May, 1999

Sears workers win

by Michael Flug

Olive Branch, Miss.- On March 24, workers at Focus Distribution, Inc. voted 114 to 90 to be represented by IUE/Furniture Workers Local 282. The stunning result was the first election victory by any union in this booming and notoriously anti-union suburb of Memphis. Focus Distribution is a warehouse and shipping operation for Sears appliances. Several past union drives, including a recent one by the Teamsters, had failed.

In January, a Black forklift driver called Local 282 and asked for union pledge cards. He had heard that Local 282 was a militant Black-led union which didn't make deals behind workers' backs. Before Local 282 staff could even get involved, workers had formed their own shop committee and signed up enough co-workers to petition for an election. "The organizing was done so carefully," Local 282 vice-president Ida Leachman told N&L, "that the company didn't even know there was a union campaign until the election petition was filed on Feb. 8."

The company fought back with anti-union flyers, meetings and videos. "There are about 260 workers in the warehouse, mostly Black men, but with white workers and women too," Leachman said. Workers said that the attendance policy was manipulated to avoid giving anyone raises, but what made them angriest was the way management talked down to them like children.

The shop committee really ran the union campaign. When the company showed the first anti-union video, claiming that the union would be coming to workers' homes to intimidate them, the workers put out a leaflet the next day saying "This is your campaign. Nobody will be coming to your door. It's your decision."

A white worker named Thomas Langston researched the internet for information on the union, and countered management propaganda with the facts, even putting out his own leaflets. Langston and other workers were passing out leaflets in the company parking lot and the company called the sheriff. They grabbed Langston and said that because he was passing out leaflets on his own time, he was trespassing on company property. After they took him to jail, the company withdrew the trespassing charge, but the state refused to drop a charge of failing to obey a direct order from a police officer.

Leachman is thrilled that a hole has been punched in Olive Branch's anti-union wall. "The company hoped that the arrest would frighten off the workers and kill the union campaign, but it went the other way."

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