Above, 300 members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union and supporters picket and rally outside a Safeway supermarket in Washington, D.C., November 22 to urge residents not to shop at Safeway stores, whose owners have locked out their southern California workforce. They were joined by contingents of grocery workers from California, West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky. In the latter three states 3,300 workers are locked out by the Kroger chain. The rally was joined by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton and a number of AFL-CIO officials, including the federation’s president John Sweeney. The same day, similar rallies took place in Los Angeles and Oakland. The Los Angeles rally drew 1,500 strikers and supporters. In Oakland another 500 rallied and marched to a Safeway store. That action was joined by contingents of Teamsters, some of whom work at Safeway and Albertsons distribution warehouses in the Bay Area. “This is a good example of the unions coming together,” said Scott Pulido, a Teamsters Local 70 member and worker at an Albertsons warehouse in San Leandro, California, “and I wanted to be a part of it.” The 70,000 locked out workers in California got a boost November 24 with the announcement that the Teamsters union will halt deliveries to grocery chains, shutting off supplies during Thanksgiving week—one of the year’s busiest.
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