Four years after unionizing, Bi-Mart workers decertify without a contract

EUGENE - More than four years after Bi-Mart warehouse workers voted 2-1 to join Teamsters Local 206, they are still without a union contract. On June 12, a management-aided "dump the union" campaign produced a 49-31 vote to get rid of the union. That election has not yet been certified by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), however, because of legal challenges by the union.

Bi-Mart fought the union from the beginning, with methods legal and illegal. On the eve of the April 1998 union election, the company illegally gave big wage and pension increases, eliminated mandatory overtime, and made a guarantee of at least eight hours of work per shift. Though ruled unfair by the NLRB, those changes proved to be some of the only concrete gains the workers won from the union campaign.

"It's my opinion Bi-Mart had no intention of coming to agreement," said Teamster Representative Stefan Ostrach. Management engaged in negotiations for about a year, but then "withdrew recognition" of the union in mid-1999 and refused to talk to the union for two years. Then, ordered by the NLRB to recognize the Teamsters and resume bargaining, the company engaged in "surface bargaining," Ostrach said, without ever coming to agreement on the key issues of wages, pensions and union security.

Last January, a decertification petition was filed, which resulted in the June election. Throughout, Local 206 has waged a boycott campaign.

"There are tens of thousands of union members," Ostrach said. They have to have lost tens of thousands of customers."

A local grocery chain with 60 stores in Oregon and Washington, Bi-Mart is privately owned by the company's officers and managers. It busted its grocery workers union in the early 1970s. Bi-Mart is on the Do Not Patronize/Unfair List of the Oregon AFL-CIO.

The union is challenging the results of the decertification vote on the grounds that management supported the campaign: the petition, Ostrach says, was circulated by lead workers on company time.

Even if it loses the legal case, the union will continue to pursue the boycott campaign, and will try to function as a minority union for the pro-union warehouse workers that remain.

"The campaign is still in full force," Ostrach said. "We've still got a good solid 30-plus people in that warehouse. We will never give up."

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