BD Medical Campaign-Issue 1, December 1, 2021

Why Does BD Medical Think Paying Us So Little is “Doing What is Right”?

Do you feel like you are getting paid enough?  I know I don’t. But BD’s executives and wealthy stockholders are making out like bandits. BD Medical has up to 200-300% profit margins on the main lines of products that WE make here. BD can certainly afford to offer better wages for our good work.

For example, look at Kellogg’s.  Right now, their employees are striking in a fight to improve their wages, they are standing with new hires to make sure they keep those good wages that they, the union workforce, fought so hard to obtain. Kellogg’s new employees get paid nearly twice our entry level pay to begin with! And we have at least three times the profit margin!

Do we deserve better pay?  Do we deserve access to better benefits?

These are questions that require no answer.  We all already know what the answers are.

We can continue to keep our heads down and say nothing, And nothing will ever change. Or we can come together and take action. How? By organizing – and yes, I am about to say the “U” word – a UNION here at BD Medical.

I’m sure you’ve heard this word a lot, but what does it mean in relation to you? What is a union, anyway?

Despite what you may have heard, a union is simply a group of like-minded employees coming together to fight for their interests in the face of the well-organized, experienced and lawyered up machine of the massive corporation that we face.  Interests like wages, benefits, better working conditions, fair and non-preferential treatment, and “just cause’ standards of discipline that each and every one of us deserves.

Because of our hard work, BD Medical has the resources to pay top legal and other specialists to enrich the company’s elite while the rank-and-file line worker barely makes enough to stay afloat, much less give our families the middle-class existence they deserve…and that BD can easily afford.

BD’s Executives are organized and determined.

We should be too.

A few of us might be able to cut our own little deals with them for more favorable treatment and better wages. This has happened a lot here in the past. But if we all come together, we can make it better for everyone…..all of us. Not just their favorites. Not just their overseers.

All of us, every single hourly employee, from our new hires to our CI Line Leads, in this plant needs to be part of OUR UNION and our movement for the economic betterment of us all. It is not about our ego trips or our pathetic delusions of wannabe managerial power. If you haven’t noticed, the managers around here, and especially the department heads, tend to be tall, white, males with engineering degrees. They seldom make more than a brief tour of their respective fiefdoms before letting their subordinates, managerial “Coaches” and “Area Leads” and our soon-to-be bargaining unit CI Line Leads, run things and keep them out of the line of fire.

If we all come together, we can easily take back the middle-class lifestyles that corporations like BD have denied American workers for many years now, and we can do so within just a few three-year contracts, just a single decade or so. But to do this we must all learn to stand in absolute Solidarity, as ONE even. We cannot let race, religion, cultural identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin nor our little personal disputes and prejudices divide us. We must handle our disputes and misunderstandings ourselves within OUR circle. Not by whining and tattling to management. That never does any of us any good. We Are ONE untied People, The Workers of BD Medical Sandy. When we all know this, they will not be able to stand before us without trembling and we will exploit their fears even as we take our higher wages to the bank.

Yeah…..I, David Nichols, am currently Suspended, Pending Investigation.

Who would have thought that could ever happen?

Do not let it worry you. They are without doubt going to fire me. That happens more than 30% of the time when workers in a larger plant move to organize. They try to go for the leaders in order to make you afraid. Do not be. To date I have never had the National Labor Relations Board rule against me in any matter. They seek only to distort and delay. To instill fear in you. They hope they will be able to buy me off. But this time I will not sell my return-to-work rights. I will be back. Fear not. It could take a bit of time, maybe even two or three years. But even BD’s high-dollar attorneys, of the union busting Ogletree-Deakins law firm on K-Street in Washington, D.C., know I will eventually prevail.

For those who don’t know. K-Street is where American democracy is turned into corporate Oligarchy by mercenary attorneys and business lobbyists. K-Street i why your vote doesn’t matter 70% of the time as far as law-making goes. K-Steet is also where once good laws like the NLRA, are perverted by overcompensated attorneys, into laws that heavily favor corporate elites.

At BD Medical we do what is right, huh?

