Supermarket Chain Found In Violation Of The National Labor Relations Act.(Brief Article)

King Soopers operates a chain of supermarkets in Colorado. Many of the stores are unionized, with the grocery and delicatessen employees at such stores being represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), and the bakery employees at such stores being represented by the Bakery Workers. Both Unions have had long standing bargaining relationships in multi-store bargaining units covering all company stores located within the Denver metropolitan area.

The multi-store Denver-area collective-bargaining agreements contained language that ceded to the Unions jurisdiction to represent employees at all existing stores and any future stores established by King Soopers within the agreements' geographic limits before the agreements expired.

One store, established in 1987, was located in a facility at 120th Avenue in Broomfield. It was King Soopers' first and only store in Broomfield. It fell just outside the parameters of the geographic limits of the Denver-area multi-store bargaining units.

Shortly after the store was established, King Soopers agreed to a check of signed union authorization cards, and based upon a majority showing in that check, recognized the UFCW as the bargaining representative of the store's grocery and delicatessen employees.

King Soopers and the UFCW then entered into a collective-bargaining agreement, with a recognition provision that specified that the Union was the representative for all grocery and delicatessen employees at "the grocery store owned or operated by the Employer at 5150 West 120th Avenue." The recognition provision contained no future additional store language but instead added that the UFCW's "jurisdiction [is] to apply to the current store represented by the Union."

King Soopers recognized the Bakery Workers as the exclusive bargaining representative of the Broomfield store's bakers and cake decorators ("bakery-department employees") in 1990, based upon the results of a Board-conducted election. The election had been conducted among the store's bakery-department employees based upon a stipulation that such employees comprised an appropriate bargaining unit.

The Bakery Workers and King Soopers then agreed to merge the Broomfield store bargaining unit into the existing Denver-area multi-store unit and to extend the Denver-area collective-bargaining agreement to the Broomfield store's bakery-department employees. In pertinent part, that agreement read: