Bashas' Family of Stores Files Lawsuit against United Food & Commercial Worker's...

Hometown Grocer Cites Defamation, Intentional Interference with Business Operations

CHANDLER, Ariz. -- Bashas' Family of Stores, Arizona's hometown grocer, today filed a lawsuit against the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) union. Submitted to the Superior Court of Arizona,

the lawsuit names the UFCW and the union's operatives - including its false-front organization, "Hungry for Respect" - for defamation and intentionally interfering with the grocer's operations to extort an agreement for union representation.

"In the 75 years that our company has served Arizona, we've never been the target of such strong-arm tactics, and such ugly, malicious lies," said Mike Proulx, Bashas' president and chief operating officer. "We will not allow the UFCW or its operatives to bully, intimidate or harass our employees or our customers. This extortion has got to stop. Enough's enough."

Bashas' Family of Stores operates Food City, AJ's Fine Foods and Bashas' supermarkets. The family-owned and -operated company was recently selected as a "Best Place to Work" - an award based on employee input to an independently-conducted human resources survey. The grocer, which offers benefits and a pay scale equal to or greater than its unionized competitors, employs more than 14,000 people, making it an attractive target for the UFCW.

Bashas' has been a target of the UFCW since 2001, when the UFCW filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to unionize the grocer's Food City workforce. In June 2002, the National Labor Relations Board rejected the UFCW's petition to represent Food City employees, finding that the bargaining unit the UFCW sought to represent was not appropriate. Less than a month after that ruling, the UFCW withdrew its petition, presumably because the UFCW knew it would lose a fair, secret-ballot election among Food City employees.

The UFCW then switched gears to a "win at all costs" corporate campaign against Bashas'. The goal of this campaign is to pressure management into voluntarily signing a union contract on behalf of its 14,000 employees - rather than allowing individual employees to vote for themselves, in a secret-ballot election, whether they want a union.

"We will not allow the UFCW to take away our employees' rights to choose whether or not they want to be represented by the UFCW or any other union," said Proulx. "Arizona is a right to work state where employees have a choice whether or not they want to be represented by a union. The UFCW would like to remove this right, and make Arizona a closed shop state - so that employees don't have the freedoms they do today. If the UFCW had its druthers, everyone working in Arizona would be forced, by law, to give a portion of every paycheck to a union."