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Stella D’oro Pulls a Wal-Mart, Shuts Down When Labor Board Rules for Workers |
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UPDATE: BCTGM Local 50 says it will fight Stella D’oro’s decision to close the plant and soon file retaliation charges against the company with the NLRB. We will keep you updated.
Just days after a federal administrative law judge (ALJ) found Stella D’oro Biscuit Co. guilty of several labor law violations and ordered the company to reinstate more than 130 workers who have been on strike since August, the cookie maker announced it was closing its Bronx, N.Y., plant.
Last year, members of Local 50 of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) refused management demands for wage cuts by as much as $5 hour and slashes in health and pension benefits by the private equity firm that took over the company in 2006.
On June 30, National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ALJ Steven Davis ruled Stella D’oro—now owned by Brynwood Partners—refused to bargain with the union, improperly declared an impasse in negotiations and illegally refused the workers’ May 6 offer to return to work. Davis ordered the company to reinstate the workers with back pay and interest.
The Local 50 members returned to work today. Yet the company not only is appealing the judge’s ruling, it announced yesterday it will close the factory’s doors in October. Union leaders are meeting today to determine their next actions.
After the judge’s decision last week, BCTGM Local 50 President Joyce Alston said:
This decision vindicates the struggles and sacrifices of our members at Stella D’oro. The private equity predators at Brynwood Partners thought they could refuse to bargain with us, deny us information, break the law, tear up our contract, force a strike and break the union. But our members’ solidarity has held with the help of the community and our many supporters around the country and world.
During the strike, the workers received tremendous support from New York-area unions and the community. The bakery workers were joined on the picket lines by nurses, staff at the City University of New York, textile workers and many others, with the New York State United Teachers union presenting the workers with $2,500 for their strike fund. The workers have taken their struggle to the luxurious offices of Brynwood Partners in Greenwich, Conn., and to the home of Brynwood Partners and Stella D’oro Chairman Hendrik Hartong III, son of Henk Hartong Jr., former Pittston Coal CEO and Brynwood founder.
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Whenever these gangster companies shutdown or threaten to
move to China, etc. the unions should immediately file to suit to
seize the company (perhaps by eminent domain?), and it’s assets
for $1, seize the plant, and re-start the plant under worker management.
Legislation must be introduced at all levels of government to allow such seizures fully legal and permanent. When capitalism collapsed in Argentina, many hundreds of companies went out of business. Some were taken over by the workers and continued the business successfully for years now but have serious legal
battles to keep the old owners from coming back.
The organized labor movement must re-think it’s entire economic and political strategy if it is to retain any leadership position for working people.
Entire industries should be nationalized and then socialized to put put the productive capacity of the essential industries to the filling of the needs of society. More often than not, such industries and businesses can produce needed goods and services, but can’t make enough super profit to satisfy the greedy investors.
U.S. manufacturing cannot compete against Chinese slave wages, for example. Rather than imposing trade restrictions or subsidizing the profit of the investors, simply cut the corporate profiteers out of the business entirely.
The workers have built up often decades of “sweat equity” in the business that should be legally recognized. Such worker-managed companies could be the start of a transition to a sustainable socialist economy.
Capitalism is forever broken in that it can never fill the needs of all the people at an affordable rate, because of the demands for profits.
Yes, this is a RADICAL BREAK with the past of simple trade unionism! But this simple trade unionism HAS FAILED to support organized labor (ask the auto workers!), cannot stop mass firings of school teachers and state workers (as in California) etc. etc.
Organized labor has for decades IGNORED the needs of unorganized workers. The time is NOW for the organized labor movement to recognize it must develop a new strategy or become totally irrelevant and die off completely.
Thus:
1. Break with Obama and the Democratic Party that is totally committed (and bribed) to corporate agendas. Obama has bankrupted the country with billions to wall street, billions for more wars, and then claims to have no money to help the states or schools or health care, or anything else needed desperately by working people.
2. Only the organized labor movement has the resources to organize and implement a call for a new socialist political party.
A socialist party is committed to the transition away from a capitalist economy (profit for a few, impoverishment for everyone else), to an economy that provides quality public education, public health, public utilities, as needed by all the people.
3. To accomplish this - the new party must refuse all corporate funding. Corporations must be barred from the political process entirely as illegal. Only people can vote, not corporations.
3.1 All foreign wars must end now. Bring the troops home NOW!. Cut the military budget by 50 percent, cut the foreign bases (700) drastically. End the privatization of the federal government.
3.2 Restore the massive tax cuts starting with Reagan. Corporations should be required to pay federal taxes, ending loop holes and off-shore headquarters to avoid taxes.
The new socialist party must run people at all levels of local state and federal government to replace the massively corrupt politicians only serving corporate needs.
A new mass media must be created to inform, educate and organize all working people to the crisis nature of the many problems we now face due to collapsed capitalism and having no power to implement change!
read WSWS daily: http://www.wsws.org
time for a sit-in, backed up by the full force and resources of organized labor. This story should have had top billing on this blog, and should be seen and used as a rallying cry and a call for active solidarity from all unions. In my opinion, a well-organized, united, solidarity labor fightback - including secondary strikes and pickets regardless of legal or not - trumps a papal encyclical! Time for labor to mobilize solidarity, as was done in the Lindsey Oil Refinery Workers’ Strike in England this last month. They won!
I have worked at a good union job for years. A little over five years ago, my employer joined up with other employers to form an alliance, and forced a strike and lockout that affected some 70,000 workers for nearly four months. We all went back to work, battered and bruised, but not broken. What Stella D’Oro is similarly trying to do, and hopefully will be unable to accomplish, is break the union.
These workers have done nothing to hurt their company. But the private equity firms come in and try to liquidate everything they can get their hands on in order to grow themselves. They know very little and care nothing about the product, the pride in production, the community history, or the sweat equity those workers earned over the years.
Has this become the American way of doing business ? It is shameful that a company like Stella D’Oro would rather shut down than negotiate a fair contract. The jobs that will be lost, the lives that will be shattered, will be American lives—and that will quickly result in losses to the surrounding area where those workers live. The quality of life for everyone will suffer.
D’Artagnan Collier, the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for Detroit Mayor, discusses the economic crisis and the political issues facing workers in Detroit.
Here is a link to the on-line video presentation by D’Artagnan Collier.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/dart-j08.shtml
I do not know how many sit ins or strikes went on when the textile industry went overseas but I do know the label on the tee shirts, jeans and sneakers these people wear do not say Made in the USA. Why wait for your company to move out before you make a big stink? Let’s do it for all the companies that are moving out and never to return.