One hour before noon on Monday, Jan. 28, the executives who oversee New Era Cap Co. were joined at the company’s Derby, N.Y., plant by hundreds of their workers. Together, they rallied to send a pre-emptive message: We get along — and we don’t discriminate.
Two hours later, two of the most prominent names from separate, but in this case interlocking, organizations stood together in front of the cameras at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and James Hoffa, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, took aim at the Buffalo-based hatmaker. At issue: the alleged mistreatment of workers at New Era’s Mobile, Ala., distribution center.
“Unfortunately,” Hoffa said, “New Era has different rules above and below the Mason-Dixon line.”
Last July, workers in Mobile chose the Teamsters to negotiate a labor contract. There’s been no deal, though, and at the joint press conference, Bond and Hoffa released a 13-page NAACP report that contends New Era has discriminated against black workers in Mobile.
New Era CEO Christopher Koch has
responded to allegations from NAACP
and union officials.
New Era CEO Christopher Koch, fresh from the rally, was tuned in to the press conference.
“Obviously,” he said in an interview the next day, “you start to take things personally when you’re being accused of racial discrimination.”
Shortly before the 1 p.m. press conference, Koch and Bond had a brief telephone conversation. Koch hadn’t yet received the report, which contains allegations ranging from anti-union tactics to overlooking black workers when filling supervisory positions.
Bond agreed to wait two weeks before actively trying to engage the muscle of Major League Baseball, which licenses New Era to make its team caps. Koch said he received a call from a contact at MLB who told him “they were very concerned about the report” and “asked that we do our very best to move this along as quickly as possible to get an agreement in place and put this behind us.”
Koch hastened to explain, both in an interview for this story and to the baseball executive, that New Era wants the same.
“We want nothing more than to get a contract in place and end this disruption,” he said.
Negotiations appear to be moving. On Monday night, hours after the press conference faceoffs, New Era received an economic proposal from the Teamsters.
Aside from negotiation posturing on both sides, New Era has activated a damage-control strategy. The company’s public relations agency e-mailed to Business First of Buffalo a breakdown of New Era’s employee base in Alabama, where it has three facilities, including the one in Mobile. According to New Era’s documents, 81 percent of its Alabama work force is African-American and 38 percent of administrators are minorities. Of the company’s 29 Alabama managers, 11 are “non-white.” Three of nine managers in Mobile are categorized as “non-whites.”
A fact sheet produced by New Era asserted that the company “has excellent labor relations with the Communications Workers of America” at its Derby plant — the same union that went on strike for 11 months in 2001 during tense negotiations. The NAACP acknowledges as much and says Mobile workers want the same.
“[Mobile workers] know very well the kind of treatment the employees in Buffalo receive versus the employees in Mobile,” said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP’s Washington bureau and author of the report.
Shelton points out that full-time workers in Mobile average $8 an hour with benefits while Buffalo-area workers average $16-$18 hourly with benefits.
New Era spokeswoman Dana Marciniak called the comparison incorrect, pointing out that while the Mobile facility is a distribution center, the Derby facility is a manufacturing plant.
Shelton’s report details some of the floor jobs in Mobile, including “pickers,” who gather hats from around the warehouse and bring them to “packers,” who put the hats in boxes, label the packages and place them in the shipping lines.
“The work being done is completely different in Mobile than in Derby,” Marciniak wrote in an e-mail. “The two cannot be compared.”
Tim O’Shei writes for Business First of Buffalo, an affiliated publication. Correspondent Rick Maloney, also of Business First, contributed to this report.