Good, then I am sure BD will be announcing very shortly that they are going to take a completely neutral stance on OUR choice to form or join a union or not, here at the Sandy plant. Accordingly, they will not have captive audience meetings; they will not have managers call us in one by one to tell us unions are bad and make implied threats of plant closings or of business transfer to other locations to try and scare us.

To tell the truth I am going to have a great deal of fun with my one-on-one meeting personally. My manager may be clawing on the door to get out of there before it is over. He is a good guy, and a really good manager by usual standards. I truly feel for him. I wouldn’t take a six-figure salary with 10-year golden parachute to be my boss, particularly not in a traditional command system like BD uses to suppress employee empowerment.

Still, letting the employees of BD Medical Sandy plant choose without interference whether or not to join or form a union is the right thing to do. We will see if BD Medical lives up to its own core values or not.

On the Upcoming c2c Investigations

Just a little advice for all employees. It is pretty much the same advice any well trained shop steward in a union shop would give you.  If ever the Company questions you. Tell the truth.  Only answer the questions you are asked. If asked about others tell the truth but do not speculate or pass on hearsay rumors. If you have not witnessed it or heard it yourself don’t say that you have any knowledge of it. You don’t. Only answer any question of which you have direct knowledge. If you don’t know, say I don’t know.

Now, on this c2c thing.  I am the one who spilled the beans here.  I know many of you, especially some of our CI Line Leads, are not happy about it to say the very least.

But I don’t think many of those line leads and others who may or may not have been doing c2c’s for other employees understand how critical of a failure to the company’s ability to enforce policies, often based on governmental regulations or laws, this thing really is. I know why those who may have done so did this thing.  It is hard to get people off the line to go let them do their c2cs and they take SO long.  They never seem to remember, when their c2c’s are due. And employee X just got here on a work vista. He / She hasn’t even learned to understand spoken English very well yet. How can he/she be expected to read all these tedious controlled documents in English?

I get it. I do.

But those policies cover everything from FDA and EPA regulations to a host of federal employment, occupational safety, labor, anti-discrimination and other laws enforced by the EEOC, the US Department of Labor, the NLRB, OSHA and other Federal agencies. If employees are not doing their c2c’s themselves these legal obligations are not being communicated to them and BD can be held legally responsible for that.

To all those line leads and others who have done other employee’s c2c’s for whatever reasons, including all those who are livid with me about revealing this not very well kept little secret anyway, I would simply reiterate what I said above.  Tell the Truth.  And if asked by either HR in an internal Investigation or by any official of any Federal agency such as the NLRB, EEOC, FDA or DOL 1) answer very truthfully because some of these agencies are law enforcement agencies, and 2) Do not cover for any member of management who has knowledge of what has been going on with these communication of policy failures. I don’t care how badly you want to work your way up the ladder. If your supervisor knows that you have been doing c2c’s for other employees you are largely absolved of legal responsibility. But to be on the safe side it wouldn’t hurt to join our UNION ORGANIZING COMMITTEE as well. That way if the Company does try to use you as their scapegoat you have legal recourse with the NLRB.

And that gets to my point of revealing the whole thing in the first place. I suspect that there are many supervisors that do know what has been going on with c2c’s and have been winking at this practice for many years in order to favor the compliant, controllable and anti-union workforce they want in place here. Yeah, well, those days are over.  As far as I am concerned anyway, wherever a worker in this shop may originate from, whatever their citizenship or immigration status, they are also modern American workers now, not some 19^th century immigrants to be discriminated against, abused and paid less than they are worth by yet another greedy corporation.

So now we all have to do our c2c’s and the line leads will have to work out time for line workers to do them. That is good. It will help keep the line leads humble and with us, not with the kind of dangerous ambitions that lead them to run cutthroat over others on the way up that ladder. This is only what it was suppose to be all along. Trust me, I find it a bigger pain than most of you.

I, and the rest of the BD Organizing Committee will try to use whatever influence we have to get the company to 1) translate the c2c’s into other languages, and, 2) set up programs for helping new employees from other countries learn English at an accelerated pace.

WHY UNIONS? Final BWAY Edition

On Estimated Pay Rates and Overtime Hours

As promised, attached are my educated estimations of the job rates here at BWAY.  I do stress that these are only estimations although I don’t believe that at even the highest rates (those hardest to obtain information on) that many will be off by much more than a quarter.

