Armour Food Draws Fire as NLRB Probes Charges of Hiring Bias

After he had spent 17 years as a self-described “hard-working meatpacker and hard-core union man,” Robert Bell’s company changed hands and he became one of nearly 2,000 Armour Food Co. workers in 13 cities around the country to lose their jobs.

Now working as a pavement marker for half his former salary, Bell, 44, of Charlotte, N.C., believes he was cheated out of his job by a company seeking to pay lower wages.

Complaints by Bell and other workers in North Carolina, California and Texas have led to a major hiring-discrimination investigation by the National Labor Relations Board. The NLRB is investigating whether Armour’s new owner, ConAgra Inc. of Omaha, Neb., discriminated against the union members when it failed to hire them.

ConAgra faces potential back-pay liability of $50 million or more, in what could become one of the largest hiring-discrimination cases in NLRB history, according to board sources and attorneys for the aggrieved workers.

Charges Denied

ConAgra denies that it has broken the law. “The charges have no merit,” said Peter Nash, a Washington lawyer who was hired to lobby the NLRB not to file a complaint against ConAgra. Nash was the general counsel of the labor board during the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

This week, the union plans to initiate a nationwide comprehensive program against the company. The AFL-CIO executive council is expected to place ConAgra/Armour on its list of employers who are unfair to workers. And union officials plan to launch a boycott this spring against Armour products.

Despite these plans by the AFL-CIO, a number of former Armour workers remain sorely disappointed in their own union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, for not helping them get rehired.

The workers’ criticisms of their union illustrate the difficulties that unions face during a period when confident, cost-conscious employers have gone on the offensive. As owners in increasingly competitive, economically depressed, labor-intensive industries such as meatpacking strive to become more profitable, an increasing number of American workers may find themselves in situations in which their bosses are determined either to extract significant concessions from employees or to sell the company, with a resulting loss of jobs.

“The problem of economic dislocations has become an increasing one for unions, and the law has been unsympathetic to them and the plight of their members,” said William Gould, professor at Stanford Law School.

Contract Nullified

In the ConAgra case, the previous union contract was nullified when the firm bought the Armour plants. The U.S. Supreme Court, Gould said, has ruled that the purchaser of a company is not obliged to operate under an old union contract unless there is a specific provision requiring it. While the new owner of a company cannot discriminate against union members in hiring, Gould noted, proof of such discrimination can be difficult.

The ConAgra case is also attracting interest because it comes at a time when union leaders are attacking the NLRB for being more sympathetic to the needs of corporations than to the needs of workers.

Last June, for example, William H. Wynn, president of the Food and Commercial Workers, told a Congressional hearing: “The NLRB--as it was initially conceived and functioned for many years--has been destroyed. . . . As a result, labor-management relations is back in the jungle.”

The roots of the current controversy go back to June, 1983, when Greyhound Corp. of Phoenix announced that it would sell Armour to ConAgra for $166 million. Greyhound Chairman John Teets said that, although Armour had a profit of $13 million in 1982, the rate of return on its investment (about 0.5%) was too low to meet the company’s growth needs. Armour was paying double the wages and benefits of some of its competitors, making it increasingly difficult to operate at a profit, Teets said.

ConAgra said it would retain the Armour work force if there were “satisfactory” labor contracts at each of Armour’s plants. At the time, 2,250 Armour workers were employed under a master agreement with the Food and Commercial Workers giving them an average base wage of $10.69 an hour.

Greyhound told union officials that the workers would have to accept a new base wage of $8 an hour as well as reductions in medical and pension benefits and vacation time. Otherwise, Teets said, the plants would be closed and ConAgra would reopen with a new, non-union work force.

At the time, many packing-house workers were accepting wage concessions in the face of threatened plant closings or declarations of bankruptcy by employers, said Lewie Anderson, international vice president of the Food and Commercial Workers and director of its packing-house division.

But Armour workers overwhelmingly rejected the cuts. “We agreed to a wage freeze in 1982,” said Les Brown, who worked for more than 13 years as a sausage maker in Armour’s South San Francisco plant. “We’re not rabble rousers. But any company making $13 million a year and asking for a rollback--that’s audacity. If they’d been losing money, we’d have taken it (the new contract).”

The potential loss of severance pay also was a prime concern to the workers. Under the existing contract, Greyhound was obligated to pay severance if a plant shut down. But in its final contract proposal, Greyhound said the severance agreement would remain in effect only until September, 1986. If one of the plants were to close after that date, the workers would get no severance pay, which would have meant a loss of $10,000 for many of them and more than $20,000 for employees with the most seniority.

“We felt it was a bad gamble,” said Brown, who now works at another meatpacking plant. After Greyhound closed the plants, it had to pay out about $50 million in severance to the Armour workers, Brown said.

