Safeway exec's joke backfires, brings apology

Christopher Minglana holds a sign in support of Ryan Young, a butcher at a Monterey County Safeway, outside the store in Del Rey Oaks, Calif. on Sunday May 20, 2012. Young was suspended without pay after he stopped a customer from hitting his pregnant girlfriend in the store last month. (AP Photo/ Monterey County Herald, David Royal) less Christopher Minglana holds a sign in support of Ryan Young, a butcher at a Monterey County Safeway, outside the store in Del Rey Oaks, Calif. on Sunday May 20, 2012. Young was suspended without pay after he ... more Photo: David Royal, Associated Press Photo: David Royal, Associated Press Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Safeway exec's joke backfires, brings apology 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Safeway has enough on its plate - market share under siege, tough union negotiations, rumors of a takeover - without a senior executive putting his foot halfway down his throat, at its annual shareholders' meeting no less.

Vice President and General Counsel Robert Gordon thought he was cracking wise with a lame joke involving the Secret Service, President Obama and two Arkansas razorback hogs deemed an "excellent trade" for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco. You can hear the joke here.

Among the less-than-laugh-out-loud-responses was a letter from members of the Bay Area congressional delegation, led by Rep. George Miller, D-Martinez, whose district includes the Pleasanton company. It demanded an apology to Pelosi and Clinton, among other "corrective steps," for the "shocking lack of respect, not only for two of the most important and respected people in our country but for all women."

As of Monday, one week after the shareholders' meeting, the only corrective action was a brief statement from Gordon "sincerely apologiz(ing) if the opening comments I made at the recent annual stockholders meeting offended anyone."

Miller's chief of staff, Daniel Weiss, was not impressed. "It should go without saying that it is not an apology if you use the word 'if' in it," he said. After contacting Safeway, I was told Gordon "has now written a letter of apology directly to Secretary Clinton and Leader Pelosi," with a similar letter of apology from CEO Steve Burd, both mailed Tuesday.

"We also contacted the members of Congress who wrote to us on this matter," said Brian Dowling, a Safeway spokesman, who did not divulge the contents of the letters.

MBA BY THE BAY: See how an MBA could change your life with SFGATE's interactive directory of Bay Area programs.

Bravery unrewarded: Over at Change.org, there are 180,000 signatories on a petition to reinstate a Safeway meat clerk at the company's store in Del Rey Oaks (Monterey County), who, by all accounts, including that of the town's police chief, heroically intervened to stop a customer from beating up his pregnant girlfriend.

The incident occurred April 21. Friday, the perpetrator was sentenced to three years' probation after pleading no contest to misdemeanor battery. Meanwhile, the Safeway employee, Ryan Young, has been without a job and without pay for more than a month.

"We've heard from a lot of customers who don't feel Mr. Young should have been suspended," Teena Massingill, a Safeway spokeswoman, told the Monterey Herald on Monday. "We understand this reaction," she said, but added that video footage of the incident taken by the store's security camera "appears to reveal actions we cannot condone."

That probably refers to Young making physical contact with the perpetrator, first with a push - after telling him, without success, to stop hitting his girlfriend - then a punch after the perpetrator turned on him, according to what Police Chief Ron Langford said he saw on the tapes, backed up by Young's statement and eyewitness accounts.

"You can't condemn this man for what he did," Langford told the Monterey Herald.

However, such contact, no matter how justified, might have contravened Safeway's zero tolerance policy on workplace violence, said Mike Henneberry, communications director of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5, which has filed a grievance on Young's behalf. "Still, as far as I know, (Young) did the right thing. He deserves to be taken back, with back pay."

Del Rey Oaks Mayor Jerry Edelen agrees, calling Safeway's action "a gross miscarriage of justice" in a letter to the Herald.

Cognizant of the blowback perhaps, company executives were meeting with Young and representatives of Local 5 Tuesday afternoon. "I'd take this as a positive development," said Henneberry.

"We felt it was important to understand this incident as fully as possible and to finish a thorough investigation before reaching a final decision," said Dowling. "This was, after all, a physical confrontation in one of our stores between an employee and a customer. If we're ever going to be careful and deliberate about anything, it would be this."

Yes, but for over a month, while the employee - whose wife is also pregnant, by the way - is left out in the cold?

Last call: Apropos the Matier & Ross item in Wednesday's Chronicle on the Gold Dust Lounge finally crying uncle, this from Karin Flood, executive director of the Union Square Business Improvement District, in an e-mail:

"Last call will be tomorrow evening. They will move out in three days. The (regular) band will continue to play at Lefty O'Doul's in the interim period. They will reopen in Fisherman's Wharf in four months."

Prompting the bar's proprietors' decision to move on, I'm told, after a five-month campaign against the eviction notice they had been served, was a series of recent court decisions in favor of the Handlery family, which owns the premises.