Some Franz Bakery employees say they are less than satisfied with their new contract, ratified by a smaller margin than when the union voted to begin the now over three-week-long strike.
Brad Currier, a 20-year employee of the bakery and BCTGM union representative, says they’ll be in the same place they are now when Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) International Union Local 114 is negotiating their next contract in three years.
“We’re expecting things to get worse, not better, over the next three years,” Currier says.
Franz Bakery did not respond to Eugene Weekly’s request for comment.
On Nov. 21, Franz Bakery employees voted 113 to 54 to ratify a new contractual bargaining agreement with — ending the 21-day-long strike. Currier says he voted to stay on strike, but completely understands why others felt the need to go back to work
“There were some mixed feelings about leaving the strike,” he says.
The union had voted 167 to 10 on Oct. 31 to begin the strike.
“We’re not extremely happy with the end result of the negotiations, because they wanted more,” says David Gettman, BCTGM Local 114 wholesale business agent.
While successfully negotiating a new 401(k) with employer contributions, $2.50 raises in the first year, personal unpaid time off and trading shifts between employees, Gettman says they were unable to secure any raises for sanitation workers, two day weekends and compliance with Oregon’s predictive scheduling law.
Under predictive scheduling laws in Oregon, employers must notify staff of their schedules two weeks in advance and not change the schedule after posting.
“They’re coming into work on the scheduled shift, and then they’re told that their shift has been canceled, and that they need to come in the next day, which is their scheduled day off,” Gettman says. “This happens to them all the time, so they have zero work-life balance.”
Currier says that while work-life balance was an impetus behind the decision to strike, this collective action had been a long time coming.
“I’ve been there for 20 years, and it’s been escalating this whole time, but in the last 10 years it got really bad,” Currier says, bad for work-life balance, worker safety and mutual respect between employees and their employer.
Currier — who’s spent time on the production floor, in the shipping warehouse and now works in the sanitation department — says Franz Bakery employees don’t feel like they’ve been heard.
“It just kind of escalated to the point where members felt like every time we spoke to the company, they said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. You don’t matter. You’re not a person. You’re a disposable item,’” Currier says.
Disposable to the point of unsafe working conditions, Currier says.
“They won’t listen to safety concerns from the members,” Currier says. “We’ve had a lot of OSHA activity and several OSHA fines recently as a result of that.”
OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is a regulatory agency dedicated to maintaining workplace welfare. On August 28, OSHA opened a new case into Franz Bakery for allegedly creating an unsafe working environment by telling employees it’s safe to stand on top of the bakery’s stocked product while working.
While OSHA placed Franz Bakery under a microscope, Gettman says the bakery also received an Unfair Labor Practice charge for changing the union’s contract without its consent. Before the strike, Franz Bakery unilaterally changed the bargaining agreement. In response, Gettman says BCTGM filed a ULP.
Gettman says when the contract goes into effect, six ULP charges will be dropped.
Although the ULP cases remain open, Gettman says this is only because the union has yet to withdraw them. “In the agreement to end the strike, we had to agree to remove the charges against the company,” Gettman says.
Currier says “after the strike ended, it’s been really bad in there.” He says the employees are already anticipating another strike when this newly-ratified contract expires in three years.
“Working people aren’t important at Franz,” Currier says.