Most operator rates will be much closer than even that. Indeed most will be exact or within a cent or two.

This information has been obtained through informal interviewing, participant observation and through other qualitative methods over a period of almost four years. Some wage rates have thus had to be projected according to the company’s stated “across the board” wage increases.  To a large degree inaccuracies in pay rates will depend on how truthful the company has been with us concerning the matter of wages.

The overtime hours are much more hazardous estimations. They are based on directed observations of the overtime worked by six to eight employees per week for more than a year.  Thus data was accumulated for each employee for between five and seven weeks. These weeks were then averaged to come up with the number presented under “estimated average overtime hours”.

It is hardly exact, but it does give a rough indication.

Since overtime is likely to vary from week to week, month to month and year to year, these projections could be off and that could affect the estimated annual salary by several thousand dollars.  Still, I thought it was important to give you all some sense of what real income differences are. Some employees do make up to 40% of annual income in overtime.

According to these estimations the top hourly classification at BWAY makes nearly 3.5 times as much annually as at the bottom classification. Actual hourly pay rates are more than double from bottom to top. It is true that those at the top do have special skills and that they should make more. But a more reasonable difference in wage rates would be about 1.25 to 1.5 times the pay rates of those at the bottom, who are also most often good, hard-working employees who faithfully come to work and also make valuable contributions to the success of the company.

Just to give an example, let us consider the Kellogg’s Plant here in Memphis, one of the few unionized plants left in the city. Maintainers there make about $35 an hour or about $5.00 more than our top rated mechanic. Production employees once topped out, make about $23.00 an hour, or about two thirds what the maintainers make. This is a much more reasonable difference in pay rates.

There is no doubt that the good ole boys are good at cutting deals, but there is little evidence to suggest that they are very good at cutting good deals, not even for themselves. They could benefit from a four or five dollar an hour increase as well, while at the bottom such an increase would actually constitute a decent living wage.

We all know that during slow times the good ole boys will be protected. Often they will come in to run the line in place of operators whose work week has been shorted for that express purpose.  This doesn’t even make economic sense from the company’s perspective, because labor cost for running the line with maintainers is significantly more than with a single maintainer and lower rated operators.

It looks like soon this will be happening again. Things are slowing down as often they do this time of year.  The good ole boys will be sheltered from it.  Production employees will be left to suffer on through it.  This just isn’t fair.

But it is all part of the way non-union companies are usually run, with two classes of employees, those who are valued and those who are not.

To Those who have Supported the Idea of Union here at BWAY

In closing this Final BWAY Edition of WHY UNIONS? I would like to address those 16 other employees here who responded “Yes” to my survey on the question of unionization here at BWAY.

Do not be discouraged by my departure. I am only one man. If you have learned anything from me it should be this:  If you make sure you are right, and within your legal rights, you do not have to be afraid.

Some of you will have to step up and take leadership roles in any continuing unionization movement.  My phone number will remain (901) 937-9975 for the next several months or you may contact me through the WHY-UNIONS.com website. I will be happy to serve in an advisory role.

There are a couple of things you can do to help further the long term goal of unionization here.  The first is to be kind to the new hire temps even before they get permanent status.  Be honest with them about the workplace they are becoming a part of. Work on them even as they come through the door.

Secondly, educate yourselves on the law concerning union organizing.  It is much easier now than when I began doing so twenty something years ago.  I had to go to the library and read through the reference books on Title 29, Labor Law.

Now all this information is freely available on the internet. Go to NLRB.gov to read the National Labor Relations Act in its entirety. Also read case files and rulings, these will give you a pretty fair sense of how things actually work at the NLRB.

My other suggestion is somewhat harder to give.  I generally do not condone snitching, for it undermines solidarity.

But I will throw this out here because such measures may be necessary to break up the good ole boy culture of this place.

I will leave it to you to sort out the moral implications of it all.

I generally like the good ole boys on a personal level.  I do not blame them for doing the best that they can for themselves, only for doing it at the expense of the rest. But the fact they are likable does not change the fact that every year they conspire with the company to take money away from your families. In my book this is treason towards the People. And sometimes treason must be repaid in kind.

