National Labor Relations Board judge tells Dollar General to stop messing with worker efforts to win union representation

Shellie Parsons rests after sweeping trash in the store
parking lot. (Photo: Sophie Park, The Washington Post)

Six workers at a Dollar General store in Winsted, Conn., tried to form a union, "and failed in what is now an off-kilter win," reports Jessica Kuruthukulangara of Seeking Alpha, an investors' newsletter. "The discount retailer was found to have interfered, coerced and restrained its employees from union organizing . . . National Labor Relations Board Judge Arthur Amchan wrote, 'The unfair labor practices involve individuals at the highest levels of management. . . .These practices were also committed pursuant to a corporate policy as to how to deal with organizing efforts by employees.'"

The story begins with one employee, Shellie Parsons, who witnessed management's aggressive tactics and worried about losing her job. With few options, she sought union protection, reports Greg Jaffe of The Washington Post. She called Local 371 of the United Food and Commercial Workers. "The workers wanted more job security. They wanted a process to ensure that their complaints weren't ignored. They wanted to know that their labor was valued and that they were respected. . . . Most of [the Winsted workers] were making minimum wage or just slightly above it."

Dollar General, which closed its only successfully unionized store in Auxvasse, Mo., responded to the employees' efforts by hiring "five anti-union consultants, each of whom was paid $2,700 a day, according to documents filed with the Labor Department. It dispatched three out-of-state executives to the store who shadowed the employees for the month, working alongside them. Sometimes executives talked baseball, hunting or music with the store employees," Jaffe writes. "Other times, they warned them about the union, which they said would make them pay costly dues and ruin their relationship with their store manager, whom they liked and admired."

In the weeks leading up to the Winsted store's representation election, employee Jake Serafini was fired for cursing, Jaffe reports. "The dismissal shook some of Serafini's co-workers, who were convinced that he was fired because he was pro-union . . . Parsons said that a Dollar General executive had warned [another employee] about the closing of the Auxvasse store and suggested that the same thing could happen in Connecticut. . . . Dollar General, in response to questions from the Post, said that no threats were made to close the Connecticut store."

The union lost the vote, but Parson "believed that the election hadn't been fair, that Dollar General had 'polluted' her colleagues' minds with falsehoods and fear," Jaffe writes and the NLRB judge agreed "that Dollar General had violated labor laws and used 'blatant unfair' practices to discourage unionization. . . Amchan directed Dollar General to cease and desist from these labor practices and reinstate the fired activist employee."