Riverbend Foods imposes new contract
Production employees at the Riverbend Foods plant on the North Side went to work Monday under terms of a new three-year contract imposed by the company after the union rejected the latest offer.
Workers turned down the proposal Sunday but didn’t have enough votes to approve a strike, said Anthony Helfer, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 23, which represents about 400 workers at the former Heinz plant. The old contract expired Feb. 28. After the latest offer was turned down, Insight Equity, the private equity firm that bought the soup and baby food plant from Treehouse Foods last May, refused to go back to the bargaining table, Mr. Helfer said. “Our only recourse was to go on strike, and membership wouldn’t.”
Mr. Helfer said the latest proposal preserved pensions for current and future retirees. “Thatwas a big victory,” he said. Workers who rejected the offer were most concerned about the company’s plan to eliminate health care coverage for current and future retirees at the end of this year, Mr. Helfer said. Since the contract was imposed, those cuts will go through.
The cuts will be a particularly hard blow to the plant’s 340 retirees, many of whom are friends or relatives of current employees.
Mount Oliver resident and retiree Dan Fanzo, 68, said he will be losing his supplemental insurance. “You lose your health insurance at 68. I’m upset,” he said.
Under the new terms, he will receive a lump sum payment of $2,500, which won’t be enough to cover his extra expenses for a year, said Mr. Fanzo, who worked at the plant for 40 years under Heinz, Del Monte and Treehouse Foods, before it was sold to its fourth owner last year.
His 62-year-old wife, who won’t be eligible for Medicare coverage for three more years, will receive a payout of $10,000. After taxes, that will be enough to pay for health insurance for about a year, Mr. Fanzo said.
“How can you afford it? It hurts,” he said.
Under other contract terms,workers will receive a $1,250 signing bonus as well as raises, Mr. Helfer said. “Probably one-third of the workforce is getting an upfront increase of $3 an hour,” he said.
The company is implementing changes to work rules that will give management more flexibility to move employees into other jobs, he said.
The new contract “provides a very good and competitive wage and benefit package, and provides for continued retiree health care through the end of the year,” Riverbend said in an email Wednesday.
Mr. Helfer said the concern going forward is whether the company will shutter the plant. “Let’s hope they can save it,” he said.
The company filed a Warn Act notice with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry earlier this month, giving 60 days’ notice of a potential plant closure on May 10, affecting 512 union and salaried employees.
The union asked the company to withdraw the notice, but it refused, Mr. Helfer said.
“The collective bargaining agreement is just one piece of the puzzle that we need to solve,” Riverbend said in its email.
“Our goal is certainly to continue operations, but out of an abundance of caution, we need to keep all of our options open in case circumstances beyond our control prevent us from continuing beyond the date in the Warn notice.”