| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE November 20, 2000 |
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Albertson's Faces New Wage-Hour Suit By Workers the Grocery Chain Left Out of Settlement BOISE, ID--As 150,000 current and former Albertson's workers are to receive claim forms for a multi-million dollar settlement of a nationwide suit over allegations the company coerced workers into unpaid labor, a new lawsuit was filed last week in federal district court here on behalf of workers excluded from that settlement by the grocery chain. The United Food & Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), which financed the first suit, is also providing financial assistance to the new suit. The UFCW represents some 40,000 workers in the pre-merger stores. "Albertson's insisted on excluding front-end workers from the settlement in the previous suit," said Gary Sauter, UFCW executive vice president, "even though some of them also worked off the clock. Rather than hold up an opportunity for tens of thousands of current and former employees to receive the back pay they are owed, the UFCW retained the attorneys who successfully prosecuted the earlier litigation to bring this suit." Some 30 current and former workers have already joined the new suit, according to papers filed with the court. They include front-end workers and two employees whose off-the-clock work claims far exceeded the parameters of the settlement. Additional plaintiffs are expected, since many excluded workers will only become aware that their job classification isn't included in the settlement when they do not receive claim forms. At the settlement-approval hearing in September, Albertson's sought to block two of the plaintiffs from filing new suits because they were plaintiffs in the earlier litigation. Judge B. Lynn Winmill found that the settlement allowed workers with extraordinary claims to opt-out of the settlement and file new suits seeking to recover more of their off-the-clock work, and he denied Albertson's motion. "Despite Albertson's oft-repeated claim that it wanted to pay employees for every minute they worked, insisting on excluding cashiers, lobby clerks and courtesy clerks is inherently unfair since some of them were subjected to the same pressures to work off the clock," Sauter continued. "If Boise truly wanted to be fair, it would have allowed everyone who worked off the clock access to the claims procedure agreed to in the settlement." The UFCW will undertake to inform employees in the company's non-union stores of their right to participate in the new suit, and called on Albertson's to help make those employees who worked off the clock aware of it. "The issue should be Albertson's living up to its commitment to pay for all time that employees work, not how the chain can deny the UFCW credit for enabling union and non-union workers to take collective action to eliminate a practice that exploited all Albertson's workers," Sauter concluded. The allegations in the new suit are strikingly similar to those in the now-settled litigation: workers given too much work to complete in scheduled shifts, denied overtime and punished for failing to complete assignments; discipline for workers who complained about off-the-clock work by cutting their hours, threatening to replace them, and giving them less desirable jobs and shifts; and managers looking the other way when workers were off the clock. Additionally, although Albertson's has a corporate policy supposedly requiring workers to record all of the time they are working, the suit charges that store and division managers ignored the policy to increase their bonuses. |
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