Hoisting banners and American flags, hundreds of AFL-CIO members rallied on Wall Street last week in a show of support for the 4-month-old California supermarket strike.
Stock analysts hardly noticed. They were more interested in the message delivered the day before, when three grocery companies flatly rejected a United Food and Commercial Workers union proposal that the contract dispute be submitted to binding arbitration.
That episode revealed "increasing weakness in position" on the part of the UFCW, Lisa Cartwright of brokerage Smith Barney wrote to clients as the union activists, bundled up against the cold, assembled near the New York Stock Exchange. She didn't mention them.
The Wall Street fumble was the latest misstep in a strike that has been criticized as lacking a clear, consistent and forceful strategy. Unlike the three-week-long walkout by Los Angeles janitors in 2000, which is studied by scholars for its innovation and successful outcome, the supermarket strike is likely to be remembered for its miscalculations, academics and other observers said...
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/02/11/2349512
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