Dozens Of Brooklyn Key Food Workers Enter Second Week On Strike

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — For the past 32 years, Leslie Callier has spent his days working at the meat department in the Key Food on Park Slope's Fifth Avenue. But for the past 10 days, he hasn't been allowed behind the counter.

The 64-year-old, who lives in Crown Heights, has instead spent those 10 days in a picket line outside one of four Brooklyn Key Foods locations where, like him, employees have been kept from their jobs.

The 38 meat department workers — from Park Slope, Sunset Park, Greenpoint and New Urecht Key Foods and three locations in Long Island — are entering their second week of a "lockout" from the company as their union negotiates for better wages and benefits.

Key Food began taking the meat department workers off the schedule and bringing in temporary employees about two weeks ago, when negotiations for a four-year contract started to fail, union Executive Director Kelly Egan said.

"This is the second week of a lockout that never should have happened," Egan, who runs the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 342 chapter, said Tuesday. "They're still fighting every day, morning and night. We have to get something for these people — this is not how Brooklyn operates."

Egan joined about 100 workers, supporters and employees from other grocery chains outside the Park Slope location on Tuesday, along with several blow-up rats representing the "scabs," or the temporary workers, and a blow-up pig in a suit and tie.

The union had met with the Key Food executives for the first time since the lockout on Monday for several "unfruitful hours," she said. They planned to bring a federal mediator to their second meeting on Wednesday.

Key Food declined to comment on the strike.

Employees said the contract negotiations, which happen every four years or so, had never reached this point in the last four decades, but recently the company started threatening to take away retirement and medical benefits.

Workers said they haven't had a pay increase in four years and are now being asked to pay for their own healthcare starting next month.

"It's terrible," Callier said, explaining that he had to downsize his apartment last year and is worried about retiring soon. "I had my own apartment and I had to give it up — It hurts."

Like Callier, many of the employees have been working at their Key Food location for decades. Bonnie Mingo, who has worked at the Greenpoint location for 20 years, said the lockout has been especially hurtful given the six-days-a-week of dedicated work most employees offer.

Many employees had gotten to know the executive that now leads the family-run business when he was growing up, they said.

"It's just devastation," Bonnie Alarcan, another Park Slope employee said. "Some people have been hit by a hurricane, I have been hit by this strike."

And, even as they were fighting for their jobs outside, many workers still had the customers they have gotten to know over the years on their mind.

John Mouliere, who has worked at a Long Island location for 26 years, said he worried about the quality the temporary workers were offering customers inside his store, especially given the upcoming holidays.

He contended that the strike may do longterm harm to business even if it is resolved.

"We were willing to go back...but they said no, you have been locked out," he said. ""If the day comes back that we go back to them we hope (the customers) come back. All this is going to be irreversible if it does happen."

Many customers have boycotted the stores in solidarity with the workers, employees said. Some vendors to the store, like Coca-Cola or beer distributors, have also started refusing to make deliveries as the lockout drags on, Mouliere said.

The New York union's fight resembles similar strikes going on at Stop & Shops in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Those strikes have been going on for about a week and are also at the point of using a federal mediator to help negotiations.

Some Stop & Shop employees even traveled far to join in the Brooklyn strike on Tuesday, which Key Foods workers said meant a lot to them in terms of solidarity.

"This amount of community and strength goes to show you how much everyone cares for everyone," Mouliere said. "If something happens to them, we'll be out there for them just like they're out here for us."