Workers Give Rite Aid CEO the Raspberry for Union-Busting

Rite Aid worker Tim Brown (far right), ILWU organizer Mary Winzig and supporters confront Rite Aid CEO and execs.

Workers at Rite Aid’s Lancaster, Calif., distribution center have been fighting for justice and a voice at work for years. Here’s the latest report on their battle from Rand Wilson, AFL-CIO Organizing Department communications specialist. For more background on the workers’ fight, click here, here and here.

A Rite Aid drugstore worker from California and enthusiastic supporters in New York City upstaged a corporate banquet where former first lady Laura Bush came to honor Rite Aid CEO Mary Sammons and other executives at a midtown hotel last night.   

Protesters held signs and banners outside, and several went inside attempting to offer Sammons a free plane ticket if she would agree to visit 600 workers at the company’s regional distribution center in Lancaster, Calif., where continuing labor violations have drawn Rite Aid into a bitter nationwide conflict. For more than two years, workers at the distribution center have united in the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) trying to achieve better pay and working conditions.

Some 30 representatives from other Rite Aid unions, including the United Food and Commercial Workers, SEIU 1199 and the Teamsters, along with the Longshoremen (ILA) attended a special briefing by ILWU leaders and the protest event outside the banquet. Union leaders were joined by representatives from the New York City Central Labor Council (NYSLC), AFL-CIO, the community-labor coalition New York Jobs with Justice and student activists from New York University.

Outside the hotel, protesters met drugstore executives who arrived for the corporate banquet with large banners and fliers highlighting Rite Aid’s continuing aggressive interference with workers’ rights at the Lancaster center where employees have been fired and threatened for supporting a union.

Workers there decided to join the union after Rite Aid enacted policies that hurt families by requiring parents to work mandatory overtime with no notice, preventing them from picking up their children after work.

Tim Brown, who works at the Rite Aid distribution center, flew out to represent his co-workers at the New York City event. 

Our families in Lancaster feel disrespected because the company has been violating our rights and breaking the law. We want to help Rite Aid be a better company and treating people right would be a good place to begin.

The struggle by workers in Lancaster illustrates why working families need the Employee Free Choice Act to protect them from Rite Aid and other corporations that threaten and fire workers for supporting unions, use stalling tactics to prevent workers from obtaining a first contract and allow companies to violate existing laws with impunity. Workers in Lancaster have been trying to negotiate a first contract with Rite Aid for more than 18 months, have held more than 60 negotiating sessions with the company and still have no contract.

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