Several of you have stated to me that you have specific knowledge of things such as company property coming up missing at the hands of some of the good ole boy crowd. At least one of you has even reported such things to management but with no action taken.

So here is my suggestion. On the Board by the time clock there is a poster about the “Whistle blowers hotline.”  If you choose to take the route of exposing wrong doing use this third party hotline.

DO NOT under any circumstances trust local management or corporate HR officials to fix things.  Local Managers are too dependant on certain individuals within the “good ole boy” crowd to do anything about it and HR departments exist not to provide justice, but to legally cover the company’s ass.

The third party whistle blower’s line will protect you from retaliation and force Corporate HR to respond according to the law.

Again, there is nothing personal in this suggestion and it is entirely up to you whether or not you choose to take it.

Finally I would leave you all with this.

In the survey, Teamsters 984 was the union most selected by “yes” respondents.

Thus here is the contact information for Terry Lovan, Teamsters Local 984’s President and Business Manager.

National Union:     IBT

Contacts:               Terry Lovan

Contact Title:         Business Manager

Address:                 3020 Sandbrook
Memphis, TN 81860

Phone #:                 (901) 398-2329

WHY UNIONS September 29, 2011

To the BWAY Workers from Southeast Asia

I am ashamed of my ignorance of the cultures and languages of my Vietnamese coworkers and of our one little Cambodian. Many years ago I studied Anthropology, or the study of human culture, so perhaps I know a little more than most of my countrymen. But to have worked for so many years with you all, I should by now know much more.

I do know that you are among the most diligent, hard-working and conscientious people I have ever worked with. I know that unlike most Americans today you still value the extended family and still hold the ancestors in reverence. I know to you all of our social relations must sometimes seem rude and discordant. Westerners do not always value social balance and harmony the way Easterners do.

This pattern of contentious social relations also extends to our unions here in America. Unions are not part of the State here. There is both good and bad in this. On one hand it means unions here have to be independent and free standing. This is why unions here have to have union dues from their members, so they can be able to pay the expenses involved in representing their members in collective bargaining and contract enforcement. Unions here are not subsidized by the State.  Neither do they have direct political control. There is no one to represent Labor in our presidential cabinets in the same way that the Leader of Vietnamese Labor represents Workers on the Central Committee of the Communist Party. But there is much good in this too, because in America unions must answer to their members, not to the State.

Generally unions are more effective here, at least in monetary terms.  It is true that members must pay union dues, but it also true that union members in America, after having been organized for a while, tend to make about 25% more than non union workers doing comparable work in the same industries. Little by little, the 1% to 2% more in annual raises that unions typically achieve in collective bargaining eventually adds up. The same is even truer in terms of negotiated benefits such as healthcare coverage and retirement benefits. These economic benefits of unionization soon come to outweigh the cost of union dues many times over.

Other reasons for unions are non-economic. You will all remember when one of our nozzle bowl operators was written up for trying do her duties and do can repair at the same time. She had been strongly encouraged in this by her “acting” supervisor. This was unjust, and that write up should not have been allowed to stand uncontested. In a union shop, at least any union shop that I was a part of, it would not have been.

Many of you have been subjected to verbal abuse by the line mechanics the company has put over you. Recently one of these mechanics finally went way too far and put his hands on an Asian employee. The company had but little choice but to terminate this mechanic given the requirements of the law on the matter. But if a union had been in place it might not have had to come to that. If grievances had been filed in those many previous incidents, a company culture tolerant of abuse, sometimes with racial undertones, might have been checked. It is even quite possible that these grievances could have lead to the mechanic’s getting the help in anger management that he needed, probably through the company’s Employee Assistance Program, so that a very good mechanic, whose loss is going to seriously hurt our collective efforts to serve our customers, would not have had to have been lost. Nearly as much blame for that incident belongs to the workplace culture of the company as it does to the individual involved. A union could have helped them here.

Finally I must tell you my strongest personal reason for believing in unions.

