FORT WAYNE – A uniform delivery company has failed to pay damages to union drivers who were passed over for work in favor of non-union drivers, according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Wayne.
Teamsters Local 414 last week asked the court to force Cintas Corp. to honor an Oct. 7 ruling by Edwin Benn, an arbitrator selected by the company and union to resolve a contract dispute.
The union filed a grievance on Aug. 24, 2007, accusing the company of assigning new work to non-union employees in Fort Wayne even though the assignments were within geographic areas assigned to unionized drivers.
Drivers are paid a commission of each sale, so diverting sales to other drivers lowers their pay, said Dennis Arnold, Local 414’s leader.
Cintas began the practice in mid-June 2006 after buying the assets of competitor Van Dyne Crotty and redrawing district assignments because some geographic areas overlapped. Van Dyne’s drivers were not represented by a union.
The union’s agreement with management states new accounts will be assigned by geographic area when both union and non-unionized drivers work in the same market.
But the agreement also stipulates grievances must be filed within 10 days after an incident. The company argued the union’s grievance, filed more than a year after the practice began, was too late.
Benn, the arbitrator, ruled the grievance wasn’t too late because it complained about an ongoing practice. But, he said, union members could be compensated only going back 10 days before the grievance was filed – not the full year.
Benn gave the company 30 days to agree on a settlement. When talks failed to reach an agreement, the union asked him to impose a decision. The arbitrator spelled out terms in a ruling issued Oct. 7.
The company has not complied, the Teamsters said in the legal filing March 18.
Georgia Shafer, a spokeswoman, said Cintas could not comment Tuesday on the lawsuit because the company hadn’t yet received a copy of the paperwork.
None of the documents put a dollar figure on how much Cintas owes workers. But Benn acknowledged in his first decision, issued Sept. 3, that the company could have been weakened by the recent recession. If the union receives everything it’s legally entitled to, Benn wrote, it could push Cintas into a precarious financial situation that would ultimately hurt workers.
He called it “the classic winning the battle but losing the war.”
Arnold, the union leader, said, “It’s in the thousands and thousands of dollars.”
Company and union representatives will soon meet at the bargaining table to hammer out a contract to succeed the current deal, which expires March 31.
