Pellegrini started at the bottom in the union business.

In the late seventies while attending college in Santa Cruz, California, Pellegrini worked part-time as a security guard for a company called Coastline Security.

Coastline Security was a terrible employer – a point on which all the employees agreed. One thing led to another, and eventually the employee’s thoughts turned to the subject of unions. Someone had heard of a union that represented security officers, and so Pellegrini was delegated to contact the union and find out if they could help.

The union was the International Union of Security Officers – the IUSO, from the Bay Area.

Working with Earl Mallory, the 1st Vice President of the International, Pellegrini became the lead employee organizer at Coastline.

Pledge cards were quickly collected from a vast majority of the Coastline employees, and the IUSO sent a bargaining demand.

Just as quick, the company declined to bargain based on a card count – on the advice of their attorneys, the notorious union-busting law firm of Littler, Mendelsohn, Fastiff and Tichy.

In response, the union petitioned the NLRB for an election.

Over the course of the next few months Pellegrini went way out on a limb for the union, often speaking at union meetings, and writing letters and pamphlets encouraging the employees to vote for union representation.

After a hotly contested campaign, the union won by a two to one margin.

Shortly after the election, Coastline fired Pellegrini – for union activity.

The union found Pellegrini a new job with a union security company, and then hired Pellegrini as a part-time business agent to help in the Coastline contract negotiations.

There, under the expert guidance of Vic Thuesen, Pellegrini began to learn the fine art of contract negotiations.

Over the next year, the company, aided by their union-busting attorneys drew out the negotiations. Finally, in late 1980, after a year of fruitless negotiations, the employees decided they’d had enough, and voted to go on strike.

The union hired Pellegrini full-time to coordinate that strike – his first full-time paid union job.

On December 17, 1980, the IUSO started a rolling strike against Coastline. The first place they struck was the site at Lonestar Industries in Davenport. They really lucked out when nearly 100 ironworkers honored their picket lines, all of which grabbed the attention of the Monterey Bay Area news media, and got the strike off with a real bang.

Over the next ten days, Pellegrini took out successive locations. The culmination was when they took out the guard at the county Neuro-Pyschiatric Ward (NP Ward). They had a well-attended press conference for the event, with five TV stations and several newspapers present.

By staging frequent, innovative media events and press conferences, Pellegrini engineered some really great, sympathetic news coverage for the full duration of the strike.

After about two months, the company folded – on Friday, February 13, 1981.

Most of the former employees were given jobs with union employers in the area. More importantly, wages, benefits and working conditions for security guards generally in the Monterey Bay area were substantially improved – all because the strike scared the holy bejesus out of the employers.

It was mainly because of the great news coverage that they won.

Pellegrini continued working for IUSO Local 2 as the Monterey Bay area Business Agent part-time for about a year, and then promoted into a job with the International union full-time as an organizer.

As International Organizer, Pellegrini was extremely effective, using the skills he’d developed working with Coastline Security.

Pellegrini directed all aspects of the campaigns: he wrote all the campaign literature, filed and prosecuted unfair labor practices and argued unit determination cases before the NLRB; he worked with the bargaining committees developing contract proposals for each bargaining unit; and chaired contract negotiations on each initial contract.

In a little over a year, Pellegrini brought in over 500 new members to the IUSO, with bargaining units in northern and central California, which included the security forces at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, and at Vandenberg Airforce Base’s SLC-6.

Pellegrini won six out of seven NLRB elections. His one loss was at Vanguard security in Sacramento.

Vanguard was a medium-sized (250 employees) non-union subsidiary of the largest union employer, American Protective Services (APS). Originally just in the Sacramento area, Vanguard had started to bid against APS on contracts in the Bay Area, and so the union decided it was necessary for its survival to organize Vanguard.

In only a short period of time, the union had a 60% card majority of the Vanguard employees working in and around Sacramento, and so they sent a demand to bargain to the company.

The company responded by retaining the services of Littler, Mendelsohn, Fastiff and Tichy, and war broke out.

While guards in the Sacramento area were heavily in favor of joining the IUSO, the large contingent employed at Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant were not.

The employer successfully argued to have the NLRB include the Rancho Seco guards in the bargaining unit.

The election was lost by a slim margin.

