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80%
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40%
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30%
Sec. of State
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(D) A. Gonzalez
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50%↑
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October 24, 2009 05:47 PM UTC
79 Comments
We do our shopping on Wednesdays. If those idiots want to piss away a good job, let ’em. Then they can go out in the real world and see how things really are.
I bet there will be absolutely no change in service at either chain. Other than a bunch of cold shivering people walking around outside crying that they the big mean stores won’t give them their early retirement and raises.
Awww shucks I feel so sorry for them. I bet the thousands of people that go into the county welfare office on Spruce St looking for their unemployment benefits and welfare checks feel real sorry for them too.
These idiot union bosses just can’t help but leave the membership last in line with their concern list. I’m surprised they’re not requesting defined benefit retirement package.
Early this morning, @6, I did the weekend run to Kings. You know at 6a most of the massive Denver population that consists of drunks, white trash, teen thugs, hookers have cleared out.
Anyway the poor cashier, I ask how it was going and he grumbled about Duran, said “well, I guess I’ll lose my job”, thanked me for shopping then hurried off to help another customer.
Its really too bad these workers will get slammed during the holidays. Some of them will have to continue to work, they just can’t afford the job loss.
However, if you were truly concerned for the workers, you wouldn’t be patronizing Kroger or Safeway.
Your tacit support of Raymond Jessop style thuggery clearly violates the American value of self determination.
The videos and bogus info put out by this industry hack just proves that the strikers are right.
http://www.bermanexposed.org/
‘tad, since it seems you’re now on his payroll, why don’t you post links from all of his over astroturf sites?
http://www.handsoff.org/
http://www.minimumwage.com
http://www.abionline.org
http://www.consumerfreedom.com
http://www.epionline.org
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http://www.responsibledrinker.com
http://www.petakillsanimals.com
http://www.bermanco.com
http://www.firstjobs.org
http://www.petapetition.com
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Federal law governs the collection of union dues, or agency fees in lieu of dues for non-members who still must pay (according to federal law) for the services that they receive.
This (Danielle Cookson) case was publicized by National Right to Work, a front organization financed by corporations that is used to attack unions.
It is curious that we do not know the outcome of this case, and NRTW appears to be faking the result on their website. See this:
http://www.righttowork.org/pro…
On that webpage we find this working link to the story:
That is followed by this non-working link:
That link gives:
Is NRTW conning us with the text of the so-called “Additional Resources”, such that the casual reader believes she won a just cause under federal law?
Look at the date of the non-working link. It is eleven years older than the current story.
I’m on my way to work, and cannot explore further. But i’d like to know what the courts or the NLRB actually concluded about this case, based upon federal law.
You have it ass backwards and you don’t understand the first thing about economics. These workers should be commended for going on strike to fight for their rights and the rights of other workers.
You’re like the greedy banks that didn’t see the next wave of foreclosures. That is the strategic foreclosures of middleclass families (the few that are left) who realize they are upside down on their mortgages and are walking away from their homes. The banks should have salvaged these mortgages by negotiating with the homeowners instead they thought they could get blood from a turnip. It turns out they can’t. This is a big mistake for the banks.
Don’t you understand that if we don’t have a strong middleclass in this country we are not going to recover from this depression? These union workers are saving capitalism.
People who want to work at King Soopers will be locked out by the company – but still cannot collect unemployment. Total bullshit. (Which means Ritter’s veto will hurt King Soopers in the case of my shopping.)
Its not a lot to some of you, but we’ll continue to do our part.
If the King Soopers workers were walking off in coordination and sympathy with the Safeway crowd that would be one thing, but locking out workers who aren’t striking, and can’t get unemployment rubs me the wrong way.
By not allowing King Soopers Associates to determine their own fate Duran has forced them to swing from the gallows.
Opposing citizen’s Right-to-Work has led to the outcome whereby the corporate interests and union boss interests intersect in such a manner as to screw the worker.
It’s truly sad that Kings Soopers choose to go along with the Union Bosses corrupt ballot box games last fall.
