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Some Store Workers Giving Up the Fight

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Times Staff Writers

Jo Ann Behrens spent her last day in the grocery business bundled up against the winter chill on a picket line in Riverside.

She had been pulling eight-hour shifts in the Ralphs parking lot for too long. “I would come home and just go to bed,” she said recently. “It was hard for me.”

So, after 29 years as a checker, she decided to join her husband, Jerry, a former Ralphs service manager who called it quits in November. She filed her retirement papers Feb. 1 and went out for one last day on the line. Her friends tried to make it special, tying balloons to her picket sign, autographing it and taking pictures.

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“I said, ‘I feel bad telling you guys that I’m leaving,’ ” the 55-year-old mother of two recalled. “But they said, ‘No, no, don’t feel that way. At least you get to go.’ ”

Behrens recently started part time with a company that takes school photos. She earns $7.50 an hour, less than half the $17.80 she was making as a senior checker. But once her supermarket pension payments kick in during the next few months, she and her husband will receive a total of about $2,500 a month.

For his part, Jerry Behrens has found a new career as a commission-only mortgage broker. The firm where he works is owned by a customer who used to shop at the Mission Grove Ralphs where he once was employed.

Demoralized, angry, broke or exhausted, hundreds of members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union have retired, launched new careers or gone back to school since the UFCW struck Safeway Inc.’s Vons and Pavilions chains in Central and Southern California on Oct. 11. Kroger Co.’s Ralphs and Albertsons Inc., which are negotiating with Safeway, locked out their workers the next day.

Union officials say that they can’t be sure precisely how many people have quit and can’t predict how many of the 59,000 who went on strike or were locked out will return to their old jobs.

Yet it looks like they could find out soon.

On Wednesday, grocery and union negotiators neared a deal to end the dispute, according to people familiar with the talks. A settlement could be reached perhaps as early as today, sources said, although they cautioned that negotiators were struggling with certain issues and the negotiations could still falter.

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How many veteran UFCW members decide to come back to their posts will be crucial for the union and the markets alike. If a slew abandon their jobs, it could affect the morale of those left behind, undermining both union solidarity and customer service.

“If significant numbers of workers don’t return, it could have an impact in the stores,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor specializing in labor issues at UC Berkeley. “It will leave a bit of a sour taste with the shoppers who had a relationship with those workers. It will be a lingering reminder of the length and bitterness of the strike.”

To be sure, for every one like the Behrens, there are many more union members who plan to return to work as soon as a new contract is ratified.

“I’m a supermarket clerk. I like the grocery business. This is all I’ve ever wanted to do,” said Steven Tam, 42, a strike captain and two-decade grocery store veteran who was a delicatessen clerk at a Ralphs in Malibu.

His wife, Boriana, a Ralphs bagger, is also eager to get back to the job. She liked almost everything about her work, even the gathering of shopping carts in the parking lot.

“That was the best exercise for me, better than carrying a picket sign,” she said, laughing. “Now, I’m putting on weight.”

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The Tams, members of UFCW Local 1442, have been picketing a Pacific Palisades Vons almost every day since Oct. 31. That’s when the union pulled pickets from Ralphs stores to give shoppers a breather in a contract fight that was, from the start, focused on the Vons and Pavilions outlets.

To survive, the Tams have reduced expenses to the essentials: car payments and the insurance required to drive legally in California. Married in July, they have used the money and gifts they received as a kind of supplemental strike fund. They gave up their West Hollywood apartment and moved in with his parents.

But for the Behrens, such sacrifice simply wasn’t worth it.

“Everything that Ralphs propagated, whether it was what they were doing in training or customer service programs, it didn’t really matter,” Jerry said. “All they cared about was labor costs.”

He and his wife have vowed never to return to the grocery business. In fact, they have debated whether they would ever even shop at a Ralphs again. Jo Ann said she might go there to get her coupons doubled, but Jerry said he would visit only to satisfy his curiosity and see how “inefficient” operations were.

Indeed, the Behrens predicted that once the strike was over, stores would be staffed by workers with low morale and “bad attitudes.” They couldn’t imagine former colleagues being as dedicated as they were before, doing things like decorating their departments for holidays or drilling each other on customer service so they could get perfect scores when they were rated.

“Do you think anyone is going to care?” Jerry asked.

Meanwhile, the Behrens struggle with what he calls “survivor’s guilt.”

“We are fortunate” to land jobs, he said.

As for Steven Tam, he said he doesn’t hold it against anyone who gave up the fight.

“The hardest thing,” he said, “has been watching other people struggle.”

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