Casa del Pueblo:
Family-Owned “Union-Buster”
By Kari Lydersen
The Casa del Pueblo grocery store in Pilsen, at 1810 S. Blue Island, is a true family business. It has been around for 44 years, run by owner Nicholas Lombardi and his son Nicholas Jr. and other relatives.
But according to employees, there are no warm family feelings between many of the about 45 employees at the store and the owners and managers. Workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, say they are often paid below minimum wage, as low as $3.50 an hour, and that their schedules are regularly switched without notice and in retaliatory ways. Some workers get health insurance and others don’t, they say, based on the whims of the Lombardis, who failed to return calls for this story.
“I have a history of health problems so they wouldn’t give me insurance,” said Angelica Acevedo, 27, who worked at Casa del Pueblo for eight years before finally quitting after her hours were cut to almost nothing. “There’s a woman who has worked there for 25 years and they won’t give her health insurance because they say it’s too expensive. Other workers have health insurance.”
Workers say they are generally treated without respect. “I’ve worked there six years and I’ve never been called by my name, only ‘Joven,’” said Alfonso Diez, 37.
...Workers involved with the unionizing drive were fired without a valid reason...
So a number of workers have decided to take matters into their own hands and demand better pay and working conditions. For about a year, they have been trying to organize with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 881. They made a request for union recognition in August 2004, and still have received no response from the owner or his son.
“There are threats against us, repression,” said Diez. “This is just the start. They’re going to do more.”
Diez and at least two other workers involved with the unionizing drive were fired without a valid reason in August, according to a decision issued this spring by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and several more were placed on “involuntary vacation,” including Diez before he was fired. Additionally, one worker involved with the organizing drive was physically assaulted by a security guard in the store’s basement, according to an NLRB complaint. And in August, an NLRB complaint charges that the employer threatened to call immigration officials to deport workers if they continued organizing. The NLRB complaint also alleged that the employer awarded pay increases to certain employees specifically to dissuade them from unionizing. Meanwhile in true Chicago-style, workers say that until the NLRB forced him to desist, Lombardi was pressuring them to join a different highly dubious union, the Franklin Park-based Independent Union of National Amalgamated Workers Local 711. That union currently represents no workers or workplaces, and the supposed president, John Matassa Jr., has been widely described as a figure in organized crime and he was ousted from the Laborers Union for this reason in the late 1990s. On May 23, community members rallied in support of Diez, whose car was mysteriously destroyed by fire that month.
–Reprinted from ¿Hasta Cuando?