1. The UFCW has done a horrible job of getting their message out. One piece of evidence is the first post here: “early retirement”. It is very hard to sympathize with the workers when you hear they can retire at 50 or 55.
2. The UFCW has done nothing to point out how their members are abused by management. For example, how their hours have been cut.
3. Safeway and Kroger control over 70% of the market in Colorado. A duopoly that I never seen in another state. Where else are people going to shop? If every person decided to honor the picket lines, then they would overwhelm Walmart, Target, Sunflower, Whole Foods, etc.
4. The recession has created a “be thankful you even have a job” attitude. Sympathy for strikers, in general, is at all time low.
5. I personally think that management sees this as an opportunity to crush the UFCW once and for all.
especially on your count one. Union leadership has done a vey poor job of messaging to the public.
On 3, you provide misleading statements based on general data.
on 4, you’re dead wrong. There ain’t no sympathy and your statement lacks logic. That “attitude” you claim exists, wouldn’t if Colorado hadn’t lost 187,000 jobs. The highlight being 4,000 new government jobs and that doesn’t even include local government.
on 5, the people should have voted in Right to Work.
Berman just wants justice for the membership … is that so hard?
Peace, Justice, Jobs!
Peace, Justice, Jobs!
Peace, Justice, Jobs!
Peace, Justice, Jobs!
Peace, Justice, Jobs!
Food, Justice, Jobs!
Food, Justice, Jobs!
Food, Justice, Jobs!
Food, Justice, Jobs!
‘tad, stop posting this Astroturf BULLSHIT. This is straight from a Paid Industry hitman’s company.
It has no real support other than then checks the Grocery industry is writing to Rick Berman to try and put out this black propaganda bullshit.
Bribes! Slander! Payoffs!
Bribes! Slander! Payoffs!
Bribes! Slander! Payoffs!
Bribes! Slander! Payoffs!
Bribes! Slander! Payoffs!
Bribes! Slander! Payoffs!
Dan your quote is all the evidence needed to justify why last years corrupt bollot box bribe was a payoff.
You slander all Coloradans right to self determination.
Even if this strike goes bad and King Soopers wins it doesn’t solve the problem that we have no good paying jobs in this country anymore. No good paying jobs, no middleclass and no one to buy the products from the filthy rich. They are going to go down with the rest of us. It’s just taking a long time for businesses to realize this concept but even when I mention it to senior leadership at the fortune 50 company I work for a light bulb goes off and they get it. The most conservative get it. Everybody is going to understand eventually that when you take out the middleclass in a society the ones on the top will suffer as well. If you don’t believe me go and read the lessons of the great depression. It’s all there but do try and get the real story not the one rewritten by the conservatives.
What is best for each comapny is if all other companies pay well – and they pay their employees poorly. In that respect unions were a good thing for large companies because it kept them on an even playing field with each other supporting a middle class.
If you look at the analysis that was done on Costco vs. Sam’s club Costco’s revenues were slightly lower than Sam’s Club but they generated their revenues with significantly lower labor costs. Why because turnover costs a lot of money and by paying their employee higher wages and providing affordable benefits their employees stay. It’s a misconception many businesses have that if they low ball their employees they’ll make more money. It’s simply not true.
Consider this excerpt from the The Economic Impact of Employee Behaviors on Organizational Performance.
Costco Versus Sam’s Club: A Tale of Two Employment Strategies
http://www.britannica.com/bps/…
I pay my employees well because the best programmers are 10X (or more) as productive. So it makes a gigantic difference.
But for the case of jobs where the difference is, at best, a factor of 2, it becomes more of an issue. And keep in mind that managing like Costco is hard work and requires better managers all the way up the line.
So Sam’s Club can look at this and logically decide to go as low as possible because it’s more of an old-school factory type operation and that is easier to run. And that could be the best for them – because there are a lot of people they can hire that CostCo won’t – because they’re not smart/motivated/skilled enough.
I know Burger King did a similar study (can’t find it) and compared the franchises that paid more and got better workers with lower turnover vs the ones that went the cheap route. And the bottom line was that the profits were similar and so franchise owners should go with the approach that best fit them.
