July 1, 2009, 1:43 pm
 

By Sewell Chan, New York Times
 
The Stella D'Oro Biscuit Company factory in the Bronx, where 134 workers on strike since last August have been replaced, must reinstate the workers and pay them wages going back to May, a federal administrative law judge has ruled.

 

The 134 workers, members of Local 50 of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers, went on strike on Aug. 14, two weeks after their contract had expired.

 

Most of the workers at the factory, at 184 West 237th Street in the Kingsbridge neighborhood, are paid $18 to $23 an hour, according to the union's lawyer, Louie Nikolaidis. The union and the company could not reach an agreement over a new contract. Stella D'Oro demanded that the union accept a $5-an-hour wage reduction for certain workers, along with cuts in pension and heath care benefits, Mr. Nikolaidis said.

 

A lawyer for Stella D'Oro -- which started as a family company decades ago, and was later owned by Nabisco and then Kraft Foods before being bought by Brynwood Partners, a private equity firm, in 2006 -- did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

 

In a 32-page ruling on Tuesday, Steven Davis, an administrative law judge with the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, found that the company had improperly refused to bargain with the union by declining to provide the union with a copy of its 2007 audited financial statement.

 

The company unilaterally declared an impasse on Aug. 27, 2008, nearly two weeks after the strike started, even though the legal conditions for declaring an impasse had not been met, Judge Davis found. And when the union made an unconditional offer to return to work on May 6 of this year, the factory illegally refused to put the workers back on the job, Judge Davis found. He ordered Stella D'Oro to pay the workers, with interest, going back to May 1.

 

The company may appeal the ruling to the full National Labor Relations Board in Washington.

 

As for the 134 workers, most of them have been living on unemployment benefits or benefits from a union strike fund.

 

"That's one of the remarkable things about the strike, that the 134 people went on strike and not a single person has crossed the picket line," Mr. Nikolaidis said in a phone interview. He said the workers hired to replace the strikers would most likely be dismissed when the union members were reinstated.