How Indiana Kroger Workers Won a Groundbreaking Contract

Teamsters in an Indiana grocery warehouse scored big this year with a contract campaign like none before.

They organized in five languages and sported a multilingual union button. They opened up bargaining sessions for any member to come observe — on the peak day, 150 showed up. They even pulled off a daring work-to-rule action the week before bargaining kicked off, to start from a position of strength.

The final night, June 30, negotiations came down to the wire, stretching past the midnight contract expiration deadline. Some members were itching to walk. The employer, grocery giant Kroger, had prepared for a strike too — it had three hundred scabs waiting in a hotel.

So why did management yield on the union’s top issues, averting a strike?

“I honestly believe they knew it was a fight they were not going to win,” said Greg Gorman, who has worked in this warehouse for twenty-four years and been a steward for most of them. “We were not going to give, and we had all the backing we needed.”

The Teamsters won a ban on any further outsourcing, wrested back some previously outsourced jobs, and for the first time won the right to honor strikes by other Kroger Teamsters.

This warehouse in Shelbyville, where five hundred Teamsters work, is part of Local 135 — one of the biggest Teamster locals in the country, with twelve thousand members across three states.

In 2012, the previous leaders of Local 135 pushed through a twelve-year agreement just before Indiana’s “right-to-work” law took effect, to postpone the loss of union shop….