Workers at Rite Aid's Lancaster distribution center marched on management Sept. 22 to deliver a petition demanding relief from then heat. Pictured here, left to right: Gene Jones, Will Moore, Erick Alwora. Local temperatures hover between 90 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit all summer, but the warehouse has no air-conditioning. Poor conditions and punishing production standards sparked the Rite Aid workers' drive to join ILWU warehouse Local 26. Their victory would recapture ground lost to Local 26 some 10 years ago when Rite Aid bought out Thrifty, closed its Ontario warehouse and threw 300 Local 26 members out of work. Photo by Marcy Rein.
by Marcy Rein
LANCASTER, CA—All summer the warehouse workers at Rite Aid’s distribution center here picked, pulled and lifted in full-on high desert heat. Local temperatures topped 100°F most days in July.
The warehouse has no air conditioning. The workers sweated, fainted, vomited, suffered weakness, dizziness and cramps. One died after suffering a seizure on the job. Heat may be responsible. CalOSHA is investigating.
On the last day of summer, the wind whipped up puffs of dust as about 35 workers gathered in a knot on the vacant lot across from the facility. They came out on their breaks and lunch hours in their blazing yellow union shirts, ready to tell their bosses they wouldn’t take the heat any more.
“As we rounded the gate and I could see all those yellow shirts, I got tears in my eyes,” organizing committee member Debbie Kaliff said. “I felt like I was being liberated.”
The Sept. 22 action began to break the fear and tension that had hung thick as the desert heat in the warehouse all summer. The workers had started organizing to join ILWU warehouse Local 26 in March and filed for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election June 2.
Rite Aid lashed back with a nasty anti-union campaign. It fired and disciplined union supporters and talked trash about them all over the facility. It told the Board production leads were supervisors who should not be in the union. This put off the election while the Board held hearings—and the company spread more fear and lies about the union.
Sept. 22 also pointed to what the workers will need to do to take on Rite Aid. Their employer will be the country’s third-largest drug store chain by the end of the year, if its plans to buy the Brooks and Eckerd stores go through. It brags on its web site that it sank $90 million into the state-of-the art Lancaster facility, which opened in 2000. And it operates with a “we don’t care, we don’t have to” arrogance.
“There’s nothing out here in the Antelope Valley that could be considered a good wage,” organizing committee member Christine Martinez said. “You start at minimum wage and don’t go up.”
By those standards, the 600-some people who would be covered by an ILWU contract at Rite Aid are doing a bit better. But the lack of job security and sick days, the punishing production standard and the extremes of heat and cold in the warehouse all pushed them to organize.
“Things have to change in there, the way people are treated,” Martinez said of the company’s “at-will” employment policy. “They can terminate people with no reason. You have no job security.”
Any time a worker in the warehouse calls in sick or goes home sick, they get an “occurrence,” which is like a demerit on their record. If they get seven occurrences in a year, they’re fired.
“I had walking pneumonia,” committee member Lori Williams said. “I had trouble breathing, coughed up blood and went to emergency. I got an occurrence for that.”
Other people stay at work rather than take an occurrence, even if they’re so sick they’re throwing up in trashcans.
Rite Aid uses a production standard called “ProRep” in the warehouse. People’s jobs ride on whether they can “make rate,” but many feel the standard setting is as arbitrary as the “at-will” policy.
“When they set the rates they watch people for a couple minutes, but we work a 10-hour day,” committee member Gene Jones said. “So many things can happen. You see people all of a sudden doing 97 percent of their rate when they were at 135. The company changes the standard at will.”
Working under ProRep often makes people feel they have to sacrifice safety for speed, committee member Angel Warner said.
“People are hurting themselves just to make rate,” Warner said.
Until this June, the warehouse had no heating system, and the winter cold bit people as hard as the summer heat.
“Soon it will be so cold you won’t be able to move,” committee member Lorena Ortiz said in August. “You’ll feel like a popsicle.”
The offices at the center have had proper heat and cooling. So has the cafeteria. Only the warehouse work areas don’t.
“One of the managers said to us, ‘You work and live in the desert and you should be used to it,” Ortiz reported. “I said to myself, ‘Do they think we are rats and we deserve to work in these bad weather conditions?’”
