NEW YORK — UNITE said Monday it had won the right to organize some 200 workers at Swedish retailer H&M’s U.S. distribution centers in Secaucus, N.J., and Cheshire, Conn.
The development comes at a time when the union is pushing to expand its operations outside its traditional base of apparel and textile manufacturing employees, and union officials said their next step would be to seek to organize the chain’s approximately 2,000 store-level employees in the U.S. In July, UNITE is expected to merge with the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees International Union to form UNITE HERE.
“This is part of UNITE’s organizing workers in apparel-related industries that are not subjected to offshoring, like distribution,” said union president Bruce Raynor in a phone interview. “We’ve now entered discussions regarding a proposal on the rules of organizing workers in the stores. Retail workers, especially apparel retail workers, are among the lowest-paid workers in our economy — and that’s a growing sector of our economy. It’s a significant group of workers that needs union representation.”
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H&M representatives in the U.S. and Europe did not respond to phone calls.
UNITE’s 200,000 or so members already include store-level employees at retailers including Brooks Bros., Barneys and Jos. A Bank.
The union had been campaigning to organize the distribution-center workers since the fall, and in November alleged that the company had unfairly laid off 14 staffers who had been injured on the job and who had supported unionization. Scott Zradzil, a senior researcher with the union, said some of those workers had since been rehired but that others were still waiting to be called back to work.
He said one of the union’s key goals as it begins negotiating a contract for the workers in the coming weeks would be “to improve safety in the workplace.”
One of the affected employees is Deyanire Bautista, 29, who has worked for the company three and a half years and is currently a picker in the warehouse.
“I feel very grateful that we have won the right to be represented by the union,” she said through an interpreter. “Now, we can finally start negotiating the things that we want in our jobs.”
UNITE said the union was recognized through a card-check process, in which the number of union cards signed by facility employees was counted to determine whether a majority supported unionization. That marks the second time the union has recently used the process successfully — it also did so in organizing distribution workers at Brylane.
UNITE said a majority of workers signed cards in late March, but that H&M declined to accept the results and sent the matter to an arbitrator. The arbitration decision came last week.
Union officials have argued that card checks are a good alternative to elections overseen by the National Labor Relations Board. Both methods of ratification are considered legitimate.