Militant/James Vincent

UFCW members picket Vons supermarket January 17 in Santa Monica, California.

The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, has issued a call for a “Day of Solidarity, Massive March and Rally” for noon that day at the Great Western Forum in Inglewood, California. Union organizers say they expect to mobilize more than 20,000 unionists and other supporters of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) strike. Many unions are organizing buses.

The UFCW struck Vons and Pavilions stores, owned by Safeway Inc., October 11; Ralphs, which is owned by Kroger, and Albertsons locked out UFCW members the next day. All four stores are part of the same collective bargaining unit of the union. The strike and lockout affects more than 850 stores in Southern California.

The grocery bosses are seeking $1 billion worth of health-care cuts, a wage freeze for the first two years of the contract, and a substantially lower pay and benefit scale for new hires.

The strike enjoys wide support in Southern California. “We’ve been out for more than three months and it has not been easy,” said Jessie González, a union representative for UFCW Local 1442 in Santa Monica. “We’ve gotten fantastic, unbelievable support from the community, which the company did not expect.”

The call for a large show of support on January 31 comes at the same time that strikers are pressuring the UFCW to put up pickets at Ralphs supermarkets. The union pulled the pickets on October 31 in what was described by the union as a “goodwill gesture” to get negotiations going.

The second week of January, locked-out UFCW grocery workers in San Diego County began picketing Ralphs stores again. “A proposal for locked-out grocery clerks to picket Ralphs supermarkets’ loading docks as a wildcat action was instead given official sanction by San Diego Local 135 of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union,” reported the January 13 North County Times.

The picketing of stores has started to spread to the other six striking UFCW locals. UFCW local 1167 has begun organizing pickets in front of Ralphs stores in the Inland Empire. Local 770, the largest grocery local on strike, has issued a call for “Back to Picketing at Ralphs ‘For a Day’” on January 18.

The increase in picketing comes in the wake of reports that Ralphs hired 50-100 locked-out workers using fake names and Social Security numbers. The UFCW has filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board.

In addition, grocery workers here learned this week that Safeway, the third largest U.S. supermarket company, will close 12 Dominick’s stores in and around Chicago, laying off about 800 UFCW members.

“We are doing this for other people, not just us,” said Carmen Valdvia, a produce worker at Albertsons. “We look forward to the rally planned for January 31. No matter what, we’re hanging in there.”

Betsey Stone contributed to this article  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home