Checker at Americold Logistics, Atlanta, GA

When our election was taking place last September, I was walking down the dock and a supervisor said, “You don’t want to do this—you don’t want to vote for a union. A union isn’t going to help you.”

Then he asked what my vote was going to be, for or against a union. I said I didn’t know.

“If I were you, I’d vote no,” he said. “You have too much going on. You don’t need a union.” Sometimes supervisors would talk to me and other workers on the dock, other times they’d ask us upstairs. They’d say, “If you get the union, we’re going to have to lay people off. You don’t want us to have to lay people off, do you?”

Then they’d say, “I try to give you favors and look out for you. If union comes in won’t be able to do that any more.” They’d say that even though they’d never done us favors before.

We ignored their intimidation and won our election by a big margin, 272 to 88, on September 22.

This was our second recent election.

In 2004, the company brought in all of its high-priced lawyers, paid them something like $600 an hour to tell us about how bad a union was. They showed us a film and came up with every lie they could think of. They pushed the issue of us having to pay union dues—but why did they care? They didn’t care about how we spent our money before. We wanted a union to make sure our jobs are protected—if we don’t have a job, dues are the least of our concerns.

After we lost the election, not having a job was a real issue here.

In 2005, about a month before we could file for a new election, the company fired 48 workers. They didn’t fire people quietly or with any sense, it was a big production to show their strength. It was like they were trying to show us just how much power they had.

The first guy they fired was a real good worker. The day before he was fired, he had came in at 6 a.m. and worked until 8 p.m. that night. They called him up to the office at noon and a little while later he came down and said he’d been fired.

They kept calling people up until the end of our shift at 6, then they started with the next shift. We were all afraid because we knew that any of us could be fired. It was like the company was picking numbers to decide who to get rid of next. We still don’t understand the procedure. They called people up, one by one, and fired them.

Some guys who were fired were in tears. It messed all of us up, worked on our nerves so bad. You never want to be in a position where you’re fired and you have to go home and tell your family you’ve been let go for no reason. I think it was a fear tactic of the company’s, just to let us know that they were in control. It worked for a while—when we started building support for our next election (the one we eventually won in September 2006)—lots of guys were scared. They said we were just going to get fired if we supported a union.

We worked on changing that mindset. We realized that we needed a union. We didn’t want another round of random firings to happen again. Now that we have a union and are negotiating our first contract we’re working to get the fired guys’ jobs back.

Had the company not intimidated us during our 2004 election, I think we would have voted to form a union. If we had the Employee Free Choice Act back in 2004 I think we would have already had our union and 48 of us wouldn’t have lost our jobs needlessly.