UAW Local 677 workers at AmeriCold find
Time is on their side
The song says it’s funny how time slips away, but nobody in UAW Local 677 was laughing. When the company imposed new production standards on workers at AmeriCold in Fogelsville, Pa., in summer 2006, it seemed that nobody could work fast enough.
Then the suspensions started.
Joe Groller, the unit shop chair, was incredulous. “I was watching some of the best people in the plant being disciplined, so I knew it wasn’t possible to meet these numbers. But I was not able to verify it,” he said.
“The best guys we had were being disciplined. That alone made me know something was wrong.”
Groller was right, and assessments by UAW time study experts verified his suspicions, but meanwhile there were 11 suspensions and two firings.
It all happened so fast.
Groller was told by company officials in July 2006 that new production standards would be implemented the next week.
“Suddenly we were training and trying to get people up to speed,” he said.
The stress on workers was palpable.
“People were scared of losing their jobs. We were working so fast trying to make the numbers that it got unsafe,” said Yaser Richan, a 10-year AmeriCold worker who was among those suspended.
Groller acknowledged there was a marked increase in accidents in September and October. “We had ankle injuries, back injuries. We had to do things at such a fast pace we were hitting each other on forklifts,” he said.
Through it all Groller and Local 677 President Carl Breininger (who has since retired) were talking to the company, trying to make officials see it was impossible to make the numbers, but AmeriCold stood by the standards recommended by Tom Zosel Associates (TZA), based in Long Grove, Ill. It bills itself as “the industry’s leading provider of solutions in distribution, including warehousing and transportation.”
AmeriCold is the largest provider of temperature-controlled food distribution services in the United States. Among its 100 warehouses is the one in Fogelsville, just outside Allentown, where Local 677 members store and distribute frozen foods and pharmaceutical products for major corporations, and ice for FEMA.
TZA came up with times for how long it should take a worker to drive a forklift from point A to point B. “But the standards didn’t take into account things like if you needed to go to the second level of the rack instead of the first. TZA didn’t leave time for that,” Groller said.
Local 677 in southeast Pennsylvania is an amalgamated local union with 2,300 members. Union members work at Mack Trucks Inc. in Harrisburg and in Allentown (where Mack’s international headquarters is right across the street from the union hall) and for the township of Lower Saucon.
And 250 of them work at AmeriCold, where they were furiously trying to resolve the situation.
The union kept talking to the company and tried other things as well.
Region 9 Director Joe Ashton went to New York to meet with board members of Yucaipa Companies, one of the biggest investors in AmeriCold. The Los Angeles-based holding company invests heavily in the supermarket industry and has former President Bill Clinton as one of its advisers.
The union also brought in OSHA that November and learned, among other things, that TZA used average numbers on forklift speeds and some of the lifts being used in Fogelsville simply couldn’t go that fast.
“That was the first time some of the numbers were adjusted,” Groller said. “Then the International came in.”
Vice President Bob King, who directs the UAW’s Competitive Shop/IPS Department, arranged for the union to conduct its own time study.
Trailing behind workers with a stopwatch in different sections of the warehouse for three days, a union-trained efficiency expert determined the numbers set by TZA were 30 percent too high.
TZA’s figures generally were based on products being at ground level, so when they were four high and two deep – four levels high and two racks deep – it obviously took longer. At the end of each day the company prints out a list of times. Its numbers matched those collected by the union. The difference was AmeriCold’s “expected” times, which had no relationship to the actual figures.
UAW time study experts went back two months later for another round of detailed observation. Through it all there were more suspensions “and the company kept hammering at us,” Groller said.
The first firing was in September “and when they chose me, it shocked everybody because I’d been here a long time,” said Bobby Oliver, a 21-year AmeriCold worker.
“From the beginning I felt I was wrongfully fired,” he said. “Some people had numbers below mine and they weren’t fired; they (the company) stopped at suspension. And we knew all the numbers because they posted sheets of everyone’s times.”
It’s not that he wanted someone else to be discharged instead; he just couldn’t make sense of it. Nobody else could either.
“It’s like they were handpicking people to suspend,” said Richan, 35. “They always changed things. One guy was suspended for three days. When he came back they fired him. They suspended somebody for not making their numbers, but somebody else might be lower and they wouldn’t be disciplined.”
There’s a five-step procedure for discipline: oral warning, first written warning, second written warning, three-day suspension and discharge.
Richan was written up because the company said he was taking too long for a job. “I ran out of rack space and needed to make room.
“For instance, you might need to make room for 16 pallets and a rack might have only five pallets, so you move those five somewhere else to make room for the 16. While you’re doing that you aren’t scanning, so they think you aren’t doing anything.”
Groller went with Richan to meet with the company. “They called the foreman in and he told them what I was doing so they threw it out.”
Then the next week he was written up again for the same thing and was called in for another meeting. “I told Joe I just wanted it over with. I was sick of dealing with it. They were going to suspend me no matter what.”
The company suspended him for three days in November.
Bobby Oliver’s co-workers rib him about his “six-month vacation,” but it’s all in jest because it was anything but.
He was fired Sept. 6, two days after Labor Day.
“It was stressful,” he says in a low voice.
“My wife got hurt in a hit-and-run accident right after I got fired so she was out of work too.”
Oliver, 62, is a musician in his off time, playing guitar and bass and doing a little singing with R&B groups in the area. He did a lot of that after September. “The music kept me going.”
It also brought in a little money but not enough. So Bobby and Kim Oliver were thinking about filing for bankruptcy.
He knew his firing was wrong, but as time went on “I had doubts about reinstatement the further away it got.”
Oliver was gone but not forgotten.
The union’s efforts on his behalf – and that of another worker discharged several months after Oliver and the 11 suspended workers – continued.
A meeting was convened in March, for TZA engineers, AmeriCold officials and UAW representatives. They all went to the floor to do observations. Their numbers matched those of the union.
At that meeting, “the company’s regional vice president said he’d do the right thing,” according to Groller. Another person at the meeting quoted a TZA officer saying “it blows me away,” referring to how off-base the standards were.
Oliver was reinstated in March, one month before his arbitration hearing. He and the other disciplined workers received back pay. (The other fired worker has since left AmeriCold.)
The trauma didn’t drop away quickly. “I still felt like a target when I got back,” said Oliver, “but I’m more comfortable now.”
Groller said the company has backed off on standards, though it is trying out a new program at one of its North Carolina facilities which could be brought to Fogelsville.
“Standards are designed to improve productivity and make workers accountable,” said Region 9 Director Ashton. “We are not against the concept, we just want it to be fair.”
Groller echoed that sentiment and added, “Hopefully next time it will start out differently, with everyone on board.”
