Employees at Madison screenprinting company Crushin’ It Apparel officially voted to unionize, but the company’s owner says he’s already closed the part of the company that employed those workers.
In the unanimous vote, tallied Tuesday by the National Labor Relations Board, six workers cast ballots in favor of being represented by International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) District 7. One other ballot was void, and one was challenged. Because the challenged ballot would not change the outcome, the results are final. The parties have five days to file objections. If no objections are filed, the results will be certified, requiring the employer to begin bargaining in good faith with employees — if the company is still open.
“Due to the financial strains on the business, we’ve closed up those divisions and will no longer produce them. We sold or are in process of selling all of the equipment,” Crushin’ It Apparel owner Jeremy Kruk told the Cap Times following the vote tally. “This door to my life is now closed.”
The results come about two months after workers presented Kruk with a list of demands, including timely pay, a raise and cooler working conditions.
Employees told the Cap Times that the shop, which makes custom gear for schools and companies, would get very hot during the summer because Kruk would not turn on the air conditioning during the summer months while the heat transfer machines, which heat to 500 degrees, were running. They said they’d purchased their own fans and water, and that Kruk would yell at them when they raised concerns.
Chief among their concerns were the bad paychecks they said they’d repeatedly received. In an August interview, Kruk acknowledged the pay issues, which he said resulted from the company exceeding its allowed number of transactions within a month, and later from a switch to direct deposit.
But when employees delivered their letter, signed by most of the roughly 10 screenprinters and seamstresses, asking for Kruk to either meet their demands or sit down with them to discuss them, they say Kruk laid them off instead.
Day later, Kruk reinstated the workers days later after an NLRB judge informed him that it is illegal to retaliate against organizing workers, retaliation was illegal. He then denied having laid them off, despite a recorded phone call reviewed by the Cap Times in which he repeatedly told an organizer with Worker Justice Wisconsin, the worker advocacy group that aided Crushin’ It employees in their organizing effort, to inform the workers who had signed the letter that they were not welcome at work.
In August, Kruk told the Cap Times that his employees are suffering from “a massive mob mentality,” that most of their criticisms are unfounded and that they are trying to extort him.
“We asked for $4, but we’re not demanding that. We can negotiate … but he still said, no, that we’re extorting him,” machine operator David Tecuatl told the Cap Times at an August picket outside the workshop at 5241 Voges Road in south Madison. ““He got angry because we came to deliver the letter saying we’d like to talk or dialogue with him.”
Less than two weeks later, workers filed for a union election.
After reinstating the employees, Kruk told them that there was less work than before and that the shop would close. Many workers sought other jobs, but with the union election pending, they needed to be able to return to their old jobs.
The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) bars employers from closing or threatening to close a workplace in order to dissuade employees from organizing, such as by closing a unionizing plant in order to send a message to employees at other plants. The union has filed an unfair labor practice complaint in response. However, the Supreme Court ruled in 1965’s Textile Workers Union v. Darlington Manufacturing Company that it is legal for an employer to shut down a business completely, even for an anti-union reason.