Management showed this same lack of respect in its union-busting campaign. It started by retaliating against the three workers who testified at the Board hearing on whether leads were supervisors. It suspended one and wrote up the two others. It continued by firing four union supporters and disciplining seven others for the feeblest of reasons; threatening that people wouldn’t get their annual raise; financing workers’ anti-union activities; interrogating people about their union activities and sympathies, and trying to smear the union supporters.
Mike Frescas got fired after he spoke out at a meeting. A group of managers and security guards wearing red shirts marched him through the warehouse and out the door—but they never gave him a reason for his firing.
Christine Martinez suffers from arthritis in her spine. She got fired for not making her rate, after managers twice refused her request for light duty. Replenishment lead Jerry Doyle, a known jokester and union sympathizer, got fired after a manager overheard him singing “Three Blind Mice.” Debbie Fontaine got walked out for “causing controversy.”
“When you’re in the boss’ office and he’s calling you an ‘agitator’ and a ‘pot-stirrer’ and asking ‘Are you a builder or a wrecker,’ how respectful is that?” Fontaine said. “My manager pounded on his desk and said, ‘My father once told me something when I was young and he used to knock me around, and that is, ‘Never, never pass up an opportunity to shut up.’”
Rite Aid routinely referred to pro-union workers as “union pushers” and painted them as thugs and thieves. After filing the election petition, the ILWU gave Rite Aid a list of organizing committee members and told management to respect their rights under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act. Rite Aid posted a memo all over the plant listing the committee members and advising them that it would do anything necessary to protect against “threats, harassment and intimidation…damage to any property…theft or misappropriation of property…any violent acts or acts of insubordination.”
The NLRB upheld the union’s claim that the leads are not supervisors in an Oct. 11 decision. Rite Aid told the workers it plans to appeal.
The ILWU filed 11 unfair labor practice charges on 38 separate violations of labor law Oct. 20. The NLRB now has to hear testimony from workers and managers to decide whether it has enough evidence to issue complaints and hold hearings. It also must decide whether to set an immediate election date. It won’t do so if it thinks Rite Aid’s unfair labor practices have destroyed any chance of a fair vote.
Since they learned about the complaint, the organizing committee members have been pondering the difference between simply having a vote on the union and having a fair vote. They’ve been carefully preparing to testify to the NLRB so they can try to make the labor law work for them. They’ve also been looking at strategies other Rite Aid workers have used to win union representation.
In New York, for example, National Health and Human Service Employees Union 1199 got a card-check neutrality agreement covering workers at about 100 Rite Aid stores in New York and New Jersey. Rite Aid agreed to recognize 1199 if a majority of workers signed union cards. The union made Rite Aid a preferred provider for its prescription plan. The 1998 agreement gave thousands of workers a fair shot at unionizing.
“Workers have a right to self-organization and a contract,” Local 26 President Luisa Gratz said. “They have a right to sit across the table from management as equals. But to make that real, they have to act like a union even before they officially form one. They need to believe in themselves and their rights.”
The Rite Aid workers got a taste of what it will mean to act like a union Sept. 22, when they delivered their heat petition to management.
About 40 people from six different unions and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor came out to Lancaster to back them up that day. ILWU Locals 26 and 13 were there, along with the Teamsters, the Machinists and the Electrical Workers, the School Employees, health workers from SEIU, and the Antelope Valley Labor Coalition. After a brief rally, the crowd marched across the road from the vacant lot, making enough noise for twice their numbers.
A delegation of about 15 workers went in with the petition signed by 165 co-workers. Five minutes later they strode out grinning.
“We went in and asked if we could see [General Manager] Renee Johnson,” Stanley Hatmaker reported. “They said she was in a meeting, even though it was lunch time, so the head of security said he’d take it in.”
The delegation had clapped and chanted while the security manager looked over the petition. The facilities manager singled Tim Patrick out of the group, demanding he give his badge back because he was “creating a disturbance.” Patrick refused.
“I might not have my job any more, but I will stand regardless,” Patrick told the crowd to loud cheers.
“This is the first of many actions to come,” ILWU International Organizer Carlos Cordon said in closing. He began a slow rhythmic clap, and loud chants of “¡Sí se puede!” rose from the vacant lot.