Not so fast David. You pull rank by responding that because you pay your programmers 10X more and that proves your point and then you site a dubious Burger King study you can even find the link to.
Well I’m going to pull rank on you and say that I spend 40+ hours a week professionally looking at labor cost and you are underestimating the cost of employee turnover and employer/employee bad will.
Besides I provided a valid study. You’ll have to do better then personal experience and a dubious study that you can’t source to convince me. In the real labor cost world a reduction of 10 seconds translates into millions of dollars in annual savings.
I don’t pay my people 10X the norm. I pay at the high end of the norm to get 10X the productivity. Second, I personally have very low turnover and did not claim any personal experience on low-balling pay.
On your issue of a 10 second reduction saving millions – it depends on the job. For an airline pilot or teacher – it doesn’t save squat because it does not reduce your labor costs at all. Same on an assembly line where the speed of the line determines efficiency.
Also keep in mind that companies like mine that pay well and treat the employees well in return get the cream of the crop. But where are the crappy employees going to work? There are a lot of people who are lazy, a lot that are incompetent, and a lot that are not that smart. What’s the most efficient & effective way to manage people in that group?
David I don’t buy this either. Why do you insist on blaming the victims? What about all the CEOs and financial wizards who have squandered billions with their smoke and mirror financial products at the expense of workers and taxpayers?
And your example of a pilot is a bad example because pilots only get paid when they fly so if they reduce flight time by 10 seconds it does save money. They are not salaried employees. And as we watch in horror as airlines pay out bonuses to their top executives while slashing the pay of the pilots and other workers we become less safe in the air. As the national hero Chelsey Sullenberger has been making the rounds testifying to how bad the situation is for pilots and how no one in his family will follow in his footsteps because it doesn’t pay enough and this makes our skies less safe for everyone.
And from a cost perspective your argument is based on the assumption that pilots are salaried when they are in fact paid by fly time (my husband’s a pilot). When the airlines cut costs by improving the boarding time they were able to cut labor costs across the board by reducing the number of pilots, flight attendents and customer service representatives. Although some of this was due to cutting flights they were able to significantly reduce their labor costs because the TSA starting doing all their screening for them and they were able to implement EZ check in. It made a huge difference.
I don’t think so. I think unions haven’t done a good job of reaching out with their general message. They also haven’t done a very good job of explaining specifics such as the whole card check thing in a coherent way.
They desperately need better communicators who do not start with the assumption that what makes sense to them is so self- evident it hardly needs to be explained. The simple sound bites employed to turn the public against the unions have been very effective ever since Reagan. The unions efforts in response, not so much.
Maybe the unions should spend more of their money on messaging to the public. It seems they put almost all of it into funding pols with diminishing returns.
You have an increasing number of people going in to high paying jobs that are not union and where the individuals have no interest in bringing in a union. That means the number of voters who support unions out of self-interest is declining.
A non-union carpenter understands what a union can do for him/her. A programmer only sees them as something for blue collar workers.
The vast majority of the middleclass including the ones with high paying jobs need unions they just have been brainwashed into thinking unions are bad.
During and after the Great Depression unions played a pivotal role in keeping CEOs pay in check and now look what we have. The same mechanisms that caused the Great Depression – the redistribution of wealth to the top 1% is happening all over. It’s just that CEOs are now the ones at the top.
If unions pick up a model like they have in Hollywood, then maybe. But the model unions use for public employees, construction, assembly line work – it makes no sense in jobs where people are paid a lot for their brain power.
First there’s compensation. I’ve probably made 10X as much from stock options as I have from salary. How are you going to handle that?
Second there’s job categories. We don’t have them. And can’t. I have a programmer who also draws some of the art for our portal product. Our CEO was making the travel reservations for our recent trip to the SharePoint Conference. Job classification won’t work.
Third, pay is based on what each employee can do. It is not based on educational level (Bill Gates never graduated from college), it is not based on years working, it is not based on a classification level. And we like it that way – we each want to be paid for what we do, not for what our “group” on average does.
