On Tuesday, plaintiff United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, Local 7, AFL-CIO filed a suit against Dillion, LLC d/b/a/ King Soopers in the District of Colorado. The plaintiff is claiming that the defendant had violated some of the terms of their collective barraging agreement.
King Soopers is a supermarket chain brand operating in the Rocky Mountains region of the country.
The complaint states that “King Soopers was utilizing third-party staffing services to provide employees performing bargaining unit work.”
The plaintiff alleges that they had witnessed two different entities providing work reserved to Local 7 workers to the defendant King Soopers in the form of stocking frozen cases of meat on store shelves. They also allege that they had approached such third party workers who described their status as being part of third party vendors like “Retail Odyssey and Day Ready.”
The plaintiff claims that the collective bargaining work that is exclusive to the workers of Local 7 are of those “connected to with the handling or selling of merchandise to the public shall be performed exclusively by bargain unit members.”
According to the plaintiff, the work that is not exclusive to the members of Local 7 is that of sanitation and floor maintenance and is continually provided through a third-party company which how outside help was provided.
The plaintiff claims that they satisfy the six elements of the applicable Tenth Circuit test for preliminary injunctions, which are the following: The dispute is subject to mandatory arbitration under the parties’ collective bargaining agreement, the arbitrable dispute is the underlying dispute and is not collateral, plaintiff will continue to suffer irreparable injury without an injunction, the balances of hardships weighs in favor of plaintiff, plaintiff is likely to succeed on the merits, the injunction is in the public interest.
The plaintiffs are represented by their own counsel.
