In 1989, I was working as the Employment Standards Program Manager for the Washington state Department of Labor and Industries.
Joe Peterson, president of a Seattle area UFCW local came to us with a complaint that Nordstrom's, the large, upscale department store chain, was forcing its employees to work "off the clock" without pay.
To examine the validity of the charges, we decided to request payroll data from Nordstrom's.
Peterson cautioned us that he thought Nordstrom managers might destroy evidence if we went about requesting records through normal channels.
Based on this, I planned a "Time on Target" raid of the eleven local Nordstrom stores - so they wouldn't have a chance to plan any coherent defense strategy or destroy any of the records.
On a Monday morning in September 1989, the Industrial Relations Agents from our Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia offices all descended at precisely the same instant on the Puget Sound area Nordstrom stores without warning, and delivered subpoenas duces tecum to each manager, demanding the payroll records.
It was a real panic. Some store managers gave us the records. Some told us to get lost. Others just ran around in circles. It was a great show.
Later that same day, L&I's director, Joe Dear, got a call from the governor, Booth Gardner, demanding to know what we were doing to his friend, John Nordstrom. Minutes later, I was summoned to Dear's office, along with my boss, Mark McDermott, to explain what we had done.
The prominence and connections of the family caused us to tread very lightly from that point on. Besides owning the department store chain, the Nordstrom family also owned the Seattle Seahawks – they were very rich, with lots of good connections in all the right places.
After a month or so of legal wrangling, we ended up getting the records, and for the next couple months, agents from the Seattle office led by Cindy Hanson, sifted through the mountains of data. She produced a report, which she forwarded to me in about December.
Finally, in February 1990 after an extensive legal review by the Attorney General's Office, we decided we had enough evidence to prove the charges.
Based on Hanson's investigative findings, I wrote an order for the department, where I outlined the charges and our findings of fact, as well as our conclusions of law. It ended with an order for Nordstrom to change its overtime compensation practices, and to pay the employees back-pay.
I released the order on February 16, 1990 at a news conference in Seattle.
There was a firestorm of publicity that followed.
Because of the intensity of the publicity - and because of the Nordstrom family's connections, the case was mostly out of my hands within a matter of days following the release of the order. It was just way too big .
The Wall Street Journal did stories. The New York Times . All the local TV, radio and newspapers. Plus 60 Minutes did a piece (with Morley Safer).
I was relegated to the background while my bosses got all the choice interviews. The only reporters I got to talk to were from local papers.
I've included a few articles about the case, as well as an interviews I gave (with a lowly local newspaper) about child labor.
When it was all over, Nordstrom paid their employees about $15 million in back pay.
I can't claim responsibility for all that. But I most certainly did get the ball rolling and set the stage...
Archive copies of Seattle Times Stories
PDF Versions of Stories *
Breaking Stories
Tacoma News Tribune, February 16, 1990
Seattle Times, February 16, 1990
Seattle Post Intelligencer, February 16, 1990
Daily Olympian, February 17, 1990
Wall Street Journal, February 20, 1990
Other Press
Seattle Times March 30, 1990 - Wage Claims story
Seattle Times April 29, 1990 - Child Labor
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