Unlike many of my countrymen, I also do my best to honor both the living elders and those who have crossed into the ancestor realm. My methods are not quite the same as yours. There are no shrines in my home, nor do I typically remember the death dates of my immediate ancestors as most Asians do. Still I do acknowledge the undisputable fact that I am the product of those who came before me, and I do try to remember and honor them, belligerent and semi-psycho “round-eyes” that many of them were. But even more important to me than these immediate ancestors were those who came long, long before, the “primitive” ancestors of not only me, but of all modern humanity. It is my belief that the understanding of the social wisdom and strong sense of kin and community of these long forgotten ancestors is the key to the survival of our descendants in the global post-industrial era.

My rituals in remembering these Ancestors are simple. They usually involve no more than finding a quiet, natural spot in some forest or field, of making offerings of tobacco to the spirits of the place and to the six cardinal directions in the way of certain Native American peoples. And then I will sit and allow my senses to be filled with the natural things around me. Then I seek out the Ancestor’s memories and try to “remember” what it must have been like before man became “civilized” and greedy.  What must it have been like to live in a society were no man had the right to tell others what to do, but where every man, woman and child was absolutely committed to the economic success of the whole of the People, even unto the death.

The economic technologies and methods of these peoples were very simple. We have no hope of returning to them. To do so with our global population would require more than 1000 Earths. Even so, their methods of economic decision making by small group consensus and the social organization of these mostly forgotten Ancestors are vitally relevant to all of humanity as we desperately seek to get to global economic Sustainability in the few generations we have left to get there.

Already it is probably too late to save many places on Earth from the climatic changes industrialization is causing. These places include the Mekong Delta and the lower Mississippi Delta in southern Louisiana, as well as many other low-lying coastal regions all over the world. As global warning melts the icecaps and raises sea levels these places will flood. Even more devastating environmental changes, like the shift of the life-giving monsoons away from Vietnam, will come soon after unless we quickly begin to change our industrial ways and our social methods of making economic decisions. We must return to the Quality by Consensus cultures of the original Ancestors.

Karl Marx glimpsed this evolutionary truth more than 160 years ago. Then he promptly confused everyone from Lenin to Mao, from “Che” Guevara to “Uncle Ho”, by calling this return to the social structures of the Ancestors by the ridiculous label of “the ‘Dictatorship’ of the Proletariat” and by insisting that the only way to get there was through socialist and communist “stages” that could only come about through bloody revolution.

A hundred years later in post-World War II Japan, the Japanese people, along with a few American business consultants, Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran most notably, would prove Marx at least potentially wrong. In the post-war economic devastation of that nation, the Japanese would, without knowing it, return for a short while to consensus based methods of the original Ancestors. They would organize their capitalist companies into collections of continuous process improvement teams that freed and empowered workers to solve their own work place problems and diligently serve the needs of their customers. Unfortunately, however, by the late 1980s success would lead the business leaders and politicians of Japan back towards the Quantity by Command model of the rest of the corporate world. Total Quality would not live up to its promise in Japan either.

Still, this example does show us the way. But the international industrial corporatists, whether calling themselves communists or capitalists, are not going to willingly lead us down this sensible path toward the consensus ways of the Ancestors.  Their unending Greed blinds them and makes the apathetic to even the fact that they are waging ecological war on their own descendants. They are unwilling to change, even though they know that great social change must come or the Great Mother Earth is going to exact a terrible vengeance on all of mankind.

Unions are our best peaceful hope of forcing them to Empower us with Quality by Consensus, the social wisdom of those original Ancestors, so that we may make all the untold millions of local changes all over the world in order to reach industrial Sustainability and be able to live our modern lives in harmony and balance with the Earth

In the end it may yet have to come to Marx’s vision of world wide revolution, but the blood price of that now would be so great as to defy his 19^th Century comprehension, likely a price of hundreds of millions of lives.  If we can, we owe it to not put such a horrible burden on our descendants. We owe it to them to unite in this generation and give peaceful resistance to the international corporatists through our unions, so that they may not have to give desperate and violent resistance in the generations that follow.

Ultimately this is why I believe in unions, both in America and all over the world. I hope my Asian coworkers will forgive these grandiose ideas and assertions and my great presumption in making them.

