After ‘decert,’ CNF looks to send jobs overseas

Less than a month after employees at CNF Services Inc. decertified their union following a massive anti-union campaign, the company announced just before Christmas that it likely will outsource a department overseas, putting 40 employees in Portland and 160 employees from two other cities out of work.

Nearly three dozen employees at CNF’s Menlo Worldwide Division were members of Office and Professional Employees Local 11. In a bargaining unit of 250, the department was one of the strongest supporters of the union during the decertification campaign, said Executive Secretary-Treasurer Debbie Sluyter.

The union lost the first election by two votes. A second election was held after Local 11 filed several unfair labor practice complaints for management interference. The union lost that election held Nov. 20 by a vote of 132-106.

Throughout the campaigns, Local 11 organizers emphasized to employees that their jobs would be at risk if the company’s decertification was successful. Workers were coming off a five-year union contract that contained successor language protecting them should their jobs ever be outsourced.

“The contract said the union would follow the worker,” Sluyter said.

The decertification petition was filed after negotiations for a new contract had begun. But on the opening day of bargaining last August, CNF came to the table insisting that contracting-out prohibitions in the contract be eliminated. Once the decert was filed, however, talks stopped on that issue.

But the handwriting was clearly on the wall, and the union warned employees of impending outsourcing.

“We didn’t think it would happen this quickly,” Sluyter said. “And you can bet it won’t be the last of it.”

According to former Local 11 members employed at Menlo Worldwide, several workers (most of them younger and with less seniority) from their division actually campaigned against the union believing it would help keep their jobs. “I don’t know what management was telling them, but I saw stickers that said “Keep Jobs in America: Vote No Union,” a CNF employee, who asked not to be identified, told the Northwest Labor Press.

At an emergency meeting Dec. 17, CNF’s chief executive officer and Menlo Worldwide executives told the Menlo Division their department was being put out for bid. “The reaction was shock, definitely shock. Even the supervisors were pretty shook up,” sources told the Northwest Labor Press.

As can be imagined, production dropped after the announcement was made. “Management saw this, so they came back and said it wasn’t a done deal, that they wouldn’t know anything for sure until March,” the sources said.

Employees said request-for-proposals have been let primarily to India-based companies. The manager of the department, they said, will go to India to oversee the bid process.

Employees also told the NW Labor Press that the company will offer some workers bonuses if they help train the foreigners who will replace them.

“They tell us if we stay we may be retained somewhere else in the company,” one employee said. “I don’t believe a word they say anymore.”

During the decertification process “we were told that ‘everything will fall into place once the union is gone.’ They said we’d be one happy family,” an employee said.

Sluyter said if the union was still representing workers, they possibly could have been relocated into other divisions of CNF or, in a worst-case scenario, at least been able to bargain a severance package.

“As it stands, they can be shown the door without anything,” she said.

Employees said they have been promised a severance package of one week’s pay for each year of service, up to 13 years, plus a payout of accrued vacation.

CNF is a $4.8 billion management company of global supply chain services, with businesses in regional trucking, air freight, ocean freight, customs brokerage, global logistics management and trailer manufacturing. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., but was founded in Portland in 1929 as Consolidated Truck Lines — which later became Consolidated Freightways, then Leland James, and finally CNF.

CNF spun off Consolidated Freightways in 1996. Consolidated Freightways remained primarily a unionized company until declaring bankruptcy in 2002, while CNF subcontracted and shifted its assets into mostly non-union subsidiaries.

© Oregon Labor Press Publishing Co. Inc.