Jeff's Desk

Contract in Eugene!

Grocery, Meat, and CCK members in the Eugene/Springfield area now have a contract.  This has been a long, hard struggle, which started in February 2006.  The union office set in motion a plan to educate the membership on key bargaining aspects a year in advance of the contract expiration date in hopes that the membership would be better prepared for the uniqueness of bargaining.

For a year straight, members gathered once a month to learn important issues like; how pensions work, how the Health and Welfare Trust works, the importance of language in the contract, etc.  These meetings gave the membership the knowledge and ability to understand and talk with the management negotiators.  “There are so many aspects of negotiating a contract and it is important that we know the key terms and what things mean,” said Cindy Ferguson, committee member and Fred Meyer Meatcutter. What the committee and the membership were not expecting from the negotiations was the length of time it was going to take to get a deal.

The Eugene contracts expired in February 2007 and no one thought things would be easy.  In fact most of the committee were reasonable and expected things to take some time, but one after another contracts in Southern California, Tacoma, Seattle, Northern California, and all over the country settled.  Many members began feeling slighted by their employers because most of the areas that settled expired after Eugene.  Before we knew it the Holidays were upon us and knowing that we had already authorized a strike, members started talking about going on strike to get a contract.

A strike was unneeded, as in early January a tentative agreement was reached between the union and the employers. Nearly all of the over 40 takeaways that the employers came to the table with were now gone and after reviewing the details, the committee felt confident that the membership would vote to accept the contract.  On January 17, 2008 the membership did just that - voting overwhelmingly (100% CCK, 90% Grocery, and 90% Meat) to ratify the contract.  Some of the key selling points of the contract were;

• Working on Christmas on a voluntary basis only.
• No bonuses - hard money increases only.
• Adding more stability to the Health and Welfare plan.
• No HRA which would have resulted in huge deductible increases.

In Unionism,

Jeff McDonald
Secretary-Treasurer
UFCW Local 555

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