Grocery workers are prepared for the worst as negotiations grind toward the June 21 deadline, not only in L.A. but all over the country
By Mindy Farabee Los Angeles City Beat
June 21, 2007
Their contract expired in March and grocery workers formally gave their employers notice, just this past Friday, that strikes could begin as soon as June 22.
In Houston, Texas.
Three weeks ago, when Southern California grocery workers announced a June 21 deadline to end their six-month back-and-forth with the big three supermarket chains - Vons, Ralphs, and Albertsons - it took exactly one week for their union brethren in Texas to terminate their contract extensions and start talking work stoppage. On June 11, workers in Toledo, Ohio did likewise, switching from a general, ongoing contract extension to a "meeting-by-meeting" extension, at the same time that similar talks have heated up in Oregon and Washington State. Rumblings have even been heard coming out of talks with the mostly independent grocery chains in St. Louis, Missouri. Now, as Los Angeles' cut-off date arrives with no agreement in sight, some labor voices are warning not just about picket lines, but about nationwide picket lines.
"This is part of a much larger fight across the U.S., of companies attempting to eliminate middle class jobs for maximum shareholder profits," says Mike Shimpock, a spokesperson for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the union representing grocery workers, "It's happening all over the country . [these strikes] could certainly end up going national. They could engulf the entire West Coast. The markets are playing a very, very dangerous game of chicken in order to save a few pennies."
According to the UFCW, some 400,000 employees around the country have had or will have their contracts come up for renewal this year. This is a convergence union officials aren't yet willing to equate with a mass strike, but they do like to emphasize that this means they have nationwide clout and it's not just corporations who can speak with a unified voice. "Kroger [known as Ralphs in Southern California] is consistently taking similar approaches to each bargaining table, which is to jeopardize health care benefits," says Jill Cashen, a D.C.-based spokesperson for UFCW International. "Our members are preparing for picket lines, because Kroger is forcing our workers to prepare for picket lines because their demands are so unacceptable."
For the moment, cooler rhetoric is coming out of the big three's press office, where spokesperson Adena Tessler says her bosses "from Day One have been completely committed to reaching a settlement . and the companies remain committed." Tessler calls the Southern California deadline "arbitrary" and a media stunt designed to pressure the big three into quickly signing uncompetitive contracts, yet insists that the companies would be "delighted" to meet it, even as they refuse to be rushed to the table. "These are complex issues being discussed and we plan on taking our time in getting them right," Tessler says, adding, "These three companies and this same union have negotiated hundreds of contracts successfully and believe they can again."
But, according to Kent Wong, director of the Center for Labor Research and Education at UCLA, these talks' expanding context really signals the emergence of a more savvy labor presence. Furthermore, Wong says, these new tactics are not just an isolated example coming from the grocery industry. "Increasingly, what unions are trying to do is coordinate their efforts on a regional or national basis," Wong says, pointing to a recent push among hotel unions to line up their expiration dates nationally. "In their last round of negotiations, the three major supermarket chains entered into a profit-sharing pact that coordinated their bargaining efforts nationally, while the union still operated as if it were bargaining with simply, say, the Ralphs in Los Angeles. They've learned from this."
For their part, the unions are now insisting six months was more than enough time to hash out the differences and have openly questioned whether their corporate bargaining partners are making a good-faith effort to meet them half-way. "These companies need to get serious and get real and starting paying more attention to their employees' concerns," Cashen says.
The unions, however, aren't the only ones making accusations about bad-faith negotiating. Tessler maintains that the negotiations were progressing at a fair clip up until the companies were blindsided by the June 21 deadline. Moreover, she says, the unions are scoring some unfair PR points. "The [Southern California] union says their members have had no wage increases in the last four years, but they neglect to mention that in their last contract they negotiated for bonuses instead of wage increases," Tessler says. "Workers received $6 million in bonuses in 2006 alone." Between 2002 and 2006, critics note, supermarket CEOs collected pay raises of between 125 and 600 percent.
For a minute back in early June, it looked like this whole dispute might blow over, when the supermarkets declared the two parties were in near agreement over one of their major points of contention, overhauling a limited health care benefits package mandating 18- to-30-month waiting periods for eligibility. But labor officials quickly quashed that rumor, saying no deal had been reached on the subject of who would pay for these new improved benefits.
"They presented us with an offer that would cut their contribution 50 percent over last year," says Shimpock, adding that workers would then have to shoulder a significantly higher share of the health care burden.
"In order to fund health care benefits they want us to commit 80 percent of our reserves. This from markets which made $8.3 billion in combined profits last year," Shimpock adds.
Currently, each side says it's waiting to hear back from the other - union officials say they've received no response to a wage increase proposal submitted, while the supermarkets say they're awaiting word back on their changes to the health and welfare plan.
Even as the 11th hour approaches, all concerned continue to express a desire to head off another strike - 2004's almost five-month-long ordeal cost the supermarket chains some $2 billion in lost business plus huge additional retraining costs as many employees refused to return from the picket lines, while the workers themselves were nearly driven to bankruptcy. But the unions say they are in a significantly better position to withstand another work stoppage, and Cashen confirms that Los Angeles' employees have the full backing of the international union should they vote to walk. The supermarkets are taking a more optimistic approach, refusing to comment on a possible work stoppage.
On the heels of this brouhaha, documentarian Robert Greenwald, director of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices, has announced that his next project - tentatively entitled Supermarket Swindle - will take on the grocery business. Shimpock says Greenwald got the idea from the unions themselves, who reached out to the filmmaker after they came to the conclusion the supermarket chains used the discount retailer as a "straw man" to drive their own wages down. "[The big three] are attempting to emulate Wal-Mart with substandard, poverty level wages even though they make immense profits," Shimpock says.
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