Meatpackers Throw ‘Dodger Dogs’ Producer a Strike

Nearly 1,000 Los Angeles meatpackers struck the West Coast’s largest pork processing plant Tuesday, halting the slaughter of 5,000 hogs that were to be used to make Farmer John products, including the hot dogs sold at Dodger Stadium.

Employees of Clougherty Packing Co., Farmer John’s parent company, walked off the job at 12:01 a.m. and started picketing the Vernon plant.

The strike stems from union objections to the company’s latest wage increase offer and management’s attempt to change medical and pension plans. Negotiations broke off last week and no new talks have been scheduled, according to spokesmen for both sides.

Don Holeman, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 274, said the strike will result in a shortage of the Dodger Dogs and Spicy Dogs made by Farmer John for sale at Dodger baseball games. However, a spokesman for Clougherty disagreed.

“We’ll have enough Dodger Dogs to take them (the Dodgers) through, even if they’re in a seven-game World Series,” said Tom Clougherty, the company’s sales manager.

The Dodgers have six regular season home games remaining and are regarded as likely to enter the playoffs next week and possibly reach the World Series.

For the next few days, Clougherty said, the company will function on a limited basis, using supervisors and any union employees who decide to cross picket lines. He said the company might start hiring replacements for its regular work force by the end of the week to attempt to bring production up to normal.

Clougherty said the company delivered 30,000 Dodger Dogs, an extra-long hot dog, to Dodger Stadium Tuesday, along with 5,000 Spicy Dogs, an all-beef weiner served on a bun laced with onions.

Tom Arthur, president of Arthur Food Services, Dodger Stadium’s concessionaire, said he believes that Clougherty can meet the stadium’s needs.

“We’re going to go on as normal and sell Farmer John hot dogs,” he said.

He declined to say how many hot dogs are sold at each game, but other sources said that as many as 50,000 are consumed on nights when the stadium is filled.

A union source said employees had refused to work overtime in recent weeks in an attempt to keep the company from building up large reserves of hot dogs.

Additionally, the union began passing out handbills at Dodger Stadium Tuesday night, urging patrons not to buy hot dogs made by Farmer John. Holeman said the union will start demonstrating at supermarkets on Friday, urging a boycott of Farmer John products, which also include ham and bacon.

To help its cause, the union has retained Ross Communications & Management, a Sacramento-based political consulting firm, to launch a direct-mail campaign exhorting consumers to shun Farmer John goods. Ross’s direct-mail campaign is credited with helping the United Farm Workers Union convince some supermarket chains to stop selling non-union grapes.

Ninety-three percent of the Food and Commercial Workers union members voting in mid-September authorized leaders to call a strike and reaffirmed that position Saturday.

Chuck Marchese, a Local 274 business agent, said the union objects to Clougherty’s effort to withdraw from medical and pension plans that are jointly administered by the union and management and start its own.

“People have more protection with a jointly administered plan,” Marchese said. “If the company controls and dominates the plan, it’s subject to any change the company may implement.”

However, Thomas Burke, Clougherty Packing’s lawyer, said changing the plans would save the company money on administrative costs and still provide good benefits to the employees.

“We offered a medical plan with substantially better benefits,” he added.

The union and the company also are at loggerheads over wage proposals. In October, 1982, Local 274 agreed to a two-tier wage system. Butchers already employed on that date agreed to a three-year wage freeze at $9.72 an hour. Workers hired afterward to do the same work receive $5 an hour.

Burke said the company has offered veteran employees a one-time-only 25-cents-an-hour increase effective this month. He said the company has offered the new employees (hired since Oct. 1, 1982) 50 cents an hour more, effective this month, and a 25-cents-an-hour increase in each of the following two years. The company has also proposed a third salary tier for workers hired from today on.

Marchese said the union proposed that the veteran workers receive a 75-cent-an-hour increase for each of the next three years and that the post-October, 1982, hires be given immediate wage parity with the people hired earlier. Under the contract the union signed in 1982 it would take nine years for new employees to reach salary parity with the veterans.

Holeman said he expects a long strike. He said that Teamsters Local 63, which transports Clougherty’s products, has said it will honor the Food and Commercial Workers’ picket lines, but a company spokesman said some drivers had crossed the lines Tuesday.