Strawberry workers add more supermarkets to campaign
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Weight
- 248 KB
- Volume
- 21
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0745-4880
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
based in Lakeland, Florida, for the past six years. Since UFCW officials concede that they do not have enough support to be elected to represent the employees, could the union's hidden strategy be to damage Publix vis-avis unionized competitors? That is the question raised by an editorial in The Tampa Tribune, December 14, 1997. Publix's non-union workforce "is absolutely frightening to organized labor," the editorial states.
As part of an $85 million settlement claim of gender discrimination in 1996, Publix agreed to stop attributing the lawsuit brought by female employees to union instigators. Since that case was settled, at least two new class action discrimination lawsuits have been filedone by women who work in Publix warehouses and foodprocessing plants, and another by African American employees. The union denies that it is behind these lawsuits, but does admit to informing current and former Publix workers how to be part of them.
The Tribune editorial quotes a UFCW official as saying of Publix, "They're making a lot of money. There's no reason they couldn't negotiate a contract." Another union official reportedly said, "If we can't organize them, the best thing to do is to erode their business as much as possible." The editorial also quoted Douglas Dority, now the union's president, as having said in 1990: "We must either reduce these [non-union] chains' market share enough so that they will abandon their deep-seated hatred of unions, or we must put them out of business. There is no other option."
Continued bad publicity about the discrimination lawsuits could help achieve that objective. The editorial reports that 300,000 postcards were sent to women in Florida, urging them to shun Publix because it treats women employees unfairly. A UFCW spokesman said that the union was not calling for a boycott, just alerting "women shoppers to the facts."
The editorial notes that another non-union supermarket chain, Food Lion, "was expanding rapidly until it was discredited by bad publicity generated by the union through a front group that made public announcements in the name of consumer safety. It was a strategy once outlined by Robert Harbrant of the Food and Allied Services Trades Department of the AFL-CIO: 'Some successful corporate campaigns are never made public. Anonymity may provide certain advantages. Unions may be able to proceed in the absence of company resistance or orchestrate media coverage of alleged company wrongdoing without revealing their own role and operate through surrogates.'
"Labor strategist Joe Crump, in an article in a union trade journal, reveals the power of damaging assertions: 'If the supermarket loses 10 percent of its customers, its profitability is probably eliminated. Any more than that over a protracted period, and it's out of business."'