“We had a meet­ing to talk about our con­tract, which comes up for renew­al in May, but they walked in and hand­ed us a WARN notice,” announc­ing that most union truck dri­vers will lose their jobs Decem­ber 6, says Phil Giles, Vice Pres­i­dent of Wash­ing­ton-based Team­sters Local 639 . (A WARN notice is a require­ment of the WARN Act , which requires large com­pa­nies to warn work­ers in advance of plant clo­sures and mass fir­ings.) ​“That was the first we heard of it.”

The two ware­hous­es are locat­ed in the Mary­land sub­urbs of Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and cur­rent­ly employ about 700 work­ers, most of them rep­re­sent­ed by the Team­sters. The union mem­bers were noti­fied last week that their jobs will be elim­i­nat­ed when the ware­hous­es are closed in ear­ly Decem­ber, labor sources say, with most of the jobs trans­ferred to non-union ware­hous­es else­where in Mary­land and Pennsylvania.

Team­ster mem­bers and their sup­port­ers are mobi­liz­ing to block a union bust­ing effort at two huge ware­hous­es con­trolled by the Safe­way super­mar­ket chain, one of sev­er­al food retail­ers recent­ly com­bined into nation­al gro­cery store colos­sus by Wall Street pri­vate equi­ty firm Cer­berus Cap­i­tal .

The meet­ing was with offi­cials of Colling­ton Ser­vices, a sub­sidiary of C&S Whole­sale Gro­cers, which bills itself as the largest whole­sale gro­cery dis­trib­u­tor in the Unit­ed States. C&S has had a con­tract with Safe­way for the last 15 years to oper­ate the ware­hous­es that sup­ply the chain’s super­mar­kets in Mary­land, Vir­ginia and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia, Giles says, with Safe­way in turn owned by Cer­berus Cap­i­tal-con­trolled Albert­sons Com­pa­nies Inc.

“Frankly, I am shocked that Safe­way would send — with no pri­or dis­cus­sion — a 60-day WARN notice to Team­sters mem­bers and their local unions,” Team­sters Pres­i­dent James Hof­fa stat­ed in an Oct. 9 open let­ter to Albert­sons CEO Robert Miller. C&S, Hof­fa con­tin­ued, is ​“a gro­cery com­pa­ny with a noto­ri­ous record of cast­ing thou­sands of work­ers aside, destroy­ing decent jobs and leav­ing tax­pay­ers and com­mu­ni­ties with the task of pick­ing up the pieces and clean­ing up the eco­nom­ic fallout.”

As report­ed last year at In These Times, C&S has been aggres­sive­ly expand­ing its oper­a­tions, often at the expense of Team­ster mem­bers. It has become almost com­mon­place for C&S to acquire con­trol of Team­ster-con­tract­ed ware­hous­es, trans­fer the ship­ping work to oth­er C&S non-union sub­sidiaries, and then get rid of the union­ized work­ers, one Team­ster offi­cial said. The union esti­mates it has lost about 4,500 jobs from such C&S union bust­ing since 2001.

Last year, for exam­ple, C&S acquired Asso­ci­at­ed Whole­salers Inc. (AWI), a Penn­syl­va­nia com­pa­ny that employed about 1,100 Team­ster mem­bers. Sev­en months after the acqui­si­tion was com­plete, it closed three of the company’s New Jer­sey ware­hous­es with the loss of about 400 jobs. And Team­sters employ­ment has been slashed by more than half at AWI’s largest remain­ing Penn­syl­va­nia ware­house, accord­ing to Local 429 Busi­ness Agent Bill Geise. ​“It’s the worst I’ve seen in 25 years,” of rep­re­sent­ing union mem­bers at AWI, Geise tells In These Times. ​“They (C&S) just don’t care.”

The imme­di­ate goal for the Team­sters in the new Safeway/C&S case is to con­vince Safeway/​Albertsons to agree to a 180-day mora­to­ri­um on any clo­sures, accord­ing to the Hof­fa let­ter. The Team­ster leader pro­pos­es the com­pa­ny meet with the union and with Mary­land local and state eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment offi­cials to nego­ti­ate a plan to save the jobs. Also involved would be the Inter­na­tion­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Machin­ists and the Inter­na­tion­al Union of Oper­at­ing Engi­neers, both of which rep­re­sent small­er units of work­ers at the ware­hous­es, Local 639’s Giles says.

The unions are also appeal­ing to elect­ed offi­cials to get involved. Mary­land State Sen­a­tor C. Antho­ny Muse is orga­niz­ing a demon­stra­tion in sup­port of the work­ers for Octo­ber 16, and oth­er pub­lic offi­cials are being recruit­ed by the unions, accord­ing to Giles. Elect­ed offi­cials have sup­port­ed finan­cial incen­tives for Safe­way to save local jobs in the past, accord­ing to Giles, so the union believes that such incen­tives should be part of a nego­ti­a­tion to keep the ware­hous­es open.

Hof­fa cit­ed these past incen­tives, as well as con­tract con­ces­sions made by the Team­sters in the past, in his open letter.

In fact, in the late 1990s, coop­er­a­tion between Safe­way, state and coun­ty elect­ed offi­cial, and the Team­sters helped bring this brand-new facil­i­ty to…Maryland. Safe­way received $2 mil­lion dol­lars from Mary­land tax­pay­ers for build­ing the facil­i­ty and obtained con­ces­sions from its employ­ees over the last 15 years to defray the cost of build­ing this $91 mil­lion state-of-the-art dis­tri­b­u­tion center… The very work­ers whose con­ces­sions helped pay for your suc­cess in Mary­land and who are now fac­ing unem­ploy­ment have not been told whether they’ll be offered jobs at oth­er loca­tions. Even worse, the clo­sure is planned to occur just 19 days before Christ­mas. This is shameful. Safe­way wasn’t always the kind of com­pa­ny that treat­ed local com­mu­ni­ties this way. Things have not been the same since the pri­vate equi­ty firm Cer­berus Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment bought Safeway.

Cer­berus appears to be at the root of the union bust­ing, Giles con­tin­ues. The New York-based financ­ing com­pa­ny acquired Albert­sons and Safe­way sep­a­rate­ly, and are now com­bin­ing the two for the pur­pose of mak­ing a pub­lic stock offer­ing that should be prof­itable for Cer­berus. Job cuts at Safe­way are part of increas­ing the prof­itabil­i­ty of the stock offer­ing, Giles says, and C&S Whole­sale is the mech­a­nism to imple­ment the cuts.

Accord­ing to the company’s web site, C&S is the largest whole­sale gro­cery dis­trib­u­tor in the Unit­ed States, based on rev­enue. Net sales were $25.9 bil­lion in 2014, mak­ing it one of the largest pri­vate­ly held com­pa­nies in the Unit­ed States, as ranked by Forbes mag­a­zine. C&S oper­ates in 15 states, with con­tracts with such well known retail­ers as Stop & Shop, Giant Food, BI-LO/Winn-Dix­ie, Great Atlantic & Pacif­ic Tea Co. (A&P), Safe­way and Target.

Accord­ing to the Safe­way web site, ​“our par­ent com­pa­ny, AB Acqui­si­tion LLC, and Safe­way com­plet­ed a merg­er [in Jan­u­ary 2015] that cre­at­ed one of the largest food and drug retail­ers in the coun­try, with over 2,200 stores in 33 states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia, and employ­ing approx­i­mate­ly 265,000 people.”