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So many businesses have lost family values
By Bill McClellan
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
09/07/2007
Bill McClellan
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Although there were parades on Monday and the grocery store workers ratified their new contract on Wednesday, don't be misled about the condition of organized labor. The world is changing, and not in a way beneficial to unions. Just ask Bob Triplett.
He's president of Teamsters Local 50 in Belleville. His union has been without a contract with Illinois Distributing Co. since May. IDC is the Anheuser-Busch distributor for most of St. Clair County and parts of Madison and Monroe counties.
A veteran labor guy like Triplett — he's been a Teamster for 26 years — will readily admit that there's nothing unusual about negotiations being tough and dragging on for several months. But Triplett also would tell you that the atmosphere has changed. Companies used to be more like families.
For instance, when Triplett got married, his best man was Tony Joynt, the president of IDC. Other Teamsters have similar stories about warm relationships with the Joynt family. Marc Archer, who is a second generation Teamster at IDC, said his father, Frank, was a good friend of the family, and family members visited him in the hospital before his death four years ago.
"Those days were different," Archer said.
I couldn't reach Joynt or IDC general manager Scott Givens, but this is not meant as some kind of screed against IDC. Ralston Purina used to celebrate Checker Days. Employees would gather in the auditorium and cheer while managers ate dog food.
The Post-Dispatch was family. Old-timers tell stories about new hires being invited to Joseph Pulitzer's house. All over town — all over the country — it was the same sort of thing. Companies promoted the idea of family. Companies valued stability in the work force.
That seems old-fashioned now. Quaint.
The family thing was a double-edged sword for unions. On one hand, why have a union if you're family? On the other hand, if you did have a union, the relationship between labor and management was often pretty good. When people stayed at one company forever, people were promoted from within, and that meant that management was filled with former union guys, and those former union guys did not think of the union as the enemy. Quite the contrary. They understood that the more the workers get, the more management gets.
All that has changed. Companies have become less interested in the concept of family, and more interested in the bottom line. Interested? Obsessed. But what the heck. Profits are the yardstick by which a company is measured.
I cannot look into the minds of the IDC bosses, but it would be easy to imagine that they paid attention to the labor problems at the Lohr Distributing Co. which handles Anheuser-Busch products in the city of St. Louis.
In May of 2005, the Teamsters struck Lohr after six months of negotiations failed to resolve differences over health care costs and pay. As is so often the case these days, the union was not asking for more. The company was offering less.
So the Teamsters struck. They were banking on community support. That hope did not seem unreasonable. St. Louis was once a union town. Beer is a blue-collar drink.
But the Teamsters got very little support. In the early days of the strike, a number of bars boycotted Anheuser-Busch products. As the weeks and then the months went by, the boycott fizzled. I remember wandering outside the baseball stadium on its inaugural opening day of 2006. Teamsters were on the sidewalks, trying to pass out leaflets urging the people to boycott Anheuser-Busch products. The baseball fans ignored them. In June of 2006, the replacement workers voted to decertify the union.
I imagine IDC management paid attention. I know the IDC Teamsters did.
Triplett said the company gave the union a final offer already. He has forwarded it to the International, which can either flatly reject it, or authorize Triplett to submit it to the union members for a vote. If that were to happen, Triplett said, he would recommend the contract be rejected. Under the current contract, top-scale workers made $22.60 an hour. The new contract replaces the hourly rate with a commission-based pay that Triplett said would amount to much less than workers make now.
But if it's rejected, what then? A strike could be disastrous. The workers know it. Many of them have worked for IDC for years. They remember when the world was a different place.
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