To keep its warehouses stocked and its delivery trucks running without the Teamsters union, Ralphs Grocery Co. has turned to a convicted felon with a history of legal woes.
Clifford L. Nuckols, a veteran of the strikebreaking business, has hired hundreds of people and brought them from around the country to the Los Angeles area, where the supermarket strike and lockout are in their tenth week.
Booked two to a room at hotels in Burbank and Compton, the replacement workers are packed every day into rented vans and driven past pickets from the United Food and Commercial Workers union and knots of jeering Teamsters at Ralphs warehouses in Glendale and Compton.
"They're like locusts," said Frank Halstead, a Teamster who normally works in the Compton warehouse. "They fly in, destroy the good jobs and then fly out to do it again somewhere else. This is the equivalent of hired guns in the olden days."
Helping employers through labor disputes is what Nuckols does best, according to the Web site of his company, Personnel Support Systems Inc. And with few unions mounting big, long strikes these days, he doesn't get to do it very often anymore.
Longtime labor activists familiar with Nuckols' security forces from strikes at coal mines and auto plants more than a decade ago remember him as a formidable opponent, though they said they hadn't heard about him in years.
But even today, Nuckols stands out in an industry known for tough guys, said John Logan, a researcher with the London School of Economics who has studied the business of busting unions.
Neither Nuckols nor Personnel Support's registered owner, Rita Davis, who has shared an address with him in Kentucky, responded to more than a dozen calls left with the company's answering service during the last two months.
Ralphs spokesman Terry O'Neil said in October that the grocery chain was employing Personnel Support. He since has declined to comment. Both Personnel Support and Ralphs' parent company, Kroger Co., are based in Cincinnati.
There are no official estimates on the number of companies that hire themselves out to end labor disputes. Employers that use the services are reluctant to talk about it, and the firms themselves make a point of staying in the background.
Nuckols, 57, got his start in the late 1970s, during an era of massive strikes and hard-line employer responses, when the union-fighting industry was young and unpolished.
