Next in line - Article in SFBG about Grocery Worker Struggle for Healthcare and Wages

By Rachel Brahinsky

When 70,000 grocery workers were on strike or locked out in southern California for nearly five months last winter, the response in the Bay Area outside the labor movement was pretty mild. Packs of picketers marched in front of several Safeway stores. But typically their rallies only drew small crowds, and it was hard to say whether enough local shoppers were staying away from Safeway, which was the largest of the big grocers involved in the strike, to have an impact on the company's negotiating position.

But in less than a month, contracts for some 30,000 Bay Area grocery workers are set to expire (oddly, on the inauspicious date of Sept. 11), and a major labor action or boycott of some kind seems likely.

It's a conflict that has implications for us all. If the grocers push for a contract that's anything like the one they signed with the SoCal workers, a new study by the UC Berkeley Labor Center shows, state and local governments will end up taking a hit of as much as $293 million in public health costs over the next three years.

Labor watchers will be paying close attention to the grocery talks, both because of the volume of workers involved (the United Food and Commercial Workers will be negotiating with Safeway, Albertsons, and several smaller chains including Bell Market and Andronicos) and the issues at stake.

"This is a precedent-setting labor moment for grocers and grocery workers nationwide," Christopher Martin, a communications professor at the University of Northern Iowa, told the Bay Guardian in an e-mail.

Martin, who just published the book Framed: Labor and the Corporate Media, said the Bay Area grocery workers represent the "best chance" to slow the trend that's been established in major labor negotiations over the past several years of forcing workers to accept lower pay and higher health insurance premiums.

The southern California agreement was part of this trend. In the end workers there agreed to a two-tiered system, which will eventually lower average grocery wages, while cutting into retiree pension plans and potentially shaving the number of employees with health coverage significantly.

Esai Alday says he dreads the thought of life under a similar agreement. He's a shop steward with the UFCW, which is representing the grocery workers in contract talks, and has worked for Albertsons in San Francisco for about seven years.

"The campaign breaks down to whether or not we're going to be able to survive in the Bay Area," Alday told us. Safeway and the other grocers haven't officially made their contract demands public, but if the SoCal contract is replicated here, Alday said, "We would have to get a second or a third job, to survive – but many of us already have second or third jobs."

Average salaries could go down from $24,882 a year to $18,711 within three years' time, the Labor Center study says, and as much as 53 percent of the workforce would no longer have health insurance.

The grocery workers are far from alone. In California over the past year, SBC and Verizon workers, Bay Area janitors, and others all struck – or came close to striking – largely over health care.

As health costs soar (by about 13 to 15 percent annually) and as the federal government fails to enact reforms, "health care has been the central issue in most labor conflicts over the past few years," said Ken Jacobs, a Labor Center policy analyst.

To grocery managers, cutting wages and benefits is just part of staying afloat. "Across the industry we have to find ways of controlling health care costs and continue to offer the jobs we offer now," Safeway spokesperson Teena Massingill told us. "We have to do what is smart and necessary."

In the background of the grocery struggle is Wal-Mart, the besieged company accused of sexism in hiring and pay, making employees work off the clock, and setting a low bar for wages in the industry. In addition to mammoth aisles of electronics, clothes, and household goods, some Wal-Mart stores sell groceries.

"They often mention Wal-Mart," Alday said. "They tell us Wal-Mart is coming to take our jobs and they can't afford to continue on this path, and that they're trying to find new technology such as self-checkout to alleviate 'cost burdens,' which means us."

The November election will provide another backdrop for the talks. On the federal level, presidential candidate John Kerry has promised health reform, although he's stopped short of shooting for universal care. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's people are trying to repeal the 2003 law sponsored by state senator John Burton that requires many California businesses to offer employees coverage.

The UC Berkeley Labor Center report, and another report by the center on the public cost of Wal-Mart's labor practices, can be accessed at http://www.laborcenter.berkeley.edu/. For more information on the organizing campaign that's underway, go to http://www.bayareacoalition.org.