FIGHTING

Both Carrión and Espinoza took their complaints to Teamsters Local 813, which had been working covertly to organize the roughly 30-person shop for several months over the spring.

The NLRB launched a probe of the allegations — and reached a settlement with ShredIt and Stericycle on Thursday that requires the employer to wipe Carrión’s record clean and make a payout to Espinoza.

The company also has to prominently display posters in its facilities advising all its workers of their protected organizing rights — something Espinoza hopes will help the remaining employees to recover their pro-union momentum from the spring.

“We were having meetings every Saturday, about 15 of us, maybe a few more, at a diner far away from the shop to talk about joining the union,” said Espinoza. “But somehow management always heard about what was said, they always knew what we were talking about and planning to do.”

Espinoza was among the most vocal ad- vocates for joining Local 813 — pointing out that wages for the workers were stagnant at roughly $15 an hour, with no job security.

“We knew guys could get fired anytime. There was one guy, a veteran who had been there many years, and he got jammed up one time. He had an emergency situation but couldn’t get to a phone to call in. They fired him, just like that,” he said.

Some of the more senior workers, who earn a little more than the other guys, worried they’d be fired for younger, cheaper hires.

“Job security was the real concern, guys were always really worried about that,” said Espinoza.

But he and the other pro-union workers didn’t know that management had planted a mole in their group.

“Later we learned that every word we said got carried back to them,” Espinoza said.

By March, the workers were getting called into meetings with supervisors and managers from both Shred-In and Stericycle.

“I was recording a lot of these talks, and it