The reason people in high tech companies oppose unions is they see them as killing the goose that lays the golden egg. If the union screws up the system they might make a couple of small things better – but they’ll significantly reduce the total income of the company. And in doing that, we all end up with less.
Finally, if you’re looking for egregious CEO pay levels, high-tech is not the place to go. We have lots of CEOs at $1.00/year right now.
We’re a very different world that virtually everyone in unions flat-out doesn’t understand. And as long as you keep approaching us with the model you know – you’re going to fail. And should.
As our economy continues to go down into the abyss more people will come on board in supporting unions. They are our only chance in getting the financial bad guys out of power. And we are continuing to decline We need significant change as we are out of choices.
This me me me attitude our society has developed has been responsible for taking us down. Tech workers are no different then the rest of us and we could use a little more consciencness as it relates to community. I for one am tired of hearing the same old me me me agruments. They just don’t cut it anymore.
It’s making a decision about what makes the company the most productive & profitable because that is what determines how well people can be paid. The problem with unions, and you appear to fall in to this same trap, is you are applying the solutions of a middle-skill manufacturing economy to a high-skill knowledge economy.
In my opinion the unions we see today would make things worse not better in many businesses. The fact that we face problems does not mean you provide a solution. Until you offer an effective solution, you’re not going to succeed in these other industries.
David this is your opinion and the talking points of the right. Please provide studies showing that unions would make things worse. If not I’ll assume as an owner of a business you are biased against unions and that this is just your opinion.
92% of the private sector knows what the deal is.
And at every company I worked at I, and virtually every one of my co-workers, would oppose unionization. In our view unions would harm overall productivity and saddle us with low-performing co-workers. We might be wrong in those assumptions – but those are the assumptions you face.
Exhibit 1 – teacher unions.
Exhibit 2 – the UAW.
And I’ll throw it back at you – what would unions give us? When I was at Microsoft Bill Gates had a salary of 250K/year – so you can’t scream overpaid CEOs. I received stock options so I did quite well when the stock price went up – so you can’t scream that I didn’t get a piece of the action.
You guys are fighting battles that we don’t face in the high-tech industry (by and large). Why don’t you tell me why you’ve never successfully unionized a software company?
I have been around awhile too and for 30 years I’ve watched in horror as corporatists have stripped away the rights of workers and human rights. I have an economics and finance background but I am a liberal and always have been. I grew up in Maine in an Irish Catholic neighborhood with roots in Massachusetts. All I’m trying to say is that old ways are what has brought us to this abyss and we need to change our thought processes or we will continue to decline.
You would be better served by thinking out of the box instead of continuing to believe that laissez-faire and free market conditions exist. We are controlled by a powerful few and even though you have made money those days are over. If we don’t change we will continue to decline and a first step is supporting our unions because the middleclass are the ones that will bring us out of this depression but not if we continue to take away their rights. And very timely to this discussion is this article.
And here are the 9 signs David.
or you have a very short memory. Colorado Grocery Workers have a Facebook page, a union website, a Twitter feed, and a consumer website, http://www.alwayshereforcolorado.com. You can sign up for text message and email updates.
Not to mention there were paid TV ads running statewide, web ads – including one on coloradopols.com – for months, radio ads, and full-page print ads in newspapers all over the state.
There have been newspaper and TV stories for months with grocery workers explaining how the highly-profitable corporations are cutting their pensions and wages.
So frankly, the fact that you’re not paying attention doesn’t mean the workers haven’t been getting their message out.
If the message is not getting through – your marketing sucks. Saying the consumer should be paying attention is a cop out.
If the people on this site haven’t seen this messaging, and pretty clearly most have not, then your marketing sucks. The only thing I recall was the lame banner ad saying “grocery workers – always there for you” which was terrible messaging as the back story was that they would not be there if there was a strike.
The union may have been making an effort. But they have not gotten their message out. Not even to many grocery workers. Don’t get mad at us for pointing out your marketing is ineffective – go fix the marketing.
