Stella D’Oro Workers Win One

By Michael Hirsch

Nearly year-long Bronx bakery strike ends in victory, even as management threatens to close plant

Sometimes David does beat Goliath. Or lets the giant know it’s been in a fight. On strike and locked out for more than 11 months, 134  Bronx, N.Y. bakery workers—almost all new immigrants from Latin America—employed at the last Stella D’Oro bakery in the nation won a June 30 Administrative Law Judge decision forcing management to call them back to work at their previous salaries and benefit scale. The fight’s not over, though, as they return without a new contract and in the face of a corporate threat to close the plant within 90 days and relocate it, presumably out of state.

In announcing the projected closing, company managers cried poor-mouth, blaming the national recession for an inability to offer the same level of wages and benefits it provided in better times.

The newly returned strikers are mulling over their possibilities, ranging from a second NLRB challenge and locating a new buyer to organizing a workers cooperative. And the lesson of last year’s successful Chicago window-plant occupation runs through their minds, as it does to management and local police.

Their union, Local 50 of the 100,000 member Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, had called the strike when new company management walked out of negotiations on Aug. 13, claiming an impasse over its demands  for a 28 percent pay cut, elimination of sick days, a week of vacation time and markedly jacked-up contributions to health premiums.

Strikers, immediately locked out and replaced by scabs, picketed daily, asking supporters to boycott all Stella D’Oro products until a new contract was signed. Their slogan: “No Contract, No Cookies.”

In the interim, the workers made do on some $100 in weekly strike benefits from the union, along with state unemployment benefits.

The judge’s decision affirms an earlier NLRB ruling that the employer, the Greenwich, Conn.-based private equity firm Brynwood Partners, bargained in bad faith by prematurely claiming a bargaining impasse, failing to provide the union with financial records to which it was legally entitled and that presuming would justify its claims,  and illegally refused the workers’ May 6 offer to return to work. It also banned the company from hiring permanent replacement workers, and the administrative judge ordered the company to reinstate each striker with back pay and interest from May 6.

This isn’t the Stella D’Oro of old, the “Gold Star” family business whose jingle encouraged customers to “eat and eat and eat and never miss a single treat.” It was the workers who missed a lot of treats from the predatory investor-owners, whose cookie and biscuit plant Brynwood bought from Kraft Foods in 2006 and who moved immediately to successfully break the drivers’ union at the plant. Hendrik Hartong Jr., its senior managing partner and Brynwood founder, is a former Brinks Company officer and Pittston Coal CEO.

The new owners were only the latest in a series of daisy-chain buyout players, with Kraft  having swallowed Nabisco  in 1992, which itself had taken over from  the company’s 1930s immigrant founders.

“They wanted to take us back to the dark ages,” said shop steward and veteran maintenance mechanic Mike Filippou, a hulking man who except for his smile and obvious warmth could be mistaken for the heavy in a professional wrestling match.

Union lawyer Louis Nikolaidis called the closing threat a new stage in the fight.

“Last year, they told us upfront, because we’re a hedge fund, our investors expect a higher rate of return, and your members should expect a wage cut.”

“We do not intend for this to be the final say,” local President Joyce Alston said.

“We intend to do everything in our legal ability to make sure this factory does not close. We were aware that this might be a tactic they would use and we had prepared our members for it. We believe this is retaliation, pure and simple. It’s not right for a company to respond to a legal decision by deciding to shut down.”

Alston said the union  would shortly file retaliation charges against the company with the NLRB.

Key to its success so far was a local strike support committee, which employed a panoply of left and union supporters, including DSA members, and sizable financial contributions from the city Central Labor Council and the United Federation of Teachers, among others.  Mass demonstrations were held at the plant in the Kingsbridge section of  the Bronx, on upper Broadway in the shadow of one of the last elevated train tracks linking the Bronx with Manhattan. With energetic backing from  shop steward Filippou, the  committee also organized actions at Brynwood headquarters in southern Connecticut and at a nearby directors’ home.  But the two greatest successes were the solidarity of the strikers—not one crossed the picket line to work under the new take-back rules—and the incompetence of management in forcing the strike.

And David has plenty of shot left for his sling.

Michael Hirsch is a labor journalist and union staffer in New York City. A member of the national political committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, he is on the editorial boards of New Politics and Democratic Left.

Photos courtesy of Micah Landau. View more of his Stella D’Oro photos on Flickr.