Stella D'oro workers not done fighting

BY ALIZA APPELBAUM

Leaders of the Stella Support Committee, a group trying to save the Stella D’oro bakery in the Bronx, sent Mayor Michael Bloomberg a letter on Oct. 27, containing some pretty unlikely recommendations for saving the Kingsbridge factory, which has now been closed for nearly a month.

Members of the Support Committee indicated in the letter that they would like Bloomberg to use his influence, both as mayor and as a former businessman, to reopen the bakery.

“All it requires is that you use your power, formal and informal, to get things going,” the letter urged. “Time is short. An immediate decision by you will be needed.”

The bakery closed on Oct. 8, because its owner, the Connecticut-based Brynwood Partners, said it could not make the factory profitable. Brynwood, which has owned the Stella brand since 2006, asked employees, who are members of Local 50 of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, to take cuts in both wages and benefits; the union walked out, and Brynwood was eventually declared to have negotiated in bad faith by the National Labor Relation’s Board. That finding was based on a lack of financial information provided to the union by Brynwood. After the workers were ordered reinstated, Brynwood said that at current costs, they would have to close the bakery. They sold the company to Lance Inc., and then did just that.

The group wants the machinery, some of which has already been disassembled and shipped to the Lance Inc. plant in Ashland, Ohio, to be put back together in the Bronx. They say Lance Inc. can rely on previously produced goods during the time it would take to ship the parts back to the Bronx and reassemble them.

“The Stella D’oro brand has declined under the ownership of two multinational corporations (Nabisco and Kraft) and one private equity firm (Brynwood Partners). None had the Stella D’oro brand as its priority,” the letter claimed. “The brand can be rebuilt and the workers at the Bronx bakery are the core of the people to do it.”

What the committee members really want, it seems, is for Bloomberg to have acted already.

“He should be the mayor of the city, not the mayor of Wall Street,” said Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, a member of the committee. “Something should have been done a long time ago.”

This is part of the November 5, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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