The fact that the workers have overwhelmingly cast strike votes and rejected a bad contract offer from the corporation means the message is getting through. The fact that they’re willing to stand up and fight in the face of corporate greed means they know what the stakes are and they’re willing to stand up for themselves. If the message wasn’t getting through they would have accepted the concessions months ago.
And are you following Twitter feed? Become a fan of the Facebook page? Gone to http://www.alwayshereforcolorado.com?
aren’t about to sign up for a Twitter feed.
A few don’t even have computers.
A consequence of working for Kroger, I guess.
How are you measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts?
Both have been overwhelming. Strike vote & rejection numbers have been over 90%, and hundreds of people have been to any given negotiations session. The corporation has gotten an earful as to how badly they’re treating their own workers.
There’s also been traditional outreach via snail mail, phone banks, and flyers/handbills on the union boards in the stores. Just figured coloradopols crowd would be more keyed in to Twitter and such, and aren’t members of UFCW privy to the internal communications.
I bagged groceries when I was a kid, and then I went to wash dishes at night.
If you want a computer and your job doesn’t provide you with the necessary disposable income, is that the fault of your employer?
I haven’t seen any of the so-called “statewide” TV ads here in Mesa County, not that it would matter to people who live in Mesa County.
Store employees I have talked to were completely in the dark about what’s going on.
Whatever communication that’s being done is ineffective.
Perhaps it’s time we all pitched in to help with their efforts. We all benefit from their work and a strong union.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to help?
I start conversations with checkers everywhere and talk about the plight of the middleclass in this country and how we need to return to the days when there was a strong union presence in our country.
I was thrilled when the Service Workers Union came out in favor of the public option. Organized labor is our friend.
no matter what the union does, it is dwarfed by the infinite marketing and PR machine of the grocers. Just imagine how much those circulars cost in your Sunday paper alone.
So yes, it is incumbent upon those of us who support the workers to get the word out through every available method – including talking to your friends and neighbors.
And stop shooting the messenger.
First off, I haven’t heard squat from the grocery stores either. So your claim that you can’t compete with their PR machine is total BS. They’re as out to lunch as you guys are.
Second, no one has a responsibility to proactively go learn what is going on. And 99.9% of the people out there are not going to do so. It is your job to get the word out – and to do so effectively.
The union needs to get its ass in gear. If they don’t, this strike will be a failure and they will have only themselves to blame.
which have been overwhelming in support of getting a good contract and opposing concessions. So obviously the message is getting to the people it most affects, the workers.
Just about every other media outlet in the state – as evidenced by the articles posted on coloradopols.com – has managed to both inquire about and follow the negotiations. ProgressNow has circulated an online petition and sent a number of alerts, community groups and legislators have signed on to support grocery workers, and as mentioned before there has been both earned and paid media outreach since the process started.
So please stop being insulting just because somebody’s not doing something your way. And yes, just like any other public policy or candidate issue, you do have a responsibility to do your own due diligence. The same standard applies to grocery workers as it does to Boulder City Council.
As far as he’s concerned if it isn’t covered in the Boulder Daily Camera on the days that he happens to read it, it’s news that never existed to begin with.
by not shopping at stores that are on strike or locking out their workers.
Just imagine the number of ordinary folks in a world where half your neighbors don’t know who their congressman is who check the Colorado Grocery Workers face book page and follow them on twitter. We’re talking about aggressively getting a message out, not passively posting one on your obscure site and waiting for the masses to take time out from watching reality TV to go looking for it.
please see answer above.
The statewide ads ran back in June around the first round of strike votes, so you may have forgotten about them.
I don’t think most of us are talking about internal communications when we say there is a failure to get the union’s message out with out being the operative word.
and the goal – which is to get a fair contract for the workers. The fact that they’ve refused to be rolled by multi-billion corporations with infinite marketing and ad budgets means they understand what’s at stake.
But this is true about all of politics right now but America is waking up and the middleclass is fighting back. That’s why I post. I’m not union I’m management but I believe in the unions and want to help in anyway I can.
Remember they have been beaten up pretty bad but also remember a strong union helps workers everywhere. GO UNION!
