The Keene, New Hamp­shire-based C&S Whole­sale Grocers’s actions could prove to be an imme­di­ate threat to the liveli­hoods of about 1,100 Team­ster mem­bers in the Mid-Atlantic region, the lat­est in a series of dam­ag­ing anti-union maneu­vers by the com­pa­ny. The action also high­lights the grow­ing mar­ket pow­er of C&S, a low-pro­file com­pa­ny that has qui­et­ly grown into the nation’s largest ware­hous­ing corporation.

Lead­ers of the Inter­na­tion­al Broth­er­hood of Team­sters are mobi­liz­ing their forces in the wake of an unex­pect­ed attack by a noto­ri­ous­ly anti-union ware­hous­ing com­pa­ny look­ing to under­mine work­ers with back-room tac­tics in fed­er­al bank­rupt­cy court.

On Sept. 9, Asso­ci­at­ed Ware­hous­ing Inc. (AWI) of Robeso­nia, Penn­syl­va­nia, filed a Chap­ter 11 peti­tion in fed­er­al bank­rupt­cy court in Delaware. Any bank­rupt­cy is trou­bling, says Iain Gold, Direc­tor of Strate­gic Research for the Team­sters, because of the poten­tial for job loss, but the red flag for the union in the AWI case was that the com­pa­ny also announced it want­ed to sell its assets to C&S as quick­ly as pos­si­ble. The fates of the union con­tracts cov­er­ing 1,100 Team­ster truck dri­vers and ware­house work­ers — often on the chop­ping block in bank­rupt­cy fil­ings — were not mentioned.

“In bank­rupt­cy law, it’s a stacked deck. It’s designed to pro­tect cap­i­tal, not work­ers,” Gold says. ​“We are try­ing to get the bank­rupt­cy judge to con­sid­er fair­ness to the work­ers.” The union has faced this prob­lem many times, he says, very recent­ly in the Host­ess Twinkies fias­co, where about 5,000 Team­sters unex­pect­ed­ly lost their jobs.

Accord­ing to court doc­u­ments, AWI and its truck­ing sub­sidiaries oper­ate five ware­hous­es in Penn­syl­va­nia and New Jer­sey, employ­ing a total of 2,236 peo­ple. Its fleet of leased trucks and trail­ers sup­ply about 800 Mid-Atlantic retail stores with a huge array of food prod­ucts and oth­er items for sale to the gen­er­al pub­lic. The prin­ci­pal ware­hous­es are in Robeso­nia and York, Penn­syl­va­nia, and AWI sub­sidiary White Rose oper­ates three oth­er dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters in New Jer­sey. The com­pa­ny had about $2.2 bil­lion in annu­al rev­enues in 2013, but is suf­fer­ing declin­ing prof­itabil­i­ty, the court doc­u­ments state.

The deci­sion to enter bank­rupt­cy was made ear­li­er this year when an attempt to sell part of the com­pa­ny failed, stat­ed Dou­glas A. Booth, who is described in court doc­u­ments as AWI’s ​“chief restruc­tur­ing offi­cer.” The invest­ment banker Lazard Mid­dle Man­age­ment LLC was hired to find a buy­er for the White Rose sub­sidiary, accord­ing to Booth, but no deal was ever com­plet­ed. Instead, AWI nego­ti­at­ed a pro­posed sale of the entire com­pa­ny to C&S as part of a Chap­ter 11 bank­rupt­cy proceeding.

All of this activ­i­ty was famil­iar to some Team­sters, espe­cial­ly in New Jer­sey. Mem­o­ries of the region­al gro­cery chain A&P’s sep­a­rate Chap­ter 11 pro­ceed­ing from 2011 are still fresh there. Most press accounts at the time focused on the clos­ing of dozens of A&P super­mar­kets and the eco­nom­ic con­ces­sions forced on low-income gro­cery work­ers rep­re­sent­ed by the Unit­ed Food & Com­mer­cial Work­ers union.

But anoth­er ele­ment of the A&P bank­rupt­cy sto­ry was that C&S Whole­sale gained con­trol of an enor­mous ware­hous­ing com­plex court in Wood­bridge, New Jer­sey, that was an essen­tial link in the A&P sup­ply chain. A&P received bank­rupt­cy court per­mis­sion to ter­mi­nate its pre­vi­ous con­tract and sign a new one with C&S instead.

C&S prompt­ly fired about 1,000 Team­ster mem­bers and trans­ferred all the ware­hous­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion work to oth­er non-union sites that it controlled.

