Teamsters Say Union Buster C&S Wholesale Grocers Aims To Kill Jobs at Safeway

Safeway announced a plan to shutter two Maryland warehouses without any prior negotiation. (Teamsters)

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18520/cs_wholesale_grocers_safeway_layoffs

FRIDAY, OCT 16, 2015, 5:26 PM

BY BRUCE VAIL

Teamster members and their supporters are mobilizing to block a union busting effort at two huge warehouses controlled by the Safeway supermarket chain, one of several food retailers recently combined into national grocery store colossus by Wall Street private equity firm Cerberus Capital.

The two warehouses are located in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., and currently employ about 700 workers, most of them represented by the Teamsters. The union members were notified last week that their jobs will be eliminated when the warehouses are closed in early December, labor sources say, with most of the jobs transferred to non-union warehouses elsewhere in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

“We had a meeting to talk about our contract, which comes up for renewal in May, but they walked in and handed us a WARN notice,” announcing that most union truck drivers will lose their jobs December 6, says Phil Giles, Vice President of Washington-based Teamsters Local 639. (A WARN notice is a requirement of the WARN Act, which requires large companies to warn workers in advance of plant closures and mass firings.) “That was the first we heard of it.”

The meeting was with officials of Collington Services, a subsidiary of C&S Wholesale Grocers, which bills itself as the largest wholesale grocery distributor in the United States. C&S has had a contract with Safeway for the last 15 years to operate the warehouses that supply the chain’s supermarkets in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, Giles says, with Safeway in turn owned by Cerberus Capital-controlled Albertsons Companies Inc.

FULL story at link.