Example 1 – teachers unions. Children (future workers) are worse off every time they get a lousy teacher. That teacher cannot be fired because of a strong union.
Example 2 – UAW. Yes the prime responsibility for the disaster of the American car companies rests with management. But the unions went along on that ride and we ended up with fewer and fewer jobs.
A union can be a positive influence – if it operates appropriately. But like any tool, it can also be a disaster for many.
I come from an immigrant (grandparents generation in the teens and twenties) unionist family and would no sooner cross a picket line than slit my own throat. I’m just having a hard time being optimistic about this and do think winning sound bite message wars is crucial for the kind of public support workers need to succeed.
I went to King Soopers this morning. (RedGreen pointed out it’s ok to shop until. I hate to admit he was right & I was wrong – so I won’t admit it.)
Talked to the cashier and said I was sorry it was coming to a lockout. She had no idea at first. Another then told me it was deli & meat department employees only. But not to worry – they had other people willing to come in while that group was out.
You have grocery employees who are either clueless or view it as the union workers deciding to take a vacation for a bit. If even they aren’t up to date on this – what chance does the union have?
Or doesn’t want to tip its hand.
I talked to a Kroger checker yesterday who had no idea about the impending lockout. She hadn’t even seen the “divide and conquer” letter from Kroger.
And be careful about talking about the strike/lockout while the employees are on the clock. You might get someone fired. They’re forbidden by Kroger to discuss union business.
Workers are allowed to discuss issues related to unions while on the job and on the clock, if they’re allowed to discuss any other issue. In other words, management cannot legally prohibit discussions relating to a union, unless they also simultaneously prohibit discussions of football, the weather, and anything else not directly related to the job.
When i was a union organizer at Wal-Mart, i encountered employees who stocked shelves, and were not allowed to converse with co-workers while doing their job. These workers might legally be fired for violating that policy, no matter the content of their discussion. But as “at will” employees with no union protection, they could also be fired for no reason at all, so long as there was no hint of discrimination.
There is an interesting and little known provision of the 1935 Wagner act. Employees who ARE NOT in a union and who talk about issues related to terms and conditions of employment, or about having a union, actually have more protection from being fired than if they had never had such discussions. The legal doctrine is called concerted activity.
Back to the current situation — I have heard indirectly of at least one supermarket employee taken to task by management for advising a customer where they might shop in the event of a strike. It is possible the action might be justified (by management) upon perceived disloyalty to the employer, rather than discussion of union issues. I don’t know how a court or an arbitrator would view the disloyalty argument. But i’m certain a union would fiercely defend any such employee’s right to speak freely with customers.
Of course, management can, and in my experience frequently does, disregard the law when instructing employees about what they may or may not discuss. As a result, members of the union frequently misunderstand their own legal rights. Any union member concerned about, or disciplined over such issues should contact their union steward or representative.
__
As a matter of interest, the contract between the union and the company guarantees the union’s right to communicate with members in the stores. King Soopers went to court to challenge that right. King Soopers lost that challenge. The judge did place (mostly) reasonable conditions on the discussions, but the right was upheld, and King Soopers was forced to discontinue asking the police to escort union representatives out of their stores.
Disclosure: i work for the grocery workers, but am not a spokesperson for the union. The opinions expressed here are my own.
No employee is going to risk getting fired, no matter what their legal rights.
Most of them would rather toe the line rather than going to court to prove they didn’t have to.
It’s all about who has the money to make a point. The average supermarket checker doesn’t. Even with the backing of the union, they’d rather have a job than go to court to prove why they shouldn’t have been fired.
This did not come across as being careful, this came across as being clueless.
See my comment above about the union not communicating.
I feel bad for the workers.
Why do you insist on trashing these workers as ignorant, poor and stupid. You lack the dignity to treat them as fellow informed citizens … sad, sad, sad.
Here is a guy who clearly gets it and knows that the union has screwed him, yet he continues providing great service to his customers. He owns the responsibility for the customer being delighted, sadly he knows he’s really owned by Duran and will be out of a job because of the union boss values he doesn’t share.
