Workers Win Facebook Fight Against Huge Supermarket Chain

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/13291/facebook/

Two labor unions representing workers at supermarket chains are reporting success in efforts to protect their members from employers who want to impose restrictive rules on the use of social media outside the workplace.

Leaders of the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) union and the Teamsters have successfully backed down a large multinational conglomerate that attempted to impose such restrictions on more than 100,000 workers across the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions, union officials said. Complaints to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have resulted in the New York-based unit of the company withdrawing the disputed policy, and a settlement of similar complaints is imminent in the Baltimore area, they said.

The fight erupted late last year when supermarket chains owned by the Dutch retailing conglomerate Royal Ahold began demanding that employees sign a “Social Policy Guidelines” document that warned of dire consequences if workers used social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter to communicate too freely about their jobs. The grocery chains—Stop & Shop in New England/New York, Giant Food in the Mid-Atlantic, Martin’s Food Markets in Virginia, and a separate home delivery service called Peapod—threatened disciplinary action, including possible dismissal, if employees refused to sign the document or violated any of the guidelines.

For Jeff Armstrong, a five-year employee at the Giant store in Rehoboth Beach, Del., the threat of dismissal for refusing to sign was startling. “I couldn’t believe it. They called us in and made us sit down in front of a terminal. They said ‘Read this, then sign it.’ They told us you had to sign right then and there, and that if you didn’t sign, you could be fired,” Armstrong said. Feeling pressured, he reluctantly signed.

[MADem]

1. Royal A-Holes!!!!!

Royal Ahold food SUCKS and it is overpriced--give me Mahhhket Basket any day! (They are finally opening a store on Cape Cod this June--about time Stop and Shit got some real competiton beyond Shaw's!).

I was in a Stop and Shop not too long ago (no choice owing to time constraints/circumstances) and saw a rather florid and hyper-critical manager BULLYING a worker over her hoodie! This was not long after Trayvon Martin got murdered, too. She apparently worked in the freezer and was out on the store floor for some odd reason and he didn't like the hoodie on the store floor. A guy came out of the back while he was screaming at this girl with a pile of meat for the display cases wearing a similar hoodie--also on the "store floor"--and the guy didn't say one word to the meat worker. Fucking hypocrite! Stupid rule, too!

Anyway, I don't like giving those bums my money--Giant when I'm in DC, Stop and Shit in Boston...to hell with the bastards. Their food is overpriced and rots quickly.

I like Trader Joes for a lot of things--decent prices and some fun stuff one can't get elsewhere. And I'll travel to get to a MB. They aren't fancy, but they're cheap!