Even so, I do hope that when soon asked if they would be willing to join a union here at BWAY, my brothers and sisters from Southeast Asia will join me in this attempt to be worthy of our descendant’s veneration rather than of their contempt. We must try, with all that we are, to leave them a world worth inhabiting. This is our sacred duty as their Ancestors.

why unions? August 16, 2011

The Approach of Decision Time

The time rapidly approaches when the workers here at BWAY, Memphis will have to make a collective decision on the issue of whether or not they want to have a union here.  This, of course, means that each and every one of you is going to have to make an individual decision. Do not deceive yourselves, if you choose not to decide you have in effect chosen “No.”   In that event, you have freely decided that you would prefer that things here at BWAY remain as they are.

On the other hand, many of you have come to believe that a union could be quite useful in improving things here at BWAY. So I would ask all here to consider the matter carefully over the next couple of weeks.

Include such considerations as these as you ponder the matter:

1)      Do you think you are worth the approximately 25% better wages that union workers typically earn as a result of collective bargaining?

2)      Do you think you are worth the approximately 40% better benefit packages that union workers typically receive as a result of collective bargaining.

3)      Do you think working conditions could be improved here through a union?

4)      Do you think that the company should be subject to legal “just cause” standards when issuing any sort of discipline to employees for alleged violations of company policy?

5)      Do you think you deserve to be treated with the higher degree of dignity and common respect in the workplace that union workers usually receive from management?

6)      Do you believe that unions can help transform these monolithic modern corporations into something far more adaptive to our current ecological circumstances by pushing for things such as Human Empowerment, Quality by Consensus and Self-managing Teams? Do you ultimately believe that we, a unionized workforce, can genuinely help them make much better long-term eco-economic decisions than they currently do?

Very soon I will be giving each of you the means to let me know how you feel about the issue. As you all know by now, I have a deep need to offer unionized resistance to the corporate system that I regard as so dangerously maladaptive. By letting me know where you stand you will help me make my own personal decision as to whether this is the best place for me to stand and make that fight.

Ultimately I will respect your collective decision in the matter even if I do not agree with it.

If it is to be a union here then that union shall be ours, not mine. It will only come about by our collective choice.   I can not absolve any of you from the responsibility of making that personal choice.

I can offer a great deal of assistance in helping us organize ourselves into a union, in negotiating that vital first contract, in training our shop stewards and in teaching our general membership how to make sure we maintain democratic control over what will be our union.

But that is all I can do. The rest will be up to you.

Again, I ask everyone to consider these things carefully and to examine their own hearts in the matter. It will undoubtedly take courage, determination, and a strong sense of the common good, of genuine Solidarity, if you will, to make this thing happen. You must find these things within yourselves if you want to take on the responsibilities of unionization and, thereby, reap all of those considerable benefits that union workers typically enjoy.

You already know what I believe. Ask yourselves now what you believe….and whether you personally have will and courage enough to meaningfully live according to those beliefs….whatever they may be.

WorkersReport.com

Derek Nichols, my youngest son, who created our why-unions.com website and blog has now created another one that he is currently administering.

The new site is called WorkersReport.com and its purpose is to provide better coverage to a variety of Worker-related issues including strikes and lockouts, organizing efforts, and contract offers and settlements. Sources for the site include press statements from both unions and companies involved in particular events, federal reporting documents and other media sources.

Derek believes that mainstream media does not adequately cover these issues. He hopes to provide a better way for workers wanting to keep track of things like the ongoing struggle of workers to resist ever-increasing healthcare costs, to do so.

One story there that particularly interested me concerns the 45,000 Verizon workers who have went out on strike to prevent the company from ramming up to $6800 per year, per family, in increased healthcare costs down their throats.

Verizon is not at all a company in trouble. It had sales of over $100 Billion last year and made a net profit of $6 Billion. Moreover, in the last four years Verizon has paid its top five executives more than a quarter of a billion dollars in individual compensation.

In my humble opinion it is just another example of unbridled corporate greed with the customary complete disregard for the real life needs of the workers whose labor forms the basis for all profits.

Anyway, stop by the new site if you have the time.  WorkersReport.com

On the Equalization of Overtime

On the Equalization of Overtime

By David Nichols

Several employees have recently commented to me on the issue of equalization of overtime. Certain provisions of the Fair Standards Act, administered by the Wage and Hourly Division of the U.S. Department of Labor, do apply to the issue.