Carolyn Fath Ashby
The co-op employees’ union is amping up its campaign to put public pressure on management.
Negotiations between newly unionized workers at the Willy Street Co-op and management are off to a rocky start.
On a recent blustery and cold Saturday, Willy Street Co-op owners passed out leaflets in front of the store’s three locations. “Let’s make sure workers at OUR Co-op get the respect they deserve!” read one, which listed several demands articulated by the workers’ union, UE Local 1186. The owners’ informal protest comes as the union — formed Sept. 4 — and the co-op enter into a second month of contract negotiations.
The union bargaining team is made up of elected members of the union and UE representatives, while the co-op has independently contracted Greg Leifer, who is also the city of Madison’s labor relations manager, to advise the company during the bargaining sessions.
The co-op and the union have reached a tentative agreement regarding disciplinary procedures; a policy formalizing the practice of promoting employees internally before hiring outside the company; and a procedure for dealing with layoffs, when necessary. The union’s newsletter, the “Electric Eggplant,” reports that early negotiations yielded “progress on several important issues.”
But since those early bargaining sessions in October, union members say that they have been met with resistance, especially on the subject of a contentious attendance policy in which workers are assigned disciplinary “points” for missed days — including illness-related absences. The union has called for the attendance policy, which catalyzed the push to unionize, to be suspended during negotiations. Workers say the policy remains in effect.
“Workers can decide between calling in sick and receiving a point,” says Thayer Reed, a union steward who works at the co-op’s west-side store. According to Reed, the union has filed multiple grievances to contest instances in which employees accrued attendance points due to illness. Leifer, the co-op spokesperson for issues relating to the bargaining sessions, declined to comment on the future of the attendance policy.
As negotiations wear on, Reed says, the union has been drawing public attention to workers’ concerns. “Part of it is just building union culture, some of it is informational, like getting newsletters out [and] we’ll have a day where everyone wears red, for example,” says Reed. As negotiations continue, the union will continue to escalate its public and internal campaign, she adds.
“We are constantly discussing contingencies,” says Reed. “Striking would be a last resort, but we are not taking it off the table. We want the co-op to succeed, because we love the co-op.”
The small-scale protest by the owners’ solidarity committee on Nov. 23 was part of the campaign to draw attention to workers’ demands. Co-op owners — community members with $58 shares in the organization — are afforded, among other grocery store benefits, a vote in board elections. The board, in turn, oversees the management of the co-op, but does not implement specific store policies. The member-owner committee, according to owner Ron Blascoe, is “clear that we’re taking direction from the union bargaining team.” Blascoe passed out flyers at the Willy St. East location last week, and says that management at each location told people participating in the action to leave the co-op property. “They’ve been coming down hard on people leafleting,” he says.
The head of the board of directors, Jeannine Bindl, says the co-op’s tabling policy prohibits organizations from presenting information on the premises without scheduling with the co-op in advance. That policy was set by management, not the board of directors.
Labor negotiations are scheduled to continue weekly.