And that attack on Team­ster jobs was not an iso­lat­ed inci­dent, accord­ing to Gold. Also in 2011, gro­cery chain oper­a­tor in Ahold USA hired C&S to take over oper­a­tion of its union­ized ware­house in Jes­sup, Mary­land. C&S imme­di­ate­ly began wind­ing down oper­a­tions, trans­fer­ring the gro­cery han­dling work to non-union C&S facil­i­ties in near­by Penn­syl­va­nia. After about a year, the Jes­sup ware­house closed entire­ly, elim­i­nat­ing 400 Team­ster jobs.

The deal with Ahold was rep­re­sen­ta­tive of an indus­try-wide trend for large gro­cery retail­ers to out­source their ware­house oper­a­tions to third-par­ty oper­a­tors, Gold explains, and C&S has been rid­ing the out­sourc­ing wave to become the country’s largest ware­hous­ing com­pa­ny. A sig­nif­i­cant part of that growth has come at the expense of Team­ster union mem­ber­ship, with an esti­mat­ed 4,000 mem­bers los­ing their jobs since 2001 after C&S took over.

C&S also has an alleged track record of abuse of non-union work­ers. Attor­ney Steve Wit­tels of the Armonk, New York-based Wit­tels Law Group, tells Work­ing In These Times that he brought a class action law­suit against C&S in 2006 based on abus­es of the over­time pay pro­vi­sions of the fed­er­al Fair Labor Stan­dards Act. The law­suit alleged that non-union work­ers weren’t paid for over­time work at a C&S ware­house in New­burgh, New York, and lat­er expand­ed to cov­er C&S ware­hous­es across the country.

A set­tle­ment was reached with C&S in 2010 for $14 mil­lion, Wit­tels says, with the bulk of the mon­ey paid out to ​“thou­sands of C&S employ­ees” who had been cheat­ed of over­time pay. ​“The mon­e­tary set­tle­ment we achieved for C&S work­ers demon­strates that when employ­ees unite to pro­tect their rights, they can make even the biggest com­pa­nies obey the wage laws,” Wit­tels says.

If blue col­lar work for C&S can be harsh, white col­lar work for the com­pa­ny can also be gru­el­ing and dehu­man­iz­ing. In an arti­cle in Jacobin last year, for­mer C&S office work­er Jay Mona­co pro­vid­ed an insider’s view of life at com­pa­ny head­quar­ters. Intense pres­sure to meet the company’s prof­it goals cre­ates a ​“dystopi­an” atmos­phere of anx­i­ety and fear so severe that stress-relat­ed health prob­lems are a ​“dark inside joke” among local med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, Mona­co wrote. A cul­ture of secre­cy and sus­pi­cion per­vades the place, fos­tered by Richard B. Cohen, the bil­lion­aire own­er of C&S.

With all this as back­ground, Team­ster lead­ers met last week to orga­nize their response to bank­rupt­cy court devel­op­ments. The union had already filed doc­u­ments with the court to encour­age oth­er poten­tial buy­ers of AWI to come for­ward and bid against C&S, accord­ing to Sandy Pope, Pres­i­dent of Local 805 in Long Island City, New York. . The Team­sters have had some suc­cess in this regard, she says, and two oth­er bid­ders have come for­ward. No firm agree­ments have been made with any of the poten­tial bid­ders, but each, includ­ing C&S, has said they want to rene­go­ti­ate exist­ing Team­ster con­tracts and offer jobs to ​“sub­stan­tial­ly all” of AWI’s cur­rent employ­ees. The glar­ing issue, is whether new con­tract will be fair to the workers.

“We’ve had extreme­ly bad expe­ri­ences with C&S. They have a pret­ty bad record,” Pope says.

Nev­er­the­less, the bank­rupt­cy court judge will decide on the sale of AWI, not the Team­sters, so the union will have to nego­ti­ate with the even­tu­al buy­er, who­ev­er it is. But bank­rupt­cy pro­ceed­ings are rarely kind to union members.

“The rea­son AWI went to court in the first place, rather than just do[ing] a straight sale, is that they want to dump all the debt,” Pope says. ​“That includes more than $30 mil­lion in lia­bil­i­ty to four of our [Team­ster] pen­sion funds, which are hurt­ing already.” In oth­er words, the bank­rupt­cy fil­ing could be a way for AWI to avoid pay­ing work­ers the ben­e­fits they are owed.

Pope says a coali­tion of six Team­sters locals from Penn­syl­va­nia, New Jer­sey and New York are orga­nized with legal and finan­cial experts from union head­quar­ters to fight for the mem­bers. But if past expe­ri­ences are any indi­ca­tion, fur­ther deal­ings with C&S and bank­rupt­cy courts may be bleak for union­ized workers.