I have spoken to checkers I see often and have a friendly rapport with and most knew a lot about what was going on. One was disgusted with the union and claimed that ordinary workers were being shut out of meetings. Others were hoping for customer support.
In my experience at my suburban Sooper and Safeway stores, most workers weren’t clueless, though until recently they may have been lulled into not giving it a whole lot of thought as it’s dragged on with no resolution since spring and it starts being background noise in your life at a certain point. That’s not the case anymore.
and in fact are encouraged to do so. It’s a very open and democratic process.
And the corporation is deliberately dragging out the process, just as they’re doing all over the nations. It’s the same situation in Arizona:
http://www.azcentral.com/arizo…
Said a bunch of them were told that there wasn’t room. My point was, they weren’t clueless.
But we are all cutting off our noses to spite our faces. It makes no sense why King Soopers wouldn’t negotiate with their union workers. They are delusional and out of touch with reality. It will bite them in the end but it will be too late. We’re quietly and quickly sinking into an abyss. Don’t they realize WE all suffer when they pay lousy wages and benefits?
The union has been using every available channel to communicate for months, including TV, Web, snail and emailings, text, and paid ads. Did you go to UFCW 7’s website before you made that assertion?
And it’s not ‘early retirement’ – the reporter chose an unfortunate phrase. When workers have 30 years of experience + age = 80, they can start collecting their pension (although many also keep working). This is because grocery stores have a 24-7 work cycle, and many employees start working as teenagers.
If workers are resisting this time, it’s because they know management forced a bad deal on them last time and they’re not going to be fooled again.
You think the general public is going to the UFCW 7’s website? Really? What planet are you from?
I don’t wee the corporations negotiating at all with the leadership of Local 7 up in the air until January.
It will hurt Democarats. I’m not surprised that Republicans are gleeful.
I’ll stand with Local 7 UFCW.
http://local7.weebly.com/
If what the Anti-Duran people are saying is true than there is no authorization to strike from the UFCW International Union.
Any word on how the challenge to the election won by the Anti-Duran faction is going? Has a date for a hearing been set?
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maybe suggest a few basic ways of improving it ?
I don’t care so much about the syntactical errors or omissions, but fer Pete’s sake put a date & time stamp on stuff.
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The International Union has yet to notify Local 7 of whether or not there will be final authorization.
It is disgusting the lies and smear campaign that these folks used during the election and continue to use currently. When they went to Channel 7 with their smear campaign – it didn’t only hurt the Durans, it hurt everything Local 7 members have worked so hard to fight for since May. After Local 7 spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on public relations (internally and externally), these people cared only about themselves to have the dirty laundry of Local 7 aired in the public.
If they cared so much about the membership, it seems as though it would be wise to try and bring people together to get the best contract possible for workers. Instead, they allow their hate and ignorance to continue to try and divide the membership. If they cared about the membership at all, they would not continue to engage in these childish tactics. They’ve lied repeatedly and they know it.
To this day, they have been unable to come up with any SOLUTIONS regarding the current contract negotiations. Instead, it is blind criticism after criticism. Kim Cordova made the brilliant comment to the Gazette that she thinks the contract negotiations are taking too long. Well, all UFCW members could have had a contract back in May that would have slashed their pension benefits, not maintained their current health care and there would have been no wage increases for the majority of workers. Maybe this is the contract that Kim would have allowed to be ratified in the interest of time.
It is interesting that prior to the election, the International Union said that if all requirements were met, the workers would have sanction. Now, after the election, the sanction is on hold AND the corporations come back to the table without even offering a new proposal. Quite frankly, if I were in the corporation’s shoes, I would wait until after January 1st, to take as many concessions from the workers as possible. God bless ’em, but most of the people in the new leadership of Local 7 do not have high school diplomas and some have criminal records.
How did such an uneducated bunch defeat Ernie Duran by a 60% to 40% margin and Cristanta Duran by a 65% to 35% margin? How could these so well educated people lose so badly?
Maybe the workers were just sick and tired of their union leadership.