In late 1982 following a political dispute, Pellegrini left the IUSO and moved back to Washington state.

The Washington Public Employees Association hired Pellegrini as a Business Representative, in 1984.

Working out of Olympia, Pellegrini serviced ten state government bargaining units, representing members in grievances, disciplinary cases, arbitrations, classification and compensation issues, and whatever else that arose. He chaired contract negotiations for each of his units, and was very successful at bargaining innovative language that solved problems specific to the different employers.

He developed several modules for the WPEA shop steward training course, including a module on employee organizing, and a module on contract bargaining. He presented those and other modules at WPEA sponsored leadership-training seminars, at various locations all over the state.

Pellegrini wrote extensively for the union newspaper, The Sentinel, while at WPEA. He also wrote Unit Updates and other newsletters for each bargaining unit on a regular basis.

Pellegrini was quite successful organizing union elections at WPEA, winning six union shop elections and two representation elections in five years (state employees could not then bargain for union shops – they had to win a separate, union shop election).

At WPEA, he worked with classified staff units at Wenatchee, Yakima, Walla Walla, Lower Columbia (Longview-Kelso), Highline and Tacoma community colleges. In general government, he had bargaining units at the state departments of Transportation, Revenue, Agriculture, and the state Military Department.

Over the course of the years he was with the IUSO and then WPEA, Pellegrini chaired 25 different sets of contract negotiations. He managed all aspects of the negotiations, from developing initial proposals, to acting as spokesperson in bargaining sessions, to running contract ratification meetings, to conducting employee and management training to help implement new contracts.

In 1989, Pellegrini left WPEA for a mid-management job with the Department of Labor and Industries. As the Employment Standards Program Manager, he directed the enforcement of the Washington state wage and hour laws – the minimum wage and overtime laws, child labor, employment standards and prevailing wage laws, the farm labor contractors act, and family leave and family care statutes.

At L&I, Pellegrini’s most prominent case was with Nordstrom Inc., the large, upscale department store chain. In that case, Joe Peterson, President of a Seattle-area UFCW local filed a complaint alleging that Nordstrom was forcing employees to work off the clock, without pay.

To examine the validity of the charges, Pellegrini decided to request payroll data from Nordstrom's.

Peterson cautioned that he thought Nordstrom managers might destroy evidence if L&I went about requesting records through normal channels.

Based on this, Pellegrini 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 L&I’s 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.

Later that same day, the Governor, Booth Gardner got involved in the investigation, at the request of his friend, John Nordstrom.

The prominence and connections of the family caused Pellegrini 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, L&I 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. Hanson produced a report, which she forwarded to Pellegrini in about December.

Finally, in February 1990 after an extensive legal review by the Attorney General's Office, the agency management team decided they had enough evidence to prove the charges.

Based on Hanson's investigative findings, Pellegrini wrote an order for the department, where he outlined the charges and L&I’s findings of fact, as well as his conclusions of law. It ended with an order for Nordstrom to change its overtime compensation practices, and to pay the employees back-pay.

Pellegrini released the order on February 15, 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 his 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 even did a piece (with Morley Safer).

When it was all over, Nordstrom paid their employees about $15 million in back pay.

While Pellegrini cannot take credit for all that, he most certainly did get the ball rolling.

Other notable achievements during Pellegrini’s tenure at L&I included a landmark class action lawsuit against 41 trucking companies for failure to pay overtime, and the first-ever criminal charges filed for child labor law violations.

Pellegrini served as staff on two legislative committees, and he was instrumental in the implementation of the landmark new law covering the employment of minors in agricultural labor. He also developed and implemented the first-ever procedure for issuing Class I civil infraction notices for child labor violations. He worked as liaison with the Association of Washington Prosecutors in developing a statewide policy for referring criminal cases in egregious wage and hour law violations.

While at L&I, Pellegrini was also responsible for interpreting the state wage and hour laws, preparing and analyzing legislation, directing the program’s litigation, and conducting employee and stakeholder training. He also was called to testify as an expert witness several times in different matters. He directed the activities of 22 employees.

Pellegrini left Labor and Industries in 1991, to explore the possibility of writing for a living – and ended up working as a registered longshoreman in Tacoma, with ILWU Local 23.

His commitment to unions and unionism remains intact.