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"It's Business, Man!": Unions and Socially Responsible Corporations Liza Featherstone
"How do you feel?" roared Jerry Greenfield, CEO and co-founder of Ben & Jerry's, the ice cream company that has (in the public imagination, at least) long epitomized corporate social responsibility. He posed this question a few years ago to the audience at the company's folk music festival, held annually in mansion-packed Newport, Rhode Island. "I feel good!" roared back the Teva-and tie-dye-clad crowd. (Greenfield opens the company's staff meetings with the same ritualized call and response.) The folk festival -- featuring countercultural icons like Joan Baez and accessorized by petitions supporting legislation to "Save the Family Farm" -- was vintage Ben & Jerry's. Greenfield's performance was designed to assure the festival's upper-middle-class audience that Ben & Jerry's, maker of flavors with trippy names like Cherry Garcia, is not a bunch of grim stuffed shirts in a boardroom, but a downright groovy (and ethical) little company. The skeptical observer, however, couldn't help wondering: what happens if you don't feel so good?
Last year, a group of maintenance employees at the Ben & Jerry's plant in St. Albans, Vermont, found out. These workers wanted time and a half for work on weekends and for any work that exceeded the standard eight-hour day. Company policy was to pay the federal minimum: time and a half only after forty hours have been worked in a week. (This means, for example, that maintenance workers might be scheduled for ten-hour shifts on the four days following Labor Day or Memorial Day, but collect no overtime.) In early November, after months of frustrating discussions with management, some of the maintenance workers, who earn, on average, about $17 an hour, approached the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers' Local 300, and launched a campaign for representation.
Ben & Jerry's fought back. Asked how the company's anti-union campaign compared to those he's encountered from other, less "socially responsible" firms, Local 300's Tim Watkins, who coordinated the drive, called it "very aggressive."
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