“The whole thing took like six years. I was away from my job for six years,” said Marcus Hedger, who was illegally fired in 2010 for volunteering in his union as a shop steward.
Hedger recently returned to work as a pressman at a printing plant in Niles, Illinois. The company prints food-labels.
Back in 2010, the managers of Fort Dearborn Co. and its workers sat down at the bargaining table. It was standard procedure at union workplaces, but there wasn’t anything standard about this. The company, which was under new ownership, wanted to honor basically zero of the contract provisions. Hedger did what he was supposed to do, which was inform his co-workers about management positions. The manager didn’t like it, and promised to retaliate.
The supervisor of the facility, Bill Johnstone… others saw and heard the exchange… told Hedger, “We’re watching you. We’re going to catch you, and we’re going to fire you.”
Hedger didn’t do anything wrong, though, but the company fired him anyway… supposedly for letting an acquaintance come onto plant property, even though the shift supervisor OK’d it and the plant had an open-door policy.
It devastated Hedger, who is a member of Teamsters Local 458M. Without a job, he had to take any work he could get, an entry-level position at another print shop for one-third the pay. The financial strain was terrible. The bank repossessed his home. Hedger and his wife moved into a tiny apartment, which they nicknamed “the cave.”
It was a long, long road through America’s broken and outdated system upholding workplace justice. Judge after judge sided with Hedger, but the company appealed and stalled and changed course again and again in an effort to simply wear Hedger out. He wouldn’t give in, and his union stuck by him, too.
“His perseverance was amazing,” said lawyer Tom Allison, who took Hedger’s case from beginning to end. Allison blames a system he says rewards rather than penalizes bad actors. Hedger’s employer ended up paying him a massive settlement, but that sum includes no damages… only Hedger’s lost wages. That means the company only made up the difference between what Hedger made at his low-paying replacement job and what he would have made if he had stayed at the printing plant.
Here’s another way to put it: Aside from the company’s own legal fees, the company tormented Hedger and his family for six years — and sent a chilling message to other employees — without it costing them a dime.
This was not a difficult case on its merits, Allison said. In all, 10 separate judges — some appointed by Democrats and others by Republicans — sided with Hedger. None sided with the company. Yet Hedger refuses to gripe.
“Since I’ve been making a decent wage again, I’ve started to put my life back together,” he said. “I’ve got a great wife and a great family.”
He and his wife LuAnn have a 40-year-old son and a 37-year-old daughter and six grandkids. The couple lost another son to a motorcycle accident when he was 26.
Hedger and his wife plan to use his back pay as a down payment on a house… a nice place for grandkids to visit.
“Yes. It sucks. On other hand, I did get by my back pay.” Hedger said.
