No negotiations have been held since the strike began on October 11, and none are scheduled. The outcome of this labor battle is being watched closely, and not just by grocery workers.

About 83,000 grocery workers have picket lines up in five states. Contract negotiations are bogged down in all these states, with defense of health benefits the main issue. The bosses’ main aim is to shift the burden of rising health-care costs to workers.

The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) launched the strike against Vons and Pavilions stores, both owned by Safeway Inc., October 11. The following day Albertson’s and Kroger Co.’s Ralphs stores locked out their workers in a show of support for the Safeway bosses. In all, some 859 stores have been affected by the walkout in Southern California and parts of central California.

Despite an unrelenting barrage of antiunion full-page ads in local newspapers, and widely discounted commercials to lure customers to break the strike, most people are honoring the picket lines and shopping elsewhere.

Almost every day the union is organizing rallies and beefing up picketing at different stores. Much of the solidarity is spontaneous too. Erik Hirning, picket captain at Ralphs in Long Beach, told this reporter that students from the California State University Long Beach campus have been joining their picket lines. “One campus group, La Raza, has been coming down on Sundays,” Hirning said. “They brought pizza and water for us.”

“We’re getting a lot of support from longshoremen, Teamsters, transit workers, school bus drivers,” said Marvell Gilmore, a bagger from Ralphs in Long Beach. “The public supports us because they know we deserve a lot better and that they are trying to take health care from everyone.”

The Daily Bruin Online reported that 40 UCLA students, chanting “shop somewhere else,” staged a pro-UFCW protest inside a Ralphs store near the campus.

The union estimates that traffic at the three chains has plummeted by 75 percent. Deliveries of food and other products are down too, hours are being cut, and goods are either being thrown away or donated to charities. The UFCW also estimates that the three chains are losing about $100 million a week in sales. The three grocery chains have so far not released information on how the strike has impacted business.

Outside Ralphs in Monterey Park, locked-out worker Ray Bustamante said, “Business is way down inside. The deli is closed. The bakery is shut and the meat department is closed.”

The third week of October, Albertson’s sought to win a temporary restraining order to restrict or eliminate pickets at its stores. In a victory for the union, this request was turned down by a Santa Ana Superior Court. The judge has set a November 12 hearing for a preliminary injunction.

In a related development, the union filed two lawsuits against the grocery bosses in an attempt to force the companies to continue funding the health-care plan. The union says that without this funding the health trust fund will go bankrupt. The companies report that they will no longer make monthly contributions. The struck companies say they made their last payment of $40 million October 20.

All along, the grocery chains have been playing hardball. Safeway Inc. chief executive Steven Burd said the contract offer from the big chains was “as good as it gets.” Burd, who has a reputation as a union buster, added, “They’re not going to see a better offer than this. This offer does a marvelous job of protecting existing employees. They still have Cadillac benefits when it’s over.”

The so-called “Cadillac benefits” were rejected by 97 percent of union members. Through slick advertising the grocery bosses are portraying UFCW workers as unreasonable by not accepting “the new reality of health care.” One of their ads proclaims, “More than 90 percent of American workers now pay part of their own health-care premiums.” They claim that grocery workers will be paying a “very small portion”—$5 for individuals and $15 for families per week.

Picketers are quick to expose company propaganda. “They keep saying we’re on strike because we don’t want to pay $5 or $15 toward our health care premium,” said Dave Narasky, who works at Albertson’s. “If that was all it was, we would accept it. But they want to make us pay 50 percent on hospital visits and prescriptions and make large co-payments on visits to the doctor.”

In the previous contract, if a grocery worker had a $20,000 hospital bill, he or she would be covered 100 percent. Now they would be responsible for paying $10,000.

The union says the $5 premium could rise to $95 a week to maintain the current level of health coverage. Right now no worker pays any portion.

What’s more, it is much worse for new hires. The union says the “new hire rate would result in approximately a 75 percent benefit reduction.” The grocery bosses would pay into the health fund between $8,400 and $11,000 a year for a full-time worker, but new hires would receive only $2,808 a year, a 64 percent reduction. The union figures that the companies would rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in additional profits over the life of the three-year contract if they succeed in forcing through these proposals, while workers will take a big hit.

The union’s chief benefits consultant, Sidney Abrams, called it a “pathetic sham of a health plan” that many would simply opt not to buy. The grocery bosses’ proposal for new hires here would fit the Wal-Mart pattern, where only half the retail giant’s workforce of 1.2 million is covered by a health plan.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home