Photo courtesy Market Basket.
Market Basket, a regional supermarket chain in New England, is the subject of a long-running, seemingly ever-escalating conflict. The Boston Globe has comprehensive coverage here, and Boing Boing reader MikeTheBard shares background on the story in this BBS thread.
Here’s the situation:
Market Basket, a New England supermarket chain that Consumer Reports
named the 6th best in the country, has been all over the news in the
Northeast for the last couple months.After a long family feud, the majority stockholders fired their
cousin, longtime CEO Arthur T DeMoulas. He had built the business on
low prices, high wages, and ZERO company debt- All employees get
profit sharing and a livable wage, and many have been with the company
20, 30, even 50 years.Arthur T. was replaced with the former president of Radio Shack, with
an evident goal of strip mining the wealth from the company–raising
prices, cutting benefits, loading up with debt, and selling off real
estate–in order to pay out higher stock dividends to the controlling
shareholders.The employees revolted. Top executives walked off the job and picketed
in front of headquarters. Employees from managers to baggers are
using their vacation time to protest outside stores. 68 out of 71
managers have pledged to quit unless Artie T is reinstated or allowed
to purchase the remaining 51% of the family-owned company. Deliveries
have stopped and twitter is full of photos of completely bare shelves.
The board has responded with termination letters and threats.PLEASE, PLEASE take a look at some of the links I’ve provided in the
thread. This is the working class fighting back, and it looks like
they will either win, or make sure EVERYBODY loses equally.
“Class War in Progress- Market Basket Update,” and more info in this previous thread. [Boing Boing BBS]