By Samantha Maziarz Christmann
Updated: 02/04/08 6:44 AM
Sharon Cantillon/Buffalo News

Carmen Gordon, a 16-year employee at New Era Cap. Co., said at a rally last Monday that she loved New Era so much, she would work there for free.

Having the contract to make caps for Major League Baseball means being under a spotlight that brings both positive and negative exposure.

The labor talks between Buffalobased New Era Cap Co. and 118 newly organized warehouse workers in Mobile, Ala., have been pushed into the national spotlight, with observers seeing first-hand how standard contract negotiations representing a handful of workers can become national news.

Both New Era and the Teamsters said productive negotiations have been ongoing. So what brought the situation from the bargaining table to a Washington press conference with Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa and Julian Bond, the head of the National Associaiton for the Advancement of Colored People?

“Personally, I think it’s old union strong-arm scare tactics. [The Teamsters] began running a negative campaign before we even started negotiating,” said Christopher Koch, chief executive officer of New Era Cap Co.

A company like New Era, with high-profile clients such as Major League Baseball, has an Achilles’ heel of sorts, said Arthur Wheaton, director of Buffalo labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Striking Communications Workers of America aimed for the same publicity soft spot during their contract negotiation at New Era’s Derby plant in 2001, attracting attention from groups such as United Students Against Sweatshops.

“A lot of times, negotiations are about leverage and who has the most power. You want to get people on your side,” Wheaton said. Because bargaining parties such as unions can use publicity to their advantage, companies in the public eye can become especially vulnerable.

“It makes a difference. It makes the cost of resisting a union that much higher,” said Professor Emeritus Howard Foster of the University at Buffalo’s School of Management.

According to Foster, consumers feel personally attached to entities like Major League Baseball and college sports, for whom New Era makes caps. Such intimate connections affect the way consumers view issues surrounding products. Emotions can distract from the core issues and facts of a debate, making it difficult to neutralize a situation.

Issues are further complicated by matters of race, which have been a factor in New Era’s negotiations.

“There are certain buzzwords people latch onto. When you say ‘racism’ in Alabama, it clicks,” said Kenneth Upshaw, a worker from New Era plant in Demopolis, Ala.

A company like New Era, with many consumers in the hip-hop community, would be especially sensitive to such allegations.
While not suggesting that the union is falsely using racial allegations to further its cause, Wheaton said concentrating on racial rather than labor issues is an effective move. A race-based focus might have more teeth in a negotiation hampered by its location in a “right to work” state, where companies are not obligated by law to work with unions.

“Race has more protection because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. One would have more power when dealing with a federal offense,” Wheaton said.

Spokesmen for both the Teamsters and the NAACP said they were pursued by workers seeking justice at the Mobile warehouse, and deny trumping up allegations in the media for the sake of a more advantageous union contract.

The NAACP released a report of their investigation into New Era’s Mobile warehouse that alleged racial discrimination, unlawful termination of union organizers and povertylevel wages.

New Era commissioned its own reports on promotion and pay statistics in Mobile with independent analysis firm LECG. Those reports claim no adverse relationship between an employee’s race and pay or position.

For those watching this case — a robust debate has been brewing on The Buffalo News Web site blog at buffalonews. com — the numbers aren’t adding up. Both sides agree that roughly 80 percent of the permanent workforce in Mobile is African-American. But New Era says 4 of 12 people in supervisory or management positions are African-American, while the NAACP maintains that number should be one in 20.
According to Koch, New Era and the CWA have already signed a neutrality agreement that would give the CWA access to the two remaining Alabama plants with the freedom to organize, though Teamsters local 991 representative Jim Gookins said he is waiting to hear about a counterproposal he submitted for the same agreement. While Koch did not indicate a preference for the plants to be organized by any specific union, New Era’s relationship with the CWA has been considered a mutually productive one. The company and its workers’ union won a Cornell ILR Champions @ Work award for their cooperation.
The talks with the Teamsters drew national attention last Monday when Hoffa called a press conference with Bond. Bond announced he would wait two weeks before formally asking New Era’s biggest client, Major League Baseball, to pressure the cap maker to sign a contract favorable to the Teamsters.
CWA members, who conducted an 11-month strike after organizing the plant in Derby and now support New Era in its struggle with the Teamsters, worry that as the clock ticks, threats to its biggest contracts could mean jobs lost for Western New York workers.

In fact, the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently terminated New Era’s license to make the school’s caps under pressure from the Workers Rights Consortium and United Students Against Sweatshops.

College contracts make up less than 10 percent of New Era’s $340 million in annual sales, while Major League Baseball comprises over 50 percent and has been partnered with the company since the 1930s.

schristmann@buffnews.com