Union Flyers Take a Dig at Dodger Dogs

Having only recently adjusted to a slew of concession renovations at Dodger Stadium that limited the availability of “Dodger Dogs,” Dodger fans Tuesday night encountered more food furor.

This time it came in the form of thousands of parking-lot flyers which obliquely but ominously suggested that unsanitary conditions exist in the Farmer John packinghouse, where the hot dogs are produced.

The flyers were distributed before the Dodger-Houston game by Local 770 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which has spent more than a year trying unsuccessfully to negotiate a favorable labor contract with Farmer John’s parent firm, Clougherty Packing Co.

The union said the allegations in the flyers were based on federal Department of Agriculture inspection reports.

The union had threatened for the last year to distribute flyers with USDA data it had obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The threat made Clougherty so nervous that the company spent $80,000 in April, 1990, to purchase two full-page ads in The Times warning consumers of a pending Farmer John boycott campaign by the union and predicting that the campaign would be misleading.

James Harbottle, the USDA’s Western regional director of food inspection, said last year that such tactics would be misleading to consumers because “any deficiencies found in the plants we inspect are corrected before the product leaves the factory.” Harbottle said Farmer John is “as good as any of the plants in the Western region.”

The union did not put its name on the flyers but confirmed that it printed and distributed them.

The flyers briefly described four alleged incidents from 1985 to 1987 in which consumers found pieces of plastic or metal in Farmer John pork links or wieners. The flyers contained a disclaimer stating that “there is no evidence” of such problems in Dodger Dogs--the flyer’s only reference to the hot dogs sold at Dodger Stadium.

Bernie Clougherty, vice president of the packing company, called the flyers “a desperate attempt on their (the union’s) part to make us come to another agreement.” He said the company has used metal detectors for the last eight years to guard against shipping contaminated products.

Last June, hoping to gain contract-negotiating leverage, the union launched a boycott of all Farmer John products. However, it did not make use of the USDA reports. Instead it aired numerous ads on Spanish-language radio stations criticizing Farmer John’s treatment of its 1,000 workers at the plant, the largest pork-processing facility on the West Coast.