Work to Rule and Open Bargaining Back Down Kroger Warehouse Bosses

Teamsters in an Indiana grocery warehouse scored big this year with a contract campaign like never before.

They organized in five languages and sported a multilingual union button. They opened up bargaining sessions for any member to come observe—on the peak day, 150 showed up. They even pulled off a daring work-to-rule action the week before bargaining kicked off, to start from a position of strength.

The final night, June 30, negotiations came down to the wire, stretching past the midnight contract expiration deadline. Some members were itching to walk. The employer, grocery giant Kroger, had prepared for a strike too—it had 300 scabs waiting in a hotel.

So why did management yield on the union’s top issues, averting a strike?

“I honestly believe they knew it was a fight they were not going to win,” said Greg Gorman, who has worked in this warehouse for 24 years and been a steward for most of them. “We were not going to give, and we had all the backing we needed.”

The Teamsters won a ban on any further outsourcing, wrested back some previously outsourced jobs, and for the first time won the right to honor strikes by other Kroger Teamsters.

LONG WAIT

This warehouse in Shelbyville, where 500 Teamsters work, is part of Local 135—one of the biggest Teamster locals in the country, with 12,000 members across three states.

In 2012, the previous leaders of Local 135 pushed through a 12-year agreement just before Indiana’s “right-to-work” law took effect, to postpone the loss of union shop. (Right-to-work laws, meant to weaken collective power, encourage workers to individually opt out of paying dues.)

Since then, the company has outsourced 80 formerly union jobs—the porters, who clean up spilled milk and smashed strawberries while the warehouse operates round the clock. During the 12 years of the contract, management of the warehouse changed hands twice—plus the pandemic hit and inflation soared, yet workers didn’t get back to the table to renegotiate their raise or anything else. Until this year.

Meanwhile Local 135 President Dustin Roach and the rest of the Members First reform slate, backed by Teamsters for a Democratic Union, swept local elections two years ago, pledging to mobilize members in powerful contract campaigns.

FIVE LANGUAGES

What did that look like on the ground? Many hours standing in the parking lot—getting sunburned or rained on—catching co-workers on their way in to ask about priorities and explain plans.

The warehouse has three shifts, each with staggered start times, so to reach everyone working on a given day, union activists had to be there from 4:30 to 7 a.m., then again from 12 to 4 p.m., then once more from 7 p.m. to 12 a.m. Repeat the next day to catch anyone who was off.

Plus, it took a team to cover all the languages. The warehouse workforce includes English-speakers from the U.S.; Spanish-speakers from Mexico and elsewhere; immigrants from Myanmar who speak Burmese or Chin; and the newest group, Haitian-Creole-speakers.

Over the years, stewards have established a culture that the union stands up for everyone who works here, immigrant or not. That wasn’t always a given; decades ago it was the central issue in a hard-fought chief steward election, and once they had to force out a steward who opposed the union’s program of defending immigrants.

Two years ago Mario Martinez walked into work and saw a Spanish-speaking co-worker pushed to sign a disciplinary write-up he couldn’t read or discuss, with no interpreter present. This finally convinced him to become a steward, after 15 years on the job and multiple requests from Gorman.

“That day I was like, you know what, let me get a voice,” Martinez said.

Martinez, a Texan with the drawl to prove it, speaks English and Spanish. His efforts to learn Burmese and Chin have been fruitless so far, but he relies on a network of bilingual co-workers to interpret.

For instance, to translate into Chin, “there’s a guy we call Tupac,” because in Burma he learned English by listening to the rapper Tupac Shakur. And to translate into Burmese, “there’s a guy we call Rockstar, because he plays electric guitar in the church.” Martinez is working on Tupac to become a steward.

STILL IN STREET CLOTHES

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The week before bargaining began—which also happened to be the week of Memorial Day, a big grocery holiday—members organized an action on the job.

On a typical day, most workers get to the warehouse early and put in unpaid time getting ready: changing into a snowsuit (this is a refrigerated warehouse), lining up to check out scanners and headsets, trying to get dibs on a decent forklift. Then they clock in for the shift meeting—ready to work as soon as it’s over.

So the action was: don’t do all that. Clock in for the meeting in your street clothes and your union button. Wait till you’re getting paid to change clothes and pick up equipment.

Participation was high. Management panicked, once they saw how far it was setting them back (30-45 minutes), and tried pressuring workers, especially on the large second shift. Workers saw each other stand strong—an effective demonstration of unity across the language barriers.

“They got a bit of pride out of that,” Gorman said, “like it wasn’t just something the stewards have been preaching—we really are one group.”

When long lines formed, the company also tried to get the workers who hand out equipment to open up another window.

“We didn’t,” said one of them, Monika Spears. They’re also now Teamsters—one of two previously excluded groups in the warehouse who organized over the past year.

BIG BARGAINING

In the past, stewards at this warehouse were on their own to bargain with the company—they got little help from local officers.

But this time Roach, the new president, brought new ideas, including opening up bargaining. When he suggested that negotiations be held at the union hall, Kroger management must have had no idea what it was agreeing to: large numbers of spectators.

As more Teamsters started showing up, the company’s bargaining team hid out. Sessions were scheduled to start at 9 a.m., but the management side would arrive hours late, waiting until workers had to go clock in.

The disrespect was glaring—but so was the shift in power, in who was afraid of who. “Those spineless people,” Martinez said. “They didn’t want to face all those members.”

WHAT THEY WON

Management had made noises about worsening the health care and 401(k), but backed off those efforts by the time bargaining started, admitting members wouldn’t accept it.

A sticking point, though, was the attendance policy—the union had won an unusually strong one in arbitration, and wanted to secure it in the contract. (The annual limit is 6.75 attendance penalty points. Points roll off after a year, but also each month of perfect attendance allows you to “buy back” 0.75 points and accumulate two hours of paid time off.) Kroger’s reluctance to put it in writing strengthened workers’ suspicions that the company planned to come after it. The union won.

On outsourcing, what the union won, though not complete, is big: no further outsourcing, and the Teamsters got back 20 percent of the 80 jobs already outsourced. “The goal for the next contract is to keep pushing on that, and try to get them all back eventually,” Gorman said.

The stickiest sticking point of them all, settled in the final minutes of bargaining, was the strike language. The previous contract allowed no sympathy strikes. This one allows these workers to honor the picket lines of other Kroger Teamsters—of whom there are not many in Local 135, but plenty around the country. Extending picket lines nationwide has become a major point of leverage in recent Teamster fights, for instance at US Foods and DHL.

In the next contract campaign—which isn’t far-off, since this deal is only two years and eight months long—the union may push for the right to honor secondary picket lines, where their own employer is not the direct target. Local 135 includes members at various third-party Kroger suppliers like Zenith (whose chief steward sat in on this bargaining), Transervice, and Quickway.

One inevitable step backward in this contract, because of Indiana’s right-to-work law, is that workers can now opt out of union membership. But the Teamsters I spoke with haven’t seen anyone drop out so far, and don’t expect to. The union is more active than ever, and people have a fresh confidence and pride in being members.

Getting to observe bargaining firsthand “opened a lot of people’s eyes,” Spears said. “Some of our senior guys that used to badmouth the stewards and say, ‘Oh, you got us a crappy contract,’ their outlook definitely changed.”