Crooks and Liars picks this up from The Talent Show:
“A federal grand jury in Los Angeles this morning returned a 53-count indictment against Ralphs Grocery Company, the owner of about 300 Southland supermarkets, alleging that the company secretly rehired hundreds of locked-out employees under false names and false social security numbers during the 2003-2004 grocery workers labor dispute.
The indictment alleges that Ralphs required rehired locked-out employees to work under false identities to hide its illegal activities from labor unions, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration and the National Labor Relations Board.
According to the indictment, in secretly rehiring hundreds of locked-out employees under false identities, Ralphs falsified thousands of employment records, including forms filed with government agencies such as employment eligibility forms (INS Forms I-9), employee withholding allowance certificates (IRS Forms W-4), and income tax statements (IRS Forms W-2).
The indictment also alleges that Ralphs falsified reports it submitted to trust funds responsible for providing pension and health benefits for current and retired grocery workers. In addition, Ralphs allegedly issued thousands of weekly payroll checks under the false names used by rehired workers, and then allowed these workers to cash their paychecks at Ralphs stores as means of concealing and promoting the ongoing use of false identities.
The indictment alleges that, in combination with a secret revenue sharing agreement that Ralphs executed with its two main competitors, Ralphs’ covert rehiring of locked-out workers was intended to better Ralphs’ position in the 2003-2004 labor dispute by, among other things, mitigating the financial and operational hardships of a complete lockout. The indictment alleges that Ralphs’ resulting ability to withstand a lengthier lockout provided it with increased leverage over the labor unions, whose financial resources were exhausted by the end of the lockout.
The case was announced this afternoon in Los Angeles “[…]
Ralph’s is already trying to spin this as the work of a fwe rogue store managers, but that conveniently overlooks the fact that this was going on at approx. 90% of their stores.
American corporations have fuck-all respect for the law, witness my previous post on liar and thief Ken Lay. The law, like taxes, is apparently meant only for the little people.
Before WWII, hired thugs and violence were used to break strikes, with the tacit support of the government. How long before it’s happening again?
It wouldn’t be the first time:
Farmworker strikes have traditionally been broken by strikebreakers and, all too often, drowned in blood. No country has done more than the U.S. to enshrine the right of employers to use strikebreakers, and no workers have been as devastated by the effect of strikebreaking as farmworkers.
From the first Delano grape strike, UFW members watched in anger and agony as growers brought in crews of strikebreakers to take their jobs. When necessary to break a strike, as it was during the lemon strike in Yuma in 1974, the Border Patrol opened the border, and trucks hauling strikebreakers roared up through the Sonora desert every night. Local police and sheriffs provided armed protection.
Non-violence is a basic principle of the UFW because violence in the fields has such a long history. Growers killed strikers in Wheatland at the turn of the century, and Pixley and El Centro in the 30s. Nagi Daifullah and Juan de la Cruz lost their lives in the grapes in the 1973 strike. Rufino Contreras was shot picketing a lettuce field in the Imperial Valley in 1979.