THE UNION LABEL

The 2nd Most Hated Non-Union Company

Posted on September 4, 2007 at 2:36 pm by Chuck Muth

As everyone knows, Big Labor has it in for Wal-Mart big time. Everyone knows it because Wal-Mart is such a high-profile retail operation that everyone hates…except the millions of people who shop and work there. But most people probably don’t know much about what arguably is the second most hated non-union company in America, Cintas. Here’s some background on this company which is providing a huge number of well-paid jobs to a huge number of unskilled workers and which is under constant union assault…

Drive to unionize Cintas struggling for traction
By Greg Paeth
Cincinatti Post staff reporter

As it is virtually everywhere in the United States, Labor Day is a paid holiday at Cintas, the company whose core business is providing workplace uniforms.

But that doesn’t mean the company has a deep commitment to organized labor.

For more than four years, the largest uniform supplier in the country, based in Mason, Ohio, and its 34,000 employees have been the target of a national organizing campaign by one of the nation’s largest unions. So far, the union has had little success organizing any of the 412 Cintas plants in the United States and Canada.

The union has used safety issues to highlight its effort, claiming Cintas workers have to cope with unsafe working conditions, low wages, discrimination, a paucity of benefits, and an atmosphere that discourages employees from talking openly about the company - especially when the discussion focuses on unions.

St. Louis labor and employment attorney George Lenard has said Cintas is a company “American unions demonize almost as much as Wal-Mart.”

But Cintas management counters that company workers don’t want a union, and the effort is being foisted on them by a union seeking to swell its membership.

“Our focus is on being a successful company and an employer of choice and to respect people’s choices, and I think people may have made their choice,” Cintas spokesman Wade Gates said..

“We’ve stated our position very plainly and very forthrightly to everyone of our appreciation of the freedoms that people have under the law and the right to make their own choices.”

He called the effort “a failed campaign, in that after hearing all sides, we haven’t had any employees who have chosen to unionize.”

One of the obstacles to the organizing drive may be that it is perceived as driven from “top down” - the union coming in to organize - rather than “bottom up,” with the workers themselves turning to the union for help, Lenard said.

Two accidents and a U.S. District Court decision earlier this year have fueled union criticism of Cintas and prompted a federal investigation of job safety by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.

Eleazar Torres-Gomez, 46, was killed in a Tulsa Cintas plant in March when he fell into an industrial dryer while trying to pull laundry that had snagged on a conveyor that fed wet clothing into the drying equipment.

Last month the Occupational Health and Safety Administration proposed a $2.78 million fine - the largest in the agency’s history for a service sector violation - after concluding that management disregarded rules that could have prevented the death.

OSHA spokeswoman Sharon Worthy said Friday Cintas has filed notice that it will contest the Tulsa fine as well as a proposed $117,500 fine for seven violations at its facility in Columbus. The next step in the process to resolve the citations calls for the company and the agency to sit down and discuss abatement of the safety hazards, Worthy said.

Torres-Gomez was killed about two weeks after a Cintas worker in Yakima, Wash., had his left arm shattered and yanked from the shoulder socket when it became entangled with coveralls that were hanging over the side of an operating industrial washer. In that case, a Washington State agency fined the company $13,650 for four serious safety violations, said Elaine Fischer, a spokeswoman for the Washington Industrial Safety and Health Administration.

Cintas has appealed the fine, she said.

In March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that Cintas’ handbook violated employees’ rights by, in effect, prohibiting them from talking about working conditions with anyone outside of the company.

It’s pretty well-known that Cintas officials “do not want their employees to have collective bargaining,” said Douglas E. Sizemore, executive secretary/treasurer of the Cincinnati AFL-CIO Labor Council.

One piece of federal legislation that is designed to make union organizing easier - and a measure opposed by Cintas - is expected to be addressed today by union speakers at the council’s annual Labor Day picnic at Coney Island.

“The Employee Free Choice Act is still a very important issue with us along with health care,” said Douglas E. Sizemore, executive secretary/treasurer of the council.

The labor-supported bill, which passed the House in March but was killed in the Senate through a procedural maneuver, is designed to make it easier to join unions by signing authorization cards that are, in effect, a ballot on whether a union can represent workers in a facility.

The current process calls for an in-house election that would be monitored by the National Labor Relations Board.

Cintas favors the existing law.

“We respect the democratic secret ballot process and think that it is most fair process in which people can make an important decision like this free from influence or even intimidation by anybody,” said Cintas spokesman Gates.

Two Cintas workers who are involved in union organizing for Unite Here, which used to be known as the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, said the company has been adept at countering unionization.

“One group is very interested (in joining a union) and another group is very afraid,” Emelina Tobar, a 16-year Cintas employee, said through an interpreter provided by the union.

“They tell us the union is not good - that the union is only there to take our money,” said Tobar, 55, a native of Mexico who works at a Cintas plant in Vista, Calif.

Tobar said she earns $12.48 an hour, and has health care, dental care, a life insurance policy, profit sharing and a 401K savings plan through the company. She said workers have been told that they will lose their 401K if they unionize.

On the other side of the U.S., Anna Calles, who has worked for Cintas at a plant in Charlotte, N.C., for eight years, said through another interpreter that some employees want to organize while others have “backed down because of intimidation” by management.

“The company is strong and big and worked hard to keep the union out. They said other companies closed (after the union came in), and it’s hard to continue organizing,” said Calles, who is from El Salvador.

She said she earns $9.80 an hour today after starting out at $7.15. Calles said she opted not to get health insurance through the company because it’s expensive.

Gates said wages vary from location to location. “We’ve always focused on making sure that the wages and salaries are dictated by each marketplace, and we provide very attractive benefits. For example, we have 12 different options for health care starting at a dollar a day.”

The company has 500 union workers - all of them were members before the current organizing efforts were started - scattered among its North American operations, Gates said.

He said non-union employees are rewarded with Cintas shares once they’ve been with the company for at least a year. Union employees don’t get shares of stock because their compensation is determined by their collective bargaining agreements, he said.

Unite Here has made some progress since launching its Cintas campaign in early 2003, organizing one plant.

A majority of workers at a Cintas facility in Longueuil, Quebec, have signed authorization cards that would set the stage for representation by United Here. Although the cards were signed last December, the process, which affects about 50 workers, has not been finalized.

Cintas spokesman Gates said the company hasn’t heard much recently from the union, and he talked about the campaign in the past tense, as if it were over.

Unite spokesman Matt Painter said the union continues to work at the individual plant level as well as the national level in an effort to reach an agreement that would cover every Cintas facility.

“We hope to help workers all over the country win a voice on the job,” said Painter, who didn’t see any great significance in the union’s inability to organize individual plants. “Uniform Justice (the union’s name for the campaign) isn’t about one plant. It’s about changing things nationally.”

In July, Cintas reported revenues of $3.7 billion and profits of $334 million for the fiscal year that ended May 31. The company said its revenue and profits have now grown for 38 consecutive years.

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