Need Another Reason to Support Employee Free Choice? Read About Rite Aid

ILWU Organizing Department Communications Specialist Marcy Rein describes efforts by workers at a Rite Aid warehouse in California to form a union in the face of employer intimidation and harassment.

Nacho Meza walked in to his job June 8 at the Rite Aid distribution center in Lancaster, Calif., to cheers and hugs from his co-workers. He had been out of work since Rite Aid fired him Jan. 30 for helping co-workers join the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). He and another union supporter, Debbie Fontaine, were rehired after the ILWU filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Says Meza:

Rite Aid has fired a lot of people, but none of them have ever come back. People can see the difference it makes when the union supports us.

The return of Meza and Fontaine gave heart and hope to the union supporters, but they have a long way to go to undo the damage Rite Aid inflicted with nearly a year of anti-union campaigning. The way the nation’s third-largest drug store chain has played the system—trampling workers’ rights, then escaping with a wrist slap—shows up some of the worst flaws of the NLRB election system.

Meza will be in Washington, D.C., today for a rally on Capitol Hill in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. The bill (S. 1041), now in the Senate and up for a vote as early as tomorrow, would help ensure that workers such as Meza and Fontaine who seek a union are not subject to the type of employer harassment and intimidation now common under current labor laws. (Take a minute and urge your senators to vote for the Employee Free Choice Act here.)

More than 600 people work at the Lancaster warehouse, the distribution hub for Rite Aid’s largest market. A group of them first approached the ILWU in March 2006. They were tired of working “at will” (employer-speak for being fired at any time) and of the mandatory overtime piled on to their already 10-hour days. They were sick of punishing production standards and of freezing in the winter and frying in the summer because the warehouse lacked adequate climate control.

“More than anything, we wanted them to respect us as workers,” Meza said.

In June 2006, the ILWU filed for an NLRB election. Rite Aid told the board that production lead workers were supervisors who should not be in the union. This delayed the election while the NLRB held hearings—and like most employers, Rite Aid took advantage of this extra time to roll out its anti-union campaign.

The company began by retaliating against the three workers who testified at the NLRB hearing on the issue of whether lead workers were supervisors. Management suspended one employee and wrote up the two others.

Managers spied on union activities and interrogated people about their feelings for the union. They threatened that employees would lose their regular annual raise if the union came in and routinely referred to union supporters as “union pushers.” They posted a memo throughout the plant that listed the union organizing committee members and advised them it would do anything necessary to protect against “threats, harassment and intimidation…damage to any property…theft or misappropriation of property…any violent acts or acts of insubordination.” They disciplined several union supporters and fired Fontaine for “causing controversy.”

Fontaine recalls the frightening minutes before she was fired:

My manager had me in his office and called me an ‘agitator’ and a ‘pot stirrer’ and asked, ‘Are you a builder or a wrecker?’ He pounded on his desk and said, ‘My father once told me something when I was young and he used to knock me around, and that is ‘never, never pass up an opportunity to shut up.’

The NLRB upheld the union’s claim that the lead workers are not supervisors in an Oct. 11 decision and ordered an election. The ILWU filed unfair labor practice charges Oct. 20 on 38 labor law violations. The board put the election on hold while it investigated the charges.

Rite Aid then fired Meza Jan. 30, 2007, for “intimidating” a supervisor—a man a foot taller and almost 100 pounds heavier than he. Nacho says management singled him out only after he began seeking to join a union

My co-workers will tell you I was always busy and didn’t talk much. I started work there in August 2000 and never had any problems from my managers until I started wearing the union shirt and buttons.

By the time the NLRB finished its investigation in April, it found enough evidence to bring Rite Aid to trial on 49 labor law violations.

Rite Aid settled rather than face an NLRB judge. As part of the settlement, the company must pay some $40,000 in back pay plus interest to Meza, Fontaine and three other union supporters it suspended or demoted—but it doesn’t have to pay other penalties, and doesn’t have to admit any wrongdoing. It will have to post a notice around the warehouse promising not to engage the kinds of illegal activity for which the NLRB wanted to take it to trial. It doesn’t even have to mail the notice to the workers, although it did mail a letter to everyone giving its spin on the settlement.

In the letter, Rite Aid General Manager Renee Johnson wrote:

We have stated all along we support your right to finally cast your secret ballots to decide this issue of possible unionization with the ILWU. We decided that the only way to allow the process to move forward to a vote was to give up our right to take the charges to a trial before and administrative law judge, and instead agree to a settlement.

Rite Aid’s behavior reeks of “the worst kind of hypocrisy,” said University of Oregon Professor Gordon Lafer, author of “Free and Fair? How Labor Law Fails U.S. Democratic Election Standards,” published by the worker advocacy organization, American Rights at Work in 2005.

After Rite Aid has fired and intimidated people and broken laws left and right, they turn around and insist that the NLRB system—the same system they used to create such an intimidating atmosphere—is the embodiment of democratic procedure.

Things might have unfolded very differently for the Rite Aid workers if the Employee Free Choice Act were in place, Meza said.

The act is a tool for all of us, everyone who organizes at Rite Aid, in hospitals, in hotels, so we can all have a free choice to better our lives not just for ourselves but for our families.

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