Lawmaker rushes to spotlight without checking out union’s claims against grocer

Consider the woes of United Food and Commercial Workers, a national labor union that has tried — and failed — for years to sign up employees of the Bashas’ chain of grocery stores.

Part of the union’s strategy has been to convince opinion makers that Bashas’ employees need protection from an oppressive company that doesn’t respect their right to organize and to earn a decent living.

Regardless of the validity of the union’s actual complaints, its publicity tactics have done little to turn general sentiment against the grocery chain. Bashas is a homegrown success story from the classic model of entrepreneurs who start small but dream big and attain just about everything they set out to do. Company co-founder Eddie Basha Sr. is an influential and personally generous Democrat from Chandler who once campaigned for governor, hardly the image of a rapacious business titan who forces his workers to sweat and toil while barely making minimum wage.

The union could strive harder to tell the public why it believes such perceptions are wrong. Instead, the union’s tactics recently became cartoonish in nature by implying that shopping at Bashas’ is dangerous for children. And a handful of Democrats in the state Legislature, led by Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Phoenix, are trying to provide state imprimatur to the union’s games by proposing to outlaw Bashas’ alleged wrongdoing.

Capitol Media Services reported in Friday’s Tribune about plans by Sinema and other House Democrats to write a bill that would make it illegal for grocery stores to sell baby formula past expiration dates which must be printed on formula packages by federal law. Expired formula isn’t immediately dangerous for children, but loses its nutrients which can cause malnutrition over time.

The union says it secretly sent representatives to check the shelves of Bashas’ Arizona stores. According to a June 27 news release, the union found “widespread stocking of expired infant formula” at more than half of the namesake stores as well as a sister chain, Food City.

Forget for a moment that our first expectation should be that parents check labels and not buy any expired formula, even if they have to go to another grocery store. The union’s investigators should have immediately notified store managers about any expired packages, and noted how the stores responded to the problem. Assuming parents can’t be trusted to look out for their own children, the union contributed to any danger by leaving the packages on the shelves while it prepared for a public announcement and sought out sympathetic lawmakers.

Meanwhile, responsible officials who hear such a story from someone with an obvious bias against the alleged wrongdoer should independently verify the facts before considering additional government regulation. If true, they also should determine if it’s a case of isolated human mistakes easily corrected by management, or a clear pattern of misbehavior that might require government intervention.

Sinema’s response to whether she took such steps before proposing a new law? “That’s not my job. I’m a legislator,” according to Capitol Media Services.

Which tells everyone this “investigation” had little to do with expired baby formula, and everything to do with preening politicians and browbeating Bashas’ for not conceding to demands of United Food and Commercial Workers.