A year ago, Todd Schnuck was the Man of the Year.
At a St. Louis Port Council dinner in June, area unions honored the CEO of Schnuck Markets Inc., with its top award. Here’s what the man from the famous grocery store family told the union workers gathered for the dinner:
“We can grow together or we can wither away together,” Schnuck said, according to Labor Tribune coverage of the event. “If you want to protect good union jobs … membership and their families (need to) support St. Louis union retail employers. Let them know that if they think their own union jobs, wages and benefits matter, then those of their union brethren in the food industry matter as well, and they should support those higher wages and better benefits.”
A year later, union workers are taking Schnuck’s words to heart, and their target is the very company he runs.
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In April, Schnucks announced it was laying off 190 union workers at its Bridgeton warehouse. It’s not because business is slowing down. Quite the opposite. Schnucks is a partner in a new 900,000-square-foot, high-tech taxpayer-subsidized warehouse in Kinloch that will make its older, Bridgeton warehouse relatively obsolete.
The new warehouse is expected to employ 400 or more workers, but Schnucks is contracting with a nonunion company — XPO Logistics — to run the facility.
That decision has sent members of Teamsters Local 688 to the streets and sidewalks in front of Schnucks grocery stores, asking patrons to let the company’s CEO know they aren’t happy with the move.
“We believe when the public speaks, companies listen,” says Mike Schleuter, the business representative for Teamsters Local 688. “They’ve chosen to fire the people who have been doing the work for years and hire new people at half the price.”
Schnucks, of course, sees things differently. Spokesman Paul Simon says the company is still true to the words its CEO spoke at the labor dinner a year ago.
“Schnucks has a long history of union support; in fact our workforce is 75 percent union and will still be 75 percent union after this transition,” he said in an email. “We recently signed a new six-year agreement with Teamsters Local 610 representing our drivers.”
Indeed, that is likely why this union-company dispute seems so different than many others. The Teamsters aren’t picketing. They aren’t asking consumers to stop shopping at Schnucks. But they are hoping shoppers will put some pressure on the company to reverse its decision to lay off 190 union workers.
Some of those workers have already left to look for better jobs. Others are being hired to replace them, even while being told their jobs are soon to end.
One such worker is a north St. Louis County man named Stephon Hughes. Hughes, 24, is working as a “picker” at the Bridgeton plant. For $13.95 he picks orders off the warehouse shelf and packages them for delivery to local Schnucks stores. Hughes was hired about a month ago and told immediately that his last day will be July 27.
He took the job because it pays much better than his former one at Steak ’n Shake. He knows that unless he finds another union warehouse job, he’s going to take “a major cut in pay.”
Hughes has a newborn and two boys, Stephon, 5, and Saveon, 2. Regular readers of this column might recognize their names. Their mother is Jeannetta Maclin, who was charged with felony neglect after leaving the boys home alone in their apartment when she went to her own minimum wage job. The boys started a fire and were rescued by firefighters. They have recovered and live with their father.
“They’re doing great,” Hughes said. Charges have been dropped against Maclin and she, too, has a better job now, thanks to help from a growing group of mothers and others who have stepped up to help the family. The boys see their mom on weekends, and Hughes believes they’ll probably end up living with her again.
But he wonders about his ability to support his family with the loss of his first, good, union job.
Ask Hughes where he’s from and he just says “all over.”
“We bounced from house to house,” he said. This is the reality of life in poverty for many of our St. Louis neighbors who struggle to make ends meet. It also is emblematic of the problems with how development decisions are often made in the St. Louis region.
Corporate barons promise new jobs, but only if taxpayers subsidize their risk. Governments afraid of losing developments to another state promise tax-increment financing and forgive other taxes.
In the end, few net jobs are created, and sometimes other workers are laid off. The workers with diminished pay send their kids to school in districts that find themselves with a diminishing tax base. Bottom lines are padded, working families mostly lose, and the region’s problems are shifted around from one tax-abated municipality to another.
“We can grow together or we can wither away,” a smart man once said.
Sage advice, if only it were followed more fervently.
