Expanded picket lines and strike support rallies are being held at many of the 850 stores where workers went on strike or were locked out four months ago. At some stores picketers have briefly blocked entrances recently. In each of these cases strikers have been quickly arrested by the cops and taken to a police station, cited for trespassing, and released. Large numbers of customers continue to decline to shop at the affected stores. The UFCW has garnered considerable support from other unions in this region and nationally.

At the same time, the grocery bosses are sticking to their demand that workers accept a contract proposal containing deep union-weakening concessions.

“Grocery Stocks Rise on Hopes for End to Strike” boasted a headline in the February 20 Los Angeles Times. “Shares of Safeway, Kroger and Albertsons rally as negotiators meet for the ninth straight day,” said the subheading.

The stocks of these grocery giants trade at or near their 52-week highs. Wall Street financiers hope that the intransigence of the bosses will soon be paying off in lower costs for the employers by a further proliferation of “Wal-Mart” type stores—that is, intensifying the exploitation of labor.

From the beginning, the employers forced the strike on the union and have held the initiative in the confrontation.

The bosses are pressing for some combination of lower starting pay and longer wage progressions that top out at substantially lower levels for new hires, a longer waiting period for new hires to get second-rate medical benefits, and other takeaways. Such concessions would divide the workforce at Safeway-owned Vons/Pavilions, Kroger-owned Ralphs, and Albertsons supermarkets. Striking and locked out employees would be faced with a substantial shift of medical costs onto their backs.

The negotiations restarted after a February 4 proposal by the union to submit the dispute to binding arbitration and ask their members to return to work under the old contract. In a sign of strength, the three big grocery chains rejected the offer. The talks are now reportedly being “supervised” by federal mediator Peter J. Hurtgen.

As the renewed negotiations began, the big-business press reported that the two sides were far apart. “Union officials said they have offered hundreds of millions of dollars in savings to the employers, but the chains have rejected the proposals,” KABC TV reported February 16. “Negotiators for the supermarket chains contend the union counter-offer still would raise their labor costs above acceptable levels.”

Across the country, the grocery bosses seem to have some wind in their sails at the moment.

The February 17 Washington Post reported that the 350-store chain Stop & Shop in New England “backed down” from some of its concession demands. But under a recently ratified contract covering 37,000 workers at that company, the grocery chain won a significant decrease in labor costs. The Post said that “new part-time workers will wait two years to qualify for health benefits, up from one year. Those part-time workers will also be paid differently. It now takes a part-time worker three years to reach an hourly wage of $9.50; under the new contract, it will take six years.”

The grocery bosses explain their intransigence by pointing to the specter of nonunion Wal-Mart “supercenters” moving into California. These stores sell a full line of groceries along with other merchandise. The first one to open in this state will be in La Quinta, near Palm Springs, California, this spring. Dozens more are projected, posing the challenge to the labor movement—and especially to the UFCW. In order to stand up to the grocery bosses, the union will have to take on organizing Wal-Mart workers as a fight that must be waged alongside the battle against Safeway and the other grocery chains, in California and nationally.

Such a joint fight would mean abandoning the union’s heavy reliance on Democratic Party public officials to use zoning restrictions and other ploys to keep Wal-Mart from setting up shop. The UFCW and the Teamsters union have raised more than $1 million to finance an “anti-Wal-Mart” campaign in the region. But to date, Wal-Mart has not had much difficulty in defeating these campaigns when they have cropped up around the country.

Since moving into the grocery business in 1988, the Arkansas-based retail giant is now the largest seller of groceries in the United States. On average Wal-Mart’s grocery prices are 10 to 15 percent lower than competing grocery chains. Wal-Mart is the largest U.S. private employer, with 1.3 million employees worldwide, nearly 3,000 stores, and annual sales of $245 billion. Not a single one of its stores is organized by a union. The company recently collaborated with immigration authorities that raided many of its stores as part of government-boss collusion to defeat union-organizing efforts by targeting undocumented immigrant workers who labor under the lowest pay and worst conditions at Wal-Mart.

UFCW officials were not prepared for the stubborn insistence on deep cuts by Safeway and the other chains here. From the beginning of the strike, Safeway’s chairman declared that the bosses’ contract offer was “as good as it gets,” and that they were ready to take “debt” to reach their goals.

Rick Icaza, president of UFCW Local 770, said in an interview in the February 16 Los Angeles Times that “he knew the bargaining would be contentious but that he had always worked out solutions with the stores—and expected he could again.”

“He was wrong, by at least four months,” the Times commented. “‘I felt that by having that relationship… we had passed the era of a need for strikes,’ Icaza said. ‘I thought those days were over.’”

As part of their strategy, the employers have highlighted the high salaries UFCW officials get, compared to low wages of union members, implying that the labor officialdom is simply out to preserve its dues base and “boss-like” standard of living, not to protect workers. The capitalist media have gone after UFCW officials for their “generous” salaries. Icaza, for example, is reportedly paid $273,000 a year. The Times said that Icaza, 70, is “a multimillionaire from decades of investing in Southern California real estate.”

The same daily celebrated the “more resolute” stance of Safeway and the other grocers in its February 11 edition. “By contrast, tactics hailed by the UFCW as silver bullets have been tried and discarded. The union persuaded the Teamsters to join the strike, but they stuck it out for only 30 days. The AFL-CIO was called in, then told to hold off, then allowed to take over national strategy.”

UFCW officials predicted that the Teamsters union move to bolster the strike at the big distribution centers would be a “staggering blow” to the chains. But the grocery bosses responded with “contingency plans” that included hiring hundreds of strikebreakers to drive the trucks from the distribution centers to the supermarkets. One of the scab-herding outfits has supplied strikebreakers at “coal mines and auto plants,” according to an article in the Los Angeles Times.

On the numbers of strikers and locked-out workers involved, a spokesperson for the UFCW said February 12 that the figure used earlier of 70,000 workers affected by this conflict included 11,000 who have not been on strike or locked out. They work for grocery stores that have a “me too” agreement with the union to accept whatever contract comes out of the negotiations with Safeway, Ralphs, and Albertsons.

Some 9 percent of the striking Vons and Pavilions workers have reportedly crossed the picket lines. A big majority of the striking and locked out workers are determined to last “one day longer” than their bosses. At many stores they have been backed by the majority of shoppers who have gone elsewhere to buy food.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home