Without concessions from the workers, Greyhound shut down the plants shortly before they changed hands in December, 1983. As the new owner, ConAgra reopened the plants a few days later and announced that it had hired a new work force at “competitive compensation.” Armour employees are now paid an average base wage of $6 an hour, or about $3 an hour less than workers at companies where the Food and Commercial Workers have contracts, Anderson said.

Very few of the former workers were rehired, according to union officials and NLRB sources. In most of the plants, ConAgra rehired a small number of employees who had specialized skills that the company needed to resume operations, union officials said.

Former workers were most successful at the Nampa, Ida., plant where 27 of the 120 old employees were rehired, according to Sam Miller, the local union president.

Union officials said that, at some plants, notices about when and where to get job applications and arrange interviews were not posted in the plant before the shutdown.

Several employees in South San Francisco said a ConAgra official told them that they had no chance of being rehired since workers had voted against concessions and because the new owner wanted union-free plants.

Bell said Armour workers knew they risked losing their jobs by voting against concessions. “But the thing we thought about most is, we belong to a union, the union won’t let this happen.”

After the plants closed, however, the United Food and Commercial Workers said it could offer no assistance to its members in regaining their jobs, Bell and others said. The workers said union officials told them that they thought it wiser to try to organize the new Armour work force.

“If we had tried to get the old workers’ jobs back, it would have been a three-year legal battle and we might not have won because the National Labor Relations Board is so hostile to workers now,” said the union’s Anderson.

Anderson also said that, if the Armour plants remained without union representation during that time, the entire wage structure in the meatpacking industry would be threatened, “affecting tens of thousands of people.” He stressed that it had been a tough choice for the international but said the union had to make a decision that it felt would do the most good for the most people.

Bell said he was stunned by the union’s decision. “I had been a member of the grievance committee. I thought the union was a good thing. We wouldn’t have been making the wages we were if we hadn’t had the union. But the union didn’t do a damn thing. That’s when I decided to hire a lawyer,” Bell said.

Armed with workers’ complaints about ConAgra, lawyers in three cities--including David Rosenfeld, who represented the Food and Commercial Workers local in South San Francisco--filed charges with the NLRB in the first half of 1984. Rosenfeld contends that ConAgra unlawfully retaliated against union members for voting down the concessions contract. He characterized the vote as “concerted union activity which is protected under the National Labor Relations Act.”

The workers’ charges were referred to the NLRB’s division of advice, which advises the board’s general counsel on whether a complaint should be filed in a complicated case.

The division of advice then requested that board field offices investigate the charges. The investigations are nearly completed, and NLRB lawyers currently are sifting through the evidence, according to Joseph Frankel, an NLRB staff attorney.

ConAgra officials have told the board that they did not discriminate against the former Armour workers. But neither a ConAgra public relations man nor two lawyers representing the company would discuss its position in detail.

In most NLRB cases, board sources said, the recommendation of the division of advice to the board’s general counsel about whether to file a complaint would be followed almost routinely. But in a case this sensitive, they said, the recommendation would be thoroughly reviewed by General Counsel Rosemary Collyer, an appointee of President Reagan.

Meanwhile, as the NLRB case developed, the union attempted to organize the new workers at several Armour plants.

But this effort has been unsuccessful, apparently because the company has told workers that the union is secretly trying to reinstate the old work force.

A leaflet distributed in Mason City, Iowa, on June 21 asked: “Has the union had the guts and honesty to tell you how, in San Francisco, it has filed a lawsuit in federal district court and unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board in order to force Armour Foods and ConAgra into firing the ‘new’ workforce--you--and rehiring the ‘old’ workforce?”

The leaflet added: “The UFCW will never tell you that it’s trying to reinstate the old workforce--Why?--because the union knows that if it tells you this, you’ll never join a union (and pay it money) that’s trying to get you kicked out on your rear.”

Donna Cost, a UFCW business agent and a former Armour worker in Portland, Ore., said an organizing drive at her plant was going well until the company handed out a similar leaflet there. “They said we were lying to the people,” Cost said. “We never got the people back.”

Anderson said the situation was particularly frustrating because the company was able to use the pending hiring-discrimination case against the union even though the international had not filed the case. Anderson also noted that, even if the NLRB chooses to take action against ConAgra, the agency might only seek redress at the local level in plants where workers brought complaints. This would not affect other plants where complaints have not been brought and where the union has concentrated its current organizing efforts. (There has been no organizing at the plants where former workers filed charges with the board because that would represent a conflict of interest, according to Ray Robinson, a union business agent in South San Francisco.)

Meanwhile, other meatpackers have tried to pressure UFCW workers to take further concessions, claiming that ConAgra’s low wages put them at a competitive disadvantage, Anderson said.

“We really ended up with the worst of both worlds,” he said.