Since we each have a lot of stores on our route, this task was a huge assignment.

We decided it would be best to use our steward network. At one of our CAT (Contract Action Team) meetings, we trained our stewards how to write a schedule. We also discussed how to deescalate members who might panic or get scared, and also how to talk with management if confronted or bullied.

At one store in particular, there is a steward, Jason, who works in QFC. I told him that we needed to start writing picket schedules and to make sure that we had coverage at all times since his store is open 24hours. I asked if he felt comfortable with the training or needed more hands on time with me, but he declined. He knew that I had a whole route of other stores and that he could manage his.

Within a couple of days, I checked back with him and he informed me that he only had a couple of people who were out on FMLA who he still needed to check in with. He’d already scheduled everyone else. I was excited to see how the members at the store rallied around Jason and stood with him to get it done.

He did it all on his free time and would ask people their availability and which shifts they preferred. He even managed to have buddy shifts during the overnights so that no one would be alone. He really stepped up and got it finished.

I was happy to have him help because even though I had a handful of stores with stewards that were also stepping up, I needed as much time as possible to work with the weaker stores, where we hadn’t yet identified and recruited members who felt comfortable enough to do the strike prep on their own.

At Fresh Direct, the online grocery delivery service based in New York, members of Local 2013 had a pressing problem. Plenty of members were skipping breaks, and some complained that it was hard to find bathroom time during the shift.

Stewards remembered that one member was terminated after he relieved himself in the lobby of a building in a moment of frustration.

While that incident was too far in the past for staffers to address when they heard about it, it spoke to a larger problem: Why were members having such difficulty getting a break?

Fresh Direct employs a just-in-time food delivery model that Amazon, Walmart, and other corporations are copying to get produce, prepared meals, and other perishables to the shopper’s door within a day of their online order.

The company puts constant pressure on delivery workers to speed up. The amount of time to finish stops in a shift is reduced, while the number of stops increases. The territory covered by each worker grows wider all the time.

The workplace culture encourages members to rush through their shift, too. Top performers who make the most on-time deliveries get a small bonus (and probably more tips from happy customers).

We had strong contract language protecting paid breaks, going even beyond the guarantees of state law.

But having a good issue doesn’t necessarily make it a winning issue. While some members were affected by the problem, others were not. Some segments of the workforce operate on more fixed schedules. Other workers with higher seniority feel comfortable pushing back against the boss.

The union’s first challenge was to convince leaders that even if the issue didn’t directly affect them, it mattered. Monthly meetings offsite targeted different segments of the workforce, so nobody felt left out. Parking lot meetings brought 15 minutes of union conversation right to the doorstep.

Stewards and the rep discussed the issue with the company during weekly grievance meetings, but the company’s promises to fix the problem were going nowhere.

We decided to run a petition. Stewards and other leaders drove the petition. We asked them to map out their part of the workforce, and get 10 signatures each from co-workers. Soon we had almost 500 signatures, more than half the workforce. We put together a small delegation to deliver the petition unannounced. We challenged activists who weren’t directly affected by the issue to lead the delegation, in order to show management we had unity.

The operations manager was not pleased, and the union activists got a good jolt from seeing his reaction.

Management said technology problems would delay a solution. They promised three months, and when it came and went, we had to figure out our next step.

We took another month or so to challenge management over its foot-dragging, which cost us some momentum. But when we refocused, we knew we had to escalate to make our point stick.

Since members work mostly in isolation from each other, our challenge was to make sure that whatever members did was seen by everyone else. We had built a healthy text message list, with hundreds of members.

We decided to challenge leaders to convince their co-workers to take a break all together at the same time. Our best chance for success was in the depots, about 20 locations where four to eight workers per shift congregate.

The key for reaching the members was the lead at each depot, typically a more senior worker that newer members looked up to. We had built up a network of supportive leads through our monthly meetings.  We relied on that group to pull off the action.

We told management that we needed movement on the breaks issue. When they didn’t respond, we chose a date and told leaders to get their folks ready. When the day came, staffers headed into the depots to back the leads up, agitating and mobilizing members to defend their breaks. They brought signs that read, “TIME FOR A UNION BREAK AT FRESH DIRECT.” We took dozens of photos of members holding the signs, and published many on flyers and in the newsletter.  Text messages helped encourage everyone who we couldn’t reach on site.

Management didn’t say boo—at the time. Later, they admitted to members that shipments ran late, showing us it got their attention.

And when we got to contract time, the issue still had legs. We made additional gains in contract language protecting breaks.