By J. Douglas Stevens
Staff Writer
You recognize the faces of those holding up picket signs. You’ve probably never seen them in plain clothes, but you know these people.
More than 70,000 employees of three major grocery store chains in Southern California are out of work after going on strike Oct. 11. Talks between the United Food and Commercial Workers union and grocery store officials ended Oct. 5 after failed negotiations that chiefly concerned the workers’ cost of health care benefits.
Whether you want to support a family member or friend, or you have grown accustomed to a certain store’s selection, or it’s simply the convenience of the store’s location, you should support the local grocer.
We need the service they provide.
The union is supporting the strike and picketing effort. Clerks at Ralphs and Albertsons have been locked out of their jobs in support of the striking Vons workers, but the end result is the same — all 70,000 are sacrificing a significant portion of their paychecks. Major grocery chains work hard to promote a family-friendly image, but their attempts to cut benefits and decrease retirement funds suggests a profit-driven machine with little regard for the families that support it.
The new contract presented by their employers calls for a reduction in health benefits and pensions in order to cut labor costs for the supermarket giants, all in the name of competition.
Although cheap labor and poor benefits packages allows mega stores like Wal-Mart to clear massive profits and frequently open new locations, Vons, Ralphs and Albertsons are not hurting. The profits of these supermarket corporations have increased 95 percent during the past five years, yet their contributions to employee healthcare packages have only increased 10 percent as a result of rising healthcare costs.
The offer is on the table, but at present it’s not filling the plates of employees. And for new hires, it will barely bring home the bacon.
Safeway and Kroger companies (which, between the two, own Vons, Ralphs and Alberstons) have disguised a massive reduction in health benefits and pension withholdings as a relatively small increase in weekly insurance premium pay. Over a term of the proposed three-year contract, almost $1 billion in prescription costs, doctors visits, hospitals stays and surgeries would be shifted from the employer to the employee, as in every other industry in the last few years.
So, do we support the hardworking people who provide that service, or do we simply support our habits out of convenience? Should we walk past locked-out and striking employees and give our money to parsimonious corporations, paying for our groceries elsewhere?
These people have a job to do. It’s their duty to demand adequate pay, comprehensive medical benefits and a decent retirement, and if it wasn’t worth fighting for, the union would not be striking.
When negotiations fail, you have to speak the language of big business – big dollars. So far, the strike effort has caused the markets to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Maybe market officials should reconsider.
It appears that corporate greed has blinded officials to the needs of the working man. Is the current economic strain worth a few percentage points in the long term? It is when your No. 1 concern is the bottom line. Metropolitan Transit Authority mechanics are striking against a nearly identical display of corporate irresponsibility. Nearly 2,400 buses throughout Los Angeles County operating under the MTA are standing still, leaving more than a half million commuters without a ride. And while the silence has been broken and negotiations have been resumed, who knows when buses, subways and light rails will once again be operational.
The potential effects of this strike are catastrophic, the longer this lockout continues. These supermarket chains comprise more than 900 stores in the Southern California area, which is a whopping 60 percent of the market. And since this all started on Oct. 11, thousands of workers in other states have followed suit, including West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Missouri.
Employees are sacrificing a significant portion of their paychecks in an effort to earn what they deserve and what their families deserve. All they are asking of you is that you hold on to yours.
October 23, 2003