Rite Aid Workers Win Big Victory from NLRB
 |
||||
|
||||
Robert Masciola in the AFL-CIO Organizing Department writes about a victory in the three-year struggle by Rite Aid workers to join a union.
In March 2008, nearly 700 workers at Rite Aid’s distribution center in Lancaster, Calif., overcame a vicious two-year anti-union campaign to gain a voice on the job by voting for International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 26.
The workers sought union representation to put an end to punishing production quotas and mandatory overtime piled on top of 10-hour shifts. They work in hot desert summers with no air conditioning in their work areas, with no job security.
As we enter the fall of 2009, workers are still fighting hard to win a first contract. But it has been hard given the employers’ conduct.
Rite Aid’s Anti-Worker Tactics Show Need for Employee Free Choice
 |
||||
|
||||
Across the country, union members and allies are protesting Rite Aid’s unfair treatment of warehouse workers and demanding that Congress pass the Employee Free Choice Act to end management abuses and restore the freedom to bargain.
On Monday, supporters of the freedom to form unions gathered in seven cities, including outside a pharmacy industry conference in Boston, to demand that Rite Aid workers and all workers be able to form a union and bargain free of intimidation, coercion and illegal firing.
Rite Aid’s Wrong, Workers Tell Shareholders
|
|
Rite Aid workers at the drug chain’s distribution center in Lancaster, Calif., took their years-long fight for justice to New York City yesterday, where they urged the company’s shareholders to fire management’s hired-gun, union-busting consultants.
At a Times Square rally, the workers got a boost of solidarity from their New York union brothers and sisters.
At the firm’s annual shareholder meeting, Angel Warner, a veteran Rite Aid employee and member of Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 26, charged Rite Aid with “abusive, disrespectful and illegal treatment” before and after more than 600 workers voted to join the IWLU in March 2008.
