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In early 2001, the ILWU International Executive Board found Pecker guilty of campaigning on work time -- a charge disputed by both Pecker and much of Local 6's membership. He was suspended from office for the rest of the year, according to a union newsletter.
"There were meetings where we'd look at Jerry and Peter [other ILWU officials] and say, 'Where's Fred?'" remembers former DMS messenger Marc Gunther. "They'd say, 'Oh, he can't come ....'"
The two unionized messenger companies -- Pro Mess and Speedway -- drew mixed messages from the ILWU turmoil.
"I didn't know who to be talking to," says Speedway owner Lori O'Rourke. "Fred? Someone else? I said, "Get your internal issues worked out, then call me. I'm not going to be put in the middle of it.'"
"It's like a marriage," says Pro Mess' Ritch of the union's nascent relationship with the messengers. "You don't want to go off on a round-the-world trip by yourself the second after you get married, and leave your wife, right? That first year, you've gotta stick together to make the relationship work."
Pecker downplays the significance of his suspension. "Aside from that being a convenient thing for Joel Ritch to grab onto, I don't think it really has much to do with what has happened there," he responds. "It didn't fundamentally change the relationship between the union and any employer."
Pecker was reinstated last spring and the episode appears to have blown over. In fact, Pecker was elected secretary-treasurer of Local 6, and now sits on the International Executive Board as well. "We're a democratic organization, there was a struggle internally," he says. "The membership made a decision, and I'm still sittin' here."
Crucial forward motion had been lost, however.
"To be straight, it was a huge stumbling block," says Carey Dall, SFBMA's executive director. "Things were going along somewhat rockily, but they were going. And then there was this thing with Fred .... The union kinda faded away for a while, outside the rank-and-file people like Nato."
Then things got ugly at Pro Mess. A petition demanding that the union be prohibited from bargaining on behalf of Pro Mess workers began circulating at the company, and Pro Mess officially withdrew recognition of the ILWU last May. The ILWU cried foul, and filed yet another charge with the NLRB. Ritch defended the decertification petition, saying it was a spontaneous move by employees who just didn't want the union. But the NLRB subsequently found that Pro Mess had pressured employees to sign the petition.
In a repeat of what happened in 2000, Pro Mess settled shortly before the claim was scheduled to go before a judge, and agreed to come back to the bargaining table. Why didn't Ritch slug it out in court? "We chose not to ... because it would have cost $100,000," he says. "I would have been able to prove it, but I didn't have $100,000."
But things still are not going smoothly. Pecker says Pro Mess is now trying to return to square one in negotiations on a new contract.
"They've gone backwards on a whole host of issues," he says. "Like with health care -- they're cutting how much they'll pay, and how many people they'll cover." (Ritch declined comment on the negotiations "out of respect for [his] employees.")
The day Pro Mess canceled its recognition of the union, Nato Green left his job at the company and went to work full time as an ILWU organizer.
At 42, Joel Ritch still has the look of a purposely disheveled prep-schooler. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, his brown hair a bit tousled and his casual business attire slouchy. He's a dyed-in-the-wool Deadhead who's been to more than 75 shows (although, he quickly adds, that number includes Jerry Garcia Band shows).
As befits a hard-core fan of the group that sang, "Lotta poor men got to walk the line just to pay his union dues," Ritch professes to have nothing against unions. "I got my undergrad degree in labor relations!" he says. (To be exact, it was a bachelor of commerce degree, with a focus on organizational behavior, from the University of British Columbia.)
He says he tried to convert his employees into independent contractors not to blunt the ILWU drive but because he actually thought the messengers would solicit work from multiple companies, and be better off for it. "I was surprised when few of them did," he says. The bennies he gave his employees when the ILWU campaign began had nothing to do with union agitation, he insists. "I had no idea my employees wanted a union," he says.
In any case, it's clear that Pro Mess has been a thorn in the side of the longshoremen's union since day one. Ritch hired Littler Mendelson, a San Francisco-based law firm notorious in labor circles for its long history of union-busting activities, to help him hold off the ILWU onslaught. Then Pro Mess fought the union every step of the way.
Pro Mess is a survivor in an industry where companies spawn and die like fruit flies. Entry barriers are low (all you need is a few phones, radios, and bikes and/or cars, and you're in business). Competition is fierce and profit margins slim. But Ritch, who moved to San Francisco from his native Canada in 1986 to start an air-freight business, has managed to hang in through several industry shake-ups.
Pro Mess has 80 employees in the Bay Area and more in Los Angeles. Besides its traditional courier and air-freight businesses, it operates a same-day delivery service, a legal services business, and some other companies' mail rooms.
Ritch is an animated man, prone to little flourishes of extravagance. In Pro Mess' remarkably depressing offices on Cesar Chavez Street, where discarded computer parts serve as the only decorations in the fluorescently lit rooms, Ritch's office walls are painted a buttery yellow and hung with pictures of his fairy-tale wedding at the Palace Hotel. Alongside the photos is an old San Francisco Business Times article praising his entrepreneurial acumen.
