Anatomy of a Decertification Drive: Confronting Kmart in the Early Aughts
“If you want to know where the Union stands, the last person to trust is a supervisor. We all know they lie!! Illustration/Patricia Ford
WAR STORIES By Phil Cohen
Editor’s Note: This is Part I of Phil’s three-part saga looking back at the decertification campaign that shook a Kmart distribution center located in Greensboro, North Carolina during the early aughts.
He who is skilled in attack flashes forth from the topmost heights of heaven like a thunderbolt – Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
In 1992, Kmart opened a distribution center in Greensboro, North Carolina. Within a year, its workers had been organized by ACTWU (currently Workers United). Management refused to negotiate in good faith, resulting in a bitter three-year-long first contract fight.
The union assigned a young organizer named Anthony Romano to the campaign. He was a rich kid who, upon graduating from Harvard, visited South Africa for several months during Apartheid to study with the African National Congress. Anthony fancied himself the next Che Guevara, but without the experience or battle scars to back it up. He cultivated local union leaders based purely on being outspoken, with little regard for whether they understood what they were speaking about, and organized around utterly unrealistic expectations for a first contract.
Fortunately, wiser professionals ran the corporate campaign, successfully tarnishing Kmart’s national reputation, and in 1996 management finally signed a contract with generous economic increases and solid language provisions. But what should have been a celebratory ratification turned into several hours of bitter arguments between those who realized we’d won a great victory and others who’d been seduced by Anthony’s delusions. The contract ratified by only sixty percent.
A few months later ACTWU merged with the ILGWU to form UNITE.
Anthony’s inner circle of hotheads was elected to the Local 2603 executive board (committee) and an incompetent buffoon was assigned as their business agent. Warehouse management was equally dysfunctional and the situation unraveled into utter chaos. A year later, the union rep was fired and I was assigned to straighten things out by any means necessary.
My insertion into the warehouse didn’t involve starting a fight. Everyone was already busy fighting everyone else. Instead, I slowly gained the workers’ trust by delivering results. I separated legitimate grievances from stacks of nonsense, got numerous terminated employees reinstated, corrected safety violations and meticulously enforced all contractual rights. In the process, I educated executive board members that frivolous cases had to be dropped in order to settle the good ones. Management came to realize they were dealing with a professional who could either work with them or make life miserable, depending on their responses. The second contract resulted in good raises and further solidified employee entitlements.
The inside of the distribution center [DC] was a fascinating marvel of technology. One side of the building contained trucking bays where Receiving Department workers unloaded and sorted merchandise for forklift drivers who transported it to modules.
The modules were like giant erector sets, three stories high, occupying most of the enormous building. Each module was reserved for specific product categories. When a Kmart store requested inventory, a picker (module worker) would receive the order, locate the appropriate cartons and then place them on a conveyor belt headed toward the Shipping Department. An elaborate maze of conveyor belts towered above the entire operation and miraculously sent every box to the right truck, courtesy of computers and bar codes. The DC employed seven hundred hourly workers on three shifts.
During 2001, Joe Wells was enticed to leave Walmart and become the new plant manager. Rory Ford was hired as his assistant. Both were clean-cut young men in their thirties.
On March 13 2002, I was visiting the employee breakroom with Local 2603 president Calvin Miller, a maintenance worker who was a Vietnam vet with lifelong PTSD and unpredictable outbursts of temper. But he was loyal to a fault and over time came to understand that our job wasn’t about winning arguments but rather winning grievances. We walked down long aisles with tables on either side, shaking hands, discussing issues and distributing leaflets.
We were nearly finished when I spotted a short, muscular Black man walking toward us, who we hadn’t previously engaged. I approached to hand him a leaflet but he pushed it away shouting, “I don’t want that damn shit! The union ain’t shit! You ain’t shit!!”
“Why do you feel that way?” I calmly asked.
“’Cause I’m from Philadelphia and we had a union there and it wasn’t worth shit and this one ain’t either. Don’t make no difference ‘cause this spring the union’s gonna be getting voted out of here!”
“What makes you so sure of that?” I inquired as he continued walking closer to me and raising his voice.
“You just wait and see! This spring there ain’t gonna be no more damn union!”
