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.”