No End in Sight for Store Strike

Prospects for resolving the supermarket strike by year-end appeared increasingly remote Monday after talks on a new contract broke off without significant movement on the key issues of health-care insurance and a proposed lower wage scale for new hires.

Frustrated by the stalemate, United Food and Commercial Workers Union President Doug Dority said he had summoned leaders of union locals from around the country to Southern California to help plot strategy.

The supermarkets said they had made a new contract offer that would provide an “outstanding wage and benefit” package, but the union dismissed it as inadequate.

Peter J. Hurtgen, the normally circumspect director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, referred to the negotiations that ended late Sunday as “difficult.” He said he would not call the parties back until he determined “that it might be fruitful to resume face-to-face discussions.”

The talks’ derailment was a blow to striking and locked-out UFCW members who are moving into their third month without regular paychecks. Many had hoped that a recent sympathy strike by Teamsters drivers and warehouse workers, combined with the strike-related financial losses reported by Albertsons Inc. last week, would force the three supermarket chains to reconsider hard-line positions.

“It was kind of heartbreaking,” said Gail Holguin, 45, a strike captain at a Vons in Pacific Palisades. “We figure we’re out past Christmas now ... there is no end in sight.”

In a statement Monday, Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons touted their revised offer, made to the UFCW last week.

The new offer does address several union concerns, promising to beef up a reserve to keep an employee health-care plan afloat, for example, and withdrawing a requirement that workers take an unpaid two-hour lunch during slow periods. But the offer no longer includes a 30-cent raise in the contract’s third year, a raise that was included in a proposed pact overwhelmingly rejected by union members two months ago. And, the UFCW complained, the new offer would not maintain “affordable health care for working families.”

The three chains continue to demand that there be a cap on their contributions to the health plan, which would force the union to pass on increases in medical costs to members by raising deductibles or reducing services.

The companies also want a substantially lower wage and benefit package for new hires. For example, under management’s proposal, health care for new employees would cost the companies about one-third of what they would pay for current employees.

The UFCW launched its strike against Safeway Inc.-owned Vons stores in Southern and Central California on Oct. 11. Ralphs and Albertsons locked out their union workers the next day. In all, about 70,000 workers are affected.

With the lines drawn and no immediate resolution in sight, the labor dispute is taking on a larger national significance, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at UC Santa Barbara.

“Some strikes begin to transcend themselves and this is one of them,” he said. “It is becoming a politicized event which people need to take a stand on, one way or another.”

At stake is the notion of employer-paid health benefits, he said, and even more broadly, the power of unions in the emerging service economy. A perceived win for the union could force other employers to think twice before making significant benefit cuts; a loss could set off a wave of concession bargaining.

“The national labor movement certainly sees this as a decisive event which will set the course for social policy in the U.S. for many years to come,” Lichtenstein said.

The grocery chains have said they have no choice but to pare the relatively high wages and benefits enjoyed by their workers in order to compete with nonunion Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which is moving into the grocery business in California. Union supermarket workers now earn on average of $13 an hour, and many veteran clerks make nearly $18 an hour. Even part-time workers receive fully paid family health insurance.

In their statement Monday, the companies said their latest offer “will continue to provide the current workforce with outstanding wage and benefit programs while better positioning the companies to face the enormous challenges of the changing competitive landscape.”

Vons spokeswoman Sandra Calderon would not respond to questions about the latest offer. Asked about the prospects for a resolution, she said, “I can’t comment or speculate on how long it’s going to continue.”

Representatives of Ralphs and Albertsons did not return phone calls Monday.

Rick Icaza, president of UFCW Local 770 in Los Angeles, said the union had offered to accept some cuts, in the form of higher co-pays for doctor visits or prescription medicine, for example. He said the union also had proposed a longer wage progression for new hires, so that it would take a worker several years longer to reach top scale.

“In my whole history with the union, we’ve never come in and proposed cuts in medical care, and this time, we made a significant proposal and it wasn’t good enough for them,” Icaza said. “It’s apparent now this is going to go through Christmas.”

The UFCW is now calling hundreds of union local presidents and other officials from across the country to Los Angeles next Tuesday for a summit on the strike.

“We want to throw the question out there, How do we win this strike? Because we can’t lose it,” said Greg Denier, communications director for the national union.

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Times staff writer Ronald D. White contributed to this report.

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On February 12, 2004 the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which had stated repeatedly that 70,000 workers were involved in the supermarket labor dispute in Central and Southern California, said that the number of people on strike or locked out was actually 59,000. A union spokeswoman, Barbara Maynard, said that 70,000 UFCW members were, in fact, covered by the labor contract with supermarkets that expired last year. But 11,000 of them worked for Stater Bros. Holdings Inc., Arden Group Inc.’s Gelson’s and other regional grocery companies and were still on the job. (See: “UFCW Revises Number of Workers in Labor Dispute,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2004, Business C-11)

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