Bitter Defeat 4 California Grocery Workers

By Jeff Mackler

As we go to press, 70,000 striking southern California supermarket workers, members of several locals affiliated with the United Food & Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), voted by an 86 percent margin to accept a new contract that included major losses in health care and wages.

The defeat, following a 138-day strike, the longest and largest even in the industry, will undoubtedly be used by the three major supermarket chains to try and impose similar settlements across the country.

On day one of the strike, when UFCW officials established picket lines at the giant Safeway chain only, which includes Von’s and Pavillions stores, the employers immediately locked out all UFCW members in the region – including workers at Albertson’s and Kroger supermarkets, which turn own others stores including Lucky’s and Ralph’s. In total, 852 stores were involved, either due to the strike or company lockout.

The employers were well-prepared for a fight, including an advance agreement to share any losses should only one of the major chains be struck. They were also armed ideologically, claiming that reduced wages, pensions, and health care were required to remain competitive with the non-union behemoth Wal-Mart chain, which plans to open some 40 southern California stores in the next five years.

The UFCW officials, on the other hand, opened negotiations with a proposal to grant the bosses one-third of a billion dollars in concessions even before negotiations began.

These union fakers, who routinely receive salaries comparable to top corporate executives, began with a losing strategy and followed it to the bitter end – that is, until they judged that a demoralized rank and file was hungry enough to vote for any proposed agreement in order to get back to work.

Although early on in the strike, UFCW officials allowed rank-and-filers to picket Teamster-organized distribution centers, where Teamster members respected UFCW picket lines for a short time, complaining Teamster officials and compliant UFCW bureaucrats soon agreed to take down these lines as a “gesture of good faith to the employers.”

While the employers lost an estimated $2 billion over the course of the strike due to customers who supported the union by shopping elsewhere, no one doubts that the loss is minor in comparison to the gains made at the expense of the striking workers.

The new contract includes a two-tier wage system, which new workers starting at wage levels ranging from 90 cents to $2.80 less per hour and never reaching the top tier wage of $17.90. New hires will also be subjected to a severely reduced pension plan, if any, plus an inferior health plan, with an average yearly premium of $450 as opposed to zero in premium costs for current employees.

Initial estimates are that the union tops negotiated and recommended for approval a contract that will have new hires earning on average $8,000 per year less than current workers. It is likely that the contract’s fine print will allow for increased numbers of low-wage part-time workers at even lower rates and no benefits.

The stinging defeat is all the more tragic because the unions involved had the immediate power to halt the employer in their tracks. A mass picket line at all distribution centers, organized by the Teamsters and the UFCW, would have almost immediately emptied all struck stores of groceries.

A combined campaign to organize Wal-Mart, the largest corporation in the world, would have eliminated employer excuses and provided top union wages for the newly-organized workers, not to mention inspiration to the entire labor movement.

The 14-million member AFL-CIO and its spineless bureaucrats stood by as the defeat predictably unfolded, issuing regular pronouncements of “solidarity” while doing little or nothing to fortify their striking affiliates in the face of an employer offensive that had been planned years in advance.

The national UFCW tops pressured for a settlement by cutting strike benefits and empathizing with the billionaire bosses who whined about future competition from still non-existent Wal-Mart stores.

Lacking a class-struggle left wing of experienced union fighters, it was not to be expected that the present crop of pro-capitalist bureaucrats would or could offer anything but token resistance. Rather than “organized the unorganized,” labor’s rallying cry of decades past, they undermined those who have struggled for decades to achieve something resembling a decent wage and benefit package.

The defeat follows similar sellouts over the past three decades and longer. It will take a dramatic return to rank-and-file organization and fighting unionism to oust the pathetic lot of kiss-ass officials who currently mislead the UFCW and most other unions today.

The ranks demonstrated that they were prepared to undertake great hardship and a strike of historic magnitude to win an important victory for themselves and the generation to come.

They were betrayed from day one by a hardened bureaucracy that is skilled at maneuver and deception but still fearful that a resurgent membership might see through their pretense and take union power into their own hands to fight the bosses until victory.