I Googled the Net by "ufcw 'the garden of eden,'" and found the following: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/morningsideheights/message/3233>. Since the flyer lists UFCW Local 1500 (while suspiciously misspelling its website), I looked up the UFCW Local 1500 website: <http://www.ufcw1500.org/home.cfm>. Can't find anything at the website about a campaign to boycott the Garden of Eden and recommending D'Agostinos instead. You might contact Local 1500 at <http://www.ufcw1500.org/contactus.cfm> and ask if UFCW is indeed organizing the boycott or something else is going on.
I agree with you that it probably doesn't make (even narrowly selfish economic) sense to boycott the Garden of Eden, as it's not clear the Garden of Eden is taking customers away from union shops nearby and threatening their existence.
Unions often recommend goods and services made by union labor over those made by non-union labor. If you want to give flyers to committed union men and women, you should probably have them printed at union shops if you can, rather than making copies at Kinko's or even your own desktop printers or copiers, to avoid unnecessary trouble.
Unions have tried to team up with community organizations and the like to stop new Wal-Mart stores and the like from opening, on the grounds that their competitive pressures threaten union shops' profitability and bring down union workers' wages and cost the public tax dollars in the form of direct subsidies to stores and indirect subsidies (e.g., medical care for indigent workers and their families) to workers who cannot live on low, low wages and benefits given by Wal-Mart and the like.
Unions also fear outsourcing and factory relocation, not only concerned about immediate job losses but also weary of competition from workers in lower-wage regions like the US South and lower-age countries like China and India that put downward pressures on wages and benefits.
[Conservative unions used to hate immigrant workers for roughly the same reason -- they thought that immigrant workers were more docile than native-born US workers and would undercut union workers' gains. It turns out that immigrant workers are, on the average, more enthusiastic for unionizing than native-born workers, and nowadays unions are much more pro-immigrant than before.]
Neither boycotting non-union shops nor protectionist legislations seem to work, though, and many unions have come to realize futility of them, too. Instead, they have begun to talk about trans-national organizing helping workers in lower-wage nations get organized, but the slowly changing attitude of unions (from protectionism to international solidarity) has not borne tangible fruits yet (and the new attitude still gets trumped by the imperative of imperialism in cases such as Venezuela). It probably won't yield many results in the foreseeable future.
Recently, though, Wal-Mart took out ads defending its labor practice: <http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=businessNews&storyID=7317124>. That's a sign that unions have made some headway on the PR front at least. Whether they can translate that into organizing gains remains to be seen. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>