It’s impossible for a moron to get under my skin and make me feel personally insulted, but the level of certainty behind the man’s tirade sent up a red flag I couldn’t ignore.
“Who the hell was that?” I asked Calvin once our antagonist had walked past.
“His name’s Daryl Copes.”
“Tell committee members to be on the lookout for anti-union activity and take notes. I don’t have a good feeling about this. The decert window is about to open.”
“What does that mean?” the local president asked.
“This is kind of complicated, so bear with me. Under the law, during the period beginning 90 days and ending 60 days before the contract expires, workers have the right to sign a petition asking the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] for a new election to decertify the union. If only 30 percent sign, the election is scheduled. From that point on, management has the home court advantage. They hold employee meetings, lie, make threats and false promises to influence how people vote. I have a lot of experience dealing with this and there’s no such thing as a decertification campaign that isn’t secretly organized and run by the company. It’s takes professionals to run a campaign. Most of what I just mentioned is illegal—but difficult to prove to the Board.”
Two days later, during a meeting with plant manager Joe Wells, Calvin and I informed him of the Daryl Copes incident. It wasn’t my policy to complain about workers to management, but I was testing Joe. Kmart aggressively enforced a rule against confrontational outbursts, especially if profanity was involved. I wanted to see if this would be applied to the anti-union tantrum. Joe listened dispassionately for ten minutes and finally responded, “I’ll look into it,” which is management’s polite way of saying, “Go fuck yourself.”
I brought my concerns about a pending decert to UNITE’s Southern Regional Director Harris Raynor but he thought I was being paranoid. “There ain’t gonna be no decert at Kmart,” he told me with some annoyance. “We’ve developed a good relationship with them; you’re settling cases…why would they want to rock the boat now?”
But the only thing in this life I completely trust is my own instincts because they’re the only thing that’s never let me down. I put Local 2603 activists on alert for a union busting campaign set to begin in early May and explained the playing field:
The National Labor Relations Board is a law enforcement agency created in 1935 to protect the rights of workers to form unions and engage in union activity. It violates federal law for employers to interfere with those rights.
Management is required to remain neutral regarding the free choice of workers to be represented. They’re prohibited from threatening or coercing workers for union activity or showing favoritism to anti-union employees while discriminating against those who are pro-union.
Therefore, employers wishing to get rid of a union attempt to maintain the appearance of neutrality by using a select group of workers to carry out their dirty work. It becomes the union’s job to investigate and file charges with the NLRB, proving management is pulling the strings, thereby tainting the petition and requiring its dismissal.
I handed a small notepad and pen to every committee member and shop steward. “Keep these in your pocket every day at work. We need to start gathering evidence now so we’re prepared when the shit hits the fan. Management is always taking notes on us. Now it’s our turn to start taking notes on them.”
Beginning in early April, I began receiving a steady stream of information that management was conspiring with a small group of employees to initiate a decertification drive. As is usually the case, all of these hardcore “Anti’s” were white, with Daryl being a notable exception. Most Southern Blacks viewed unions as an extension of the Civil Rights Movement and even if they chose not to join, weren’t hostile.
The company fired its opening salvo on May 1. Mandatory overtime for all departments on the coming Saturday was posted later than the contract allowed, meaning the weekend work should have been voluntary. I registered my objections with Joe Wells and threatened to file a grievance if the issue wasn’t remedied. The executive board echoed my sentiments. On Friday, department managers told employees the overtime would be mandatory because the union had agreed to it. This misrepresentation infuriated workers and had the intended divisive impact.
The union countered with a leaflet headed:
“DON’T BELIEVE COMPANY LIES”
I explained we had opposed rather than agreed to the contract violation and ended by stating:
“If you want to know where the Union stands, the last person to trust is a supervisor. We all know they lie!! Why would anyone trust a Kmart supervisor for information about the Union? If you want to know where the Union stands, ask someone who represents the Union–not our enemies.”
The decertification window opened on May 6 and the seven member anti-union committee met with management to launch their campaign. The ringleader was a mechanic named Billy Key. Employers develop union-busting teams around ill-tempered workers who need to feel important. A couple usually can’t resist boasting and end up providing union activists with intelligence that allows us to stay a step ahead and identify matters to investigate…