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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (June 19, 2020)
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS | June 19, 2020 | PAGE 5 ...In secret audio, Columbia Sportswear managers plot to fire unionists From Page 1 where our reporting ended. Since then, the anti-union offensive con- tinued. Consultants returned in January. Anti-union workers circulated an anti- union petition. As workers arrived on the job, a front desk receptionist asked them to sign. Rory Gatto, the union campaign’s most vocal supporter, describes the chill that set- tled on the workplace in an affidavit later provided to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Managers were on the floor watching employees. Anti-union em- ployees bullied pro-union co-workers. “Managers and supervisors who I had friendly work relationships with started avoiding me,” Gatto said. “They wouldn’t look at me. They wouldn’t talk to me.” Our Jan. 3 story centered on Gatto, a warehouse worker who had become disil- lusioned with the company in 2015 after a fruitless months-long effort to get the com- pany to restock empty first aid kits. On Feb. 19, Gatto was called into hu- man resources, and two days later he was terminated. The incident the company used to fire Gatto is fairly convoluted. Seeking to de- fend a co-worker he felt was being bullied, Gatto had gotten into a spirited argument with another co-worker on a private invi- tation-only online chat server called Dis- cord that Gatto himself had set up for union supporters to communicate. The co- worker he argued with betrayed him by taking a screenshot of the conversation and going to company management with it. In the warehouse human resource office, a manager accused Gatto of making co- workers uncomfortable with things he’d said, and as evidence read aloud what Gatto had written on the Discord server. Gatto denied he’d authored the comment, and left the meeting, later refusing to return to human resources to face what he de- nounced as a “kangaroo court.” He then tried to defend himself by suggesting that management investigate threats that had been made against him—on Facebook ac- counts purporting to be those of a manager and co-worker, but which he knew to be fake. It backfired, and Columbia Sports- wear terminated him for violating the com- pany’s code of ethics by impersonating co- workers online. It’s important at this point to understand that firing union supporters is an all-too common feature of company anti-union campaigns. A 2019 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that U.S. employers faced charges of firing pro-union workers in somewhere between one fifth and one third of all union election campaigns. Fir- ing workers for supporting a union is a vi- olation of federal labor law, but companies get away with it all the time. Managers look for a pretext, use that to fire the union supporter, and then deny that defeating the union was the motive for termination. It can be difficult for a worker to prove oth- erwise. Warehouse worker Rory Gatto wanted the same wages, benefits, and workplace rights that Teamster-represented workers get. Managers wanted him gone. In Gatto’s case, we’re to believe that a five-year employee was terminated for a petty online quarrel. And who’s to say oth- erwise? Except that in this case, there’s a very unusual piece of evidence: A remark- able set of four secretly recorded audio files show conversations among Columbia Sportswear managers plotting to get rid of Gatto after he led co-workers in the bold march to demand an end to the anti-union campaign. Two of the voices on the recordings ap- pear to be those of Alonzo Plater, Colum- bia Sportswear’s vice president of global distribution, and Jeanette Williams, direc- tor of distribution. In the recordings, Columbia Sportswear managers can be heard discussing how to get rid of Gatto and other union supporters. They refer to a list of names of known union supporters, and discuss individual workers who signed the union petition or wore union T-shirts. They go through the names of workers they want to fire, and talk about how to build a case that will stand up to NLRB scrutiny. One manager names two workers who are “too dumb to know what they’re doing”— “They are very clearly being taken advantage of.” Managers also talk about coaching em- ployees who are anti-union on how to be more vocally anti-union — wearing anti- union shirts, getting rid of union literature in the break room. “Go in there and rip them all up if you wish, but you didn’t hear it from me,” a manager says she told a worker. Managers appear to be really bothered by workers wearing union T-shirts on the shop floor. One suggests that people might join the union just because they want a T- shirt. But the greatest animosity is reserved for Gatto. In one recording, Williams refers to Gatto as the “ringleader” and talks about his having led the march on the boss. “He’s the one that gave the speech,” Williams says. “I had the door open and here comes Rory with his entourage and had a folder just like this in his hand and he’s like ah you guys have a minute? All sweet like and you could tell he was just nervous as shit.” They talk about finding things to disci- pline Gatto for, and discuss whether he’s posted things to Facebook on work time. “I’m thinking of just doing something terrible,” a manager says, “like have him walk away from his computer while he’s still logged in, ‘accidentally’ open a web- site and say, hey what’s this? What are you doing.” Elsewhere, Williams and another man- ager discuss promoting Gatto into manage- ment. “It would be an easy way out,” she says. “Just put him in a position,” the other manager says, “and that after you know, give him nine days and you know, just tell him … You suck at this job, so we’re going to go ahead and let you go.” “And pistol whippings?” one manager jokingly suggests. “No, we need more discipline than that,” what sounds like Plater replies. Whatever device recorded the conver- sations seems to be noise-activated, be- cause the recordings seem to cut out when voices are too quiet to trigger a threshold. Gatto says a co-worker placed the device, and sent him the recordings. Under Oregon law, you’re allowed to record a conversation that you yourself are a part of, whether or not you tell the other party. But it’s illegal to record a conversa- tion if neither party is aware. In other words, whoever placed a listening device in the Columbia Sportswear manager’s of- fice likely broke state law. But the record- ing appears to reveal managers plotting to “We gotta fire him right now. He’s got a pair on him to show up with that T-shirt on.” “Pistol whippings?” “No, we need more discipline than that. “ break federal law. On March 4, two weeks after he was ter- minated, Gatto filed a legal complaint against the company with the NLRB. The filing, known as an unfair labor practice charge, was dismissed May 7 because Gatto failed to electronically file a signed affidavit, and ignored several reminders. Gatto admits he screwed up, but says he plans on refiling the charge, which he’s al- lowed to do. Workers have six months from the time of their discharge to file. Gatto says he’s collecting unemploy- ment, but he’d like to win reinstatement. He stays in contact with union organizers and former co-workers, and is enthusiastic about supporting former co-workers in their effort to win union representation. But union organizers say his firing ac- complished a purpose. “It had a chilling effect,” says Teamsters lead organizer Thom McKibben. “Work- ers who’d been very involved became worried they’d lose their jobs too.” “To put it bluntly, the campaign took a hit when they fired Rory,” says Bobby Rispler ,a union organizer who works for Teamsters Local 162. “It scared the shit out of the workers.” McKibben also says a lot of union sup- porters have left: Because of the nature of the work, and the way they treat workers, it’s a high-turnover workplace. A few weeks after Gatto was fired, the COVID-19 epidemic hit. The company closed its retail stores until the end of April, but kept the warehouse open throughout for online orders. The epidemic forced the union to pivot to organizing and holding meetings online. It may also have made it harder for Columbia Sportswear to hold workplace anti-union meetings in the warehouse. And the epidemic added a new set of concerns. Would the company that Gatto couldn’t get to replace Band-Aids now do what it takes to keep workers safe? Rispler says the answer is no: The company put production over safety. “We had reports that the company was- n’t taking seriously social distancing and PPE,” Rispler said. “Conditions were pretty abysmal.” The warehouse is said to have shut down twice after workers tested positive for COVID-19. To add insult to injury, the company started using the hashtag #TougherTo- gether in its social media campaigns, in- cluding posts encouraging customers to stay safe by staying home. TougherTo- gether is an obvious reference to the com- pany’s long-time ad campaign “One Tough Mother.” But it’s the slogan work- ers coined for their union campaign back in December, and the name they gave the union Facebook page. “It’s not a coincidence they stole our slo- gan,” Gatto says. “To me it’s simple. The company wants to silence us in the work- place.”
