from the BERKELEY [CALIFORNIA] DAILY PLANET :
Berkeley Daily Planet Edition Date: Friday, June 6, 2003
Berkeley Bowl Staff Pushes to Form Union By DAVID SCHARFENBERG (06-06-03)
For 26 years, the Berkeley Bowl grocery store has provided customers with a taste of everything Berkeley-organic fruit, upscale orange juice, tattooed cashiers and baggers working their way through college. Now, shoppers are getting a dash of another local flavor: labor strife.
In the last two weeks, a small group of workers have gone public with their attempt to unionize the South Berkeley supermarket-contacting the press, talking to customers and distributing union authorization cards to the store's roughly 250 employees.
The union drive, opposed by management, comes at a critical time for Berkeley Bowl, which is planning to build a second store in West Berkeley on Ninth and Heinz streets next year.
Tim Hamann, president of the Oakland-based United Food & Commercial Workers Butchers' Union, Local 120, which will represent Berkeley Bowl workers if they decide to unionize, said the city should not approve a new project for a company that offers "substandard" wages in its existing store.
"Why would you want a fungus like that to spread?" he asked.
Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates said he supports the right of workers to unionize, but will not weigh the effort in any permitting decisions.
"I'm in favor of unions but I'm not going to have it color my decision on a land use issue," he said, adding that Berkeley Bowl has provided the city with a "wonderful service" for decades.
In the meantime, the grocery store's general manager Dan Kataoka said he is concerned that the publicity surrounding the unionization effort, and management's opposition, could push away customers in a pro-union town.
"I'm sure it's going to have a negative influence on the store," he said. "I just hope people recognize that there are two sides to the story."
Workers complain about a health care policy that requires six months of full-time work before an employee is eligible for coverage. Local unionized grocers like Safeway and Andronico's, by contrast, offer coverage to full-time and part-time workers after a 60-day probation period.
But employees say their main concern is pay. The Berkeley Bowl wage scale, which ranges from $7 to $19.50 per hour for non-management employees, is roughly on par with those of union grocers. But workers say that pay hikes at Berkeley Bowl are infrequent and arbitrary.
"It's really dictated by favoritism," said Eric Feezell, a produce clerk who has been active in the union push.
Store manager Larry Evans acknowledged that the wage scale is erratic and said workers deserve regular evaluations and, for those who are performing at a satisfactory level or better, consistent raises.
"I think it does need to be a structured system," he said. "It's only fair."
Evans acknowledged that the pay scale is not the only problem at Berkeley Bowl. He said the growing interest in unionization has made it clear that management has done a poor job of communicating with workers over the years and listening to their concerns.
"We haven't done everything right and we recognize that," said Evans. "We are really taking a good, hard look in the mirror."
But managers have made it clear that they don't believe bringing in a union will help. In recent weeks they have distributed anti-union flyers, held meetings with employees to raise doubts about the union and, in one case, asked workers if they had signed union authorization cards, in an apparent violation of federal law which forbids coercion of employees.
"It was our error," said Kataoka, discussing the potential legal violation. "We blundered 100 percent."
Workers pushing the union are enlisting the help of high-profile local and national organizers. Last weekend, Father Bill O'Donnell of St. Joseph the Worker's Church, who has been arrested more than 200 times for civil disobedience, distributed pamphlets to workers at the store.
Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers of America with Cesar Chavez, made an appearance at Berkeley Bowl Thursday, urging workers to unionize.
"It's kind of an anomaly to have a non-union store in Berkeley," she said. "This is a bastion of liberalism."
Several customers interviewed outside Berkeley Bowl this week said they would consider boycotting the store if asked by workers. But Kevin Meyer, a cashier who is helping to organize the movement, said employees are not yet calling for a boycott.
"I shop there," he said. "I think it's a great store."
Berkeley Bowl is not the only non-union grocer in the city. Whole Foods and North Berkeley's Monterey Foods do not have representation either.
Bill Andronico, president of the unionized Andronico's, said Whole Foods has shown that a non-union shop can still satisfy workers.
"If you have the right culture and the employees are involved, it can work," he said.
Jayar Pugao, a front end supervisor at Whole Foods on Telegraph Ave., said management was responsive during a recent flare-up over a change in health care coverage.
"Once we did voice our opinions, they found a way to get us involved," he said.
But workers pushing for a union at Berkeley Bowl said they do not trust management to initiate change without a union in place.
If organizers succeed in getting a union installed, it will not be the first time workers have had representation. Berkeley Bowl employees elected to join the Retail Clerks Union, which later became the United Food & Commercial Workers' Union, Local 870, shortly after the store's founding in 1977. But workers rejected the union in 1986.
John Nunes, assistant to the president at Local 870, said management offered workers false promises of better wages and working conditions in the mid-eighties to coax them into dumping the union. But Kataoka said workers simply believed they could get a better deal negotiating directly with the company. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20030607/6ff458ef/attachment.htm>