Dec. 18—From southern California to Canada and across the United States, United Food and Commercial Workers activists and their progressive allies are planning actions and getting set to ask shoppers to stay away from Safeway grocery stores. Safeway’s CEO Steve Burd is leading a coalition of grocers demanding deep cuts in workers’ health coverage as well as lower wages for new hires.
The success of the union movement-wide Hold the Line for Health Care campaign is important to all workers, whether or not they are represented by a union, says Jenifer Riddagh, a UFCW Local 1036 member and 29-year veteran of Safeway-owned Vons stores in southern California. “What happens to us will affect everyone’s ability to purchase not just affordable but adequate health care,” she says. “All employers are going to take a cue from what happens with us. If we go down on health care, everybody goes down.”
Los Angeles Rally Kicks Off North American Expansion
In Los Angeles, 10,000 union activists and allies turned out Dec. 16 to support 59,000 grocery workers, on strike or locked-out for nine weeks, who have been joined on the picket lines by members of the Teamsters. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, UFCW President Douglas Dority, Screen Actors President Melissa Gilbert and other union leaders rallied with workers and southern California community and religious activists as they announced picket expansions and boycotts throughout North America.
“We want to empty the stores as well as the cash drawers,” Dority said. “Safeway only understands money, so we will take action to cut them off from the source of their money—workers, consumers and communities.”
Hundreds of southern California, West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky UFCW members set up lines at Safeway grocery stores in Washington, D.C., Nov. 24, the campaign’s first East Coast outpost. At a 300-strong rally, local labor, religious and community leaders joined the workers in calling for solidarity in the Washington metro area and urged customers to support workers’ fight for affordable health care by spending their holiday dollars elsewhere.
Fund-Raising in the Heart of Hollywood
Tonight at the Roxy Theatre on Los Angeles’ famed Sunset Strip, top musicians, including Tom Morello and Brad Wilk of Audioslave, Serj Tankian of System of a Down, Boots Riley of The Coup and Lester Chambers of the Chambers Brothers, will play at a UFCW workers' benefit concert at 7:30 p.m., doors will open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20 and are available at the Roxy box office or through Ticketmaster. Concert host Janeane Garafolo also hosted the recent AFL-CIO-sponsored “Tell Us the Truth” music and rap national tour featuring Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, Chambers and other top artists.
Donations to striking families may be made online through the AFL-CIO or sent to the UFCW Strike Hardship Fund; Attention: Secretary-Treasurer Joe Hansen; 1775 K St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006.
3,300 Grocery Workers Ratify New Contract
On Dec. 11, 3,300 UFCW Local 400 members at 44 Kroger supermarkets in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia ratified a new contract in which Kroger increases its annual health care contribution by $12 million—$3 million more than the company’s offer. In California, Kroger owns the Ralphs supermarkets where UFCW members still are holding the line. In Indiana, some 4,000 UFCW Local 700 Kroger workers have worked without a new contract for nearly a month.
Since the lockout and strike began, Kroger has reported a 57 percent drop in third quarter earning and the company reduced its economic forecast for the rest of the year.
Profitable Grocers
The grocers—whose combined profits are 91 percent higher than four years ago and whose health care contributions are far below the national average, according to the UFCW—claim they must slash health care to compete with nonunion, low-wage Wal-Mart, which plans to open 40 super-centers over the next four years in California. At the end of those four years, those super-centers would make up 1 percent of the California grocery sector, according to financial analysts.
The grocers are demanding what amounts to a 75 percent cut in health coverage for new workers and a 50 percent cut for current ones—Wal-Mart-style coverage that leaves workers vulnerable to financial catastrophe if they become seriously ill. As a result, UFCW leaders say premium contributions would gobble workers’ pay and meaningful health care would be unattainable. Workers could lose key benefits, including dental, vision, well-baby care and preventive office visits—and might have to pay as much as half of a $20,000 hospital bill.
“If Safeway is so worried about Wal-Mart, why isn’t it working with us to keep Wal-Mart out of California, or to help UFCW organize it?” Vons cashier Riddagh asks. “For many reasons, including not only these outrageous demands for Wal-Mart-style health coverage but daily disrespect on the job, we are walking the line and we will fight one day longer than Safeway CEO Steve Burd and the grocers who have joined him.”
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