NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS |
June 1, 2018 | PAGE 9
...How much did New Seasons pay its union-busters?
From Page 1
Byrd grew up loving New
Seasons; it was where his family
shopped. So he was thrilled to
get a job at the Williams store in
August 2016. Living rent-free in
his parents’ basement and work-
ing 15 to 25 hours a week, he
could afford to attend Portland
Community College. But the
company lost its halo for him a
year after he began. When he
started, the company handbook
promised a review and a raise af-
ter 12 months. On Aug. 5, 2017,
his one-year anniversary, he pre-
sented himself to his manager,
asking about the review, only to
be told that the company had
changed its policy, and now the
review and raise would come af-
ter 18 months.
“That day I went around the
store talking loudly and angrily,”
Byrd recalls. “And someone who
was involved [with the union
campaign] heard me complain-
ing and told me I needed to start
going to union meetings.” [With
support from the grocery union
United Food and Commercial
Workers Local 555, a group of
New Seasons employees had
been quietly gathering support.]
It was the first Byrd had heard
of a union effort at New Sea-
sons, but he already counted
himself a supporter of unions.
He had walked the picket line
when his mother, a teacher at
Reynolds School District, went
on strike. And as a student at
Grant High School, he’d been
part of Portland Student Union,
a support group that formed to
support teachers as they pre-
pared to strike.
Surely New Seasons, with its
progressive reputation, would
respect its workers enough to let
them determine on their own
whether to form a union, he
thought.
Then in late November, the
anti-union consultants arrived at
his store.
In an emailed statement attrib-
uted to co-presidents Kristi Mc-
Farland and Forrest Hoffmaster,
New Seasons told the Labor
Press that Cruz & Associates
was hired “to provide staff with
the unbiased information they
need to make well-informed de-
cisions.”
But, of course, that’s not what
they did. Recordings made by
workers at two of the meetings
— shared with the Labor Press
— show that Cruz and at least
three other anti-union consultants
spent the hour questioning union
motives and warning of strikes,
dues and less cordial workplace
What New Seasons’ union-busters said
New Seasons execs said repeatedly that the company brought in the labor relations consultants
Cruz & Associates to “provide staff with the unbiased information they need to make well-in-
formed decisions.” But several workers recorded the sessions and shared the recordings with the
Labor Press. In the recordings, some employees — taking seriously New Seasons’ vaunted “speak-
up” culture, made it clear they weren’t buying the line that these meetings were just “informa-
tional.” “Don’t you specialize in union avoidance? I saw that on your web site,” says an employee in
one of the recordings. “My job is to help companies and employees as a whole,” Cruz replies.
Here’s some of what Lupe Cruz and other consultants told workers in the hour-long meetings.
“New Seasons is not against unions, but …”
When a UNION gets involved, all of a sudden
the company has to deal with a whole heap of
federal regulations. Managers have to watch
what they say, putting a chill on what were for-
merly nice, casual, friendly relationships. “You
might have worked with a manager for eight
years, but now you guys can't talk the way you
used to talk,” Cruz told workers.
If there’s a union vote, New Seasons will have
to give the union the names, phone numbers
and email addresses of all employees, whether
they want that information shared or not.
[Scary!!]
Members of this union organizing committee
[New Seasons Workers United] can’t claim to
represent workers, because they haven’t been
elected. And the committee has very little sup-
port. Only 176 current employees were on the
union petition asking the CEO to meet , and
some of them later told managers they didn’t
know what they were signing.
The union is here because it wants your dues:
At $50 a month, that’s $1.8 million a year, $6
million every three years “out of your pocket.”
And there’s no guarantee of what those dues
will buy. The union can’t guarantee that they
will increase your wages.
If a union gets in, you might have to go on
strike! [Scary!!] And if you’re a union member
and there’s a strike and you don’t go on strike,
the union can fine you.
When the union came into stores with fliers
and balloons, it was awkward and made cus-
tomers feel like they were in the middle of it.
Union campaigns can have a cleansing effect
on a company, serving as a “wake-up call.” [Im-
plication: Your New Seasons managers didn’t
know some employees were unhappy. Now
that the union reared its head, they’ll surely
make changes to improve things … so you
don’t need the union.]
relations should a union be voted
in. [See “What New Seasons’
union-busters said” below.]
The meetings were quite ex-
tensive. Lupe, in one of the
recordings, says he personally
trained then-CEO Wendy Collie
and most of the company’s de-
partment managers. Subsequent
trainings were held for floor-
level supervisors. Then meetings
for frontline employees began.
About three employee meetings
a day for three days at each New
Seasons store in the Portland
metro area.
Presumably, inoculating em-
ployees against the union virus
was an expensive proposition.
The consultants were from Cali-
fornia, so besides their hourly
rate, New Seasons also presum-
ably paid their travel and lodging
expenses. [So much for the com-
pany’s vaunted commitment to
local business.] With one or two
consultants at a time meeting
about 10 employees at a time,
getting through 3,300 rank-and-
file workers would have meant
as many as 200 to 300 hour-long
meetings, with New Seasons
paying the consultants hourly
rate —plus roughly $50,000 in
hourly wages for their own em-
ployees, who were paid to attend
the meetings.
The exact amount of the con-
sultant payments, it now seems,
won’t be disclosed until April
2019. Did New Seasons work
out a deal to pay the consultants
nothing for two months in order
to delay disclosure? A spokes-
person for New Seasons de-
clined to answer that question.
But the experience left Byrd
wondering: “If you don’t have
anything to hide, why are you
trying to bury this for a year?”