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Over the past 75 years, the Bashas' family has grown-up with Arizona. Like Arizona, our family is diverse and strong, with six different store formats and more than 14,000 members. We know our strength comes from the quality of our members (the people other companies call employees) and the communities we serve. That's why we have always worked hard to have great relationships with both, providing rewarding jobs with good wages and benefits to our members and investing heavily in our communities.In that regard, as in so many others, Bashas' leads the competition: our members have a fully funded pension plan, one health insurance plan that is totally free, and another, low-cost comprehensive insurance plan that is better than any plan offered by our unionized competitors.

We believe that the vast majority of Bashas' members value their relationships with us and the jobs as well as benefits they receive. That's probably why, once they join our family, so many of our members stay with us for their entire careers; it is probably also why Bashas' members have rejected representation by unions when given the chance to vote. The right of our members to vote, whether for or against unionization, is one we highly value. Indeed, the right to vote in a secret ballot election after hearing all sides of an issue is the most fundamental right we have in our democracy. But that is a right the United Food and Commercial Workers ("UFCW") wants to take away from our members, probably because the UFCW thinks our current members will vote against union representation just as they have in the past. Instead, the UFCW wants Bashas' to sign an agreement taking away our members' right to vote and allowing the union to represent our members without an election. The UFCW's effort is part of a much larger drive by unions to get rid of the "Right to Work" law in Arizona, so that people who want to work at unionized companies can be forced to join a union just to get a job, without ever having a chance to vote on whether they wanted union representation.

Bashas' thinks our members' right to vote is too important to take away, so we have refused to accept the union's terms. But the UFCW is desperate, and wants to be able to collect dues from Bashas' members to make up for the tens of millions of dollars it has lost due to dramatically declining union membership (the UFCW lost more than 75,000 dues-paying members in just the past four years alone). As a result of its financial desperation, the UFCW is following up on a threat it made to destroy Bashas' if we did not agree to give up our members' right to vote. If the union gets its wish, it will destroy not just Bashas', but the jobs of our members, who are the very people the UFCW seeks to represent. The weapon the UFCW is currently using in its effort to destroy our company is a smear campaign based on an old, discredited playbook. It started with false statements in press releases and in direct appeals to customers, at first, based on false claims that our company sells out-of-date food. The union has also made false statements about how our members are treated by the company. We fully expect the union to make more false claims in the future, to fund lawsuits against the company, and to take other steps designed to destroy Bashas' and the jobs and livelihoods of our members. However, Bashas' is not willing to give up our members' right to vote, even in response to the union's extortion. We will fight back with the truth, and will use this web site to make sure the truth is told. We hope you visit this web page whenever you hear anything about Bashas' in the press or on the news. Bashas' has been doing great things for Arizonans for 75 years; if you hear negative things now, it is a pretty safe bet that the claims are not true -- and that the UFCW is behind them.