Alpha Beta Agrees to Hire More Blacks
Alpha Beta Co. agreed Tuesday to hire more blacks at its 200 supermarkets in Southern California to settle a class-action lawsuit that charged that nepotism and word-of-mouth recruitment by its mostly Anglo management inadvertently froze blacks out of jobs.
Under the agreement filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Alpha Beta said that over the next five years it will hire more blacks for three job categories--box boys, check stand cashiers and department heads--until they average about 7 1/2% of the company’s work force.
Blacks now make up about 4% of the company’s 15,000 employees. There are only three black store managers in the chain, according to court documents.
The settlement of the lawsuit, filed on behalf of seven blacks in 1983, is part of a growing trend by blacks and other minorities to force large supermarket chains to hire more non-Anglos. In the last year, two other grocery chains, Ralphs and Vons, also have agreed to hire more blacks and Latinos to settle lawsuits similar to the one against Alpha Beta.
Charges Freeze-Out
“Nepotism (at Alpha Beta) is rampant,” said Los Angeles attorney A. Thomas Hunt, who handled the suit against the grocery chain. “Nepotism by a predominately white work force tends to freeze out blacks.””
But he added that Alpha Beta employment figures made it “very obvious there was no intentional discrimination” against blacks.
Statistics cited in the lawsuit indicated that at the time of a 1981 employee survey about 27% of all the respondents said they had a relative who worked at one time for the chain.
Hunt said store managers and other ranking officials routinely asked subordinates to consider relatives for work. He cited the case of one Alpha Beta official, an Anglo, who said 22 of his relatives were present or past employees of the company.
“He didn’t know who all of them were,” Hunt said. “Some of them turned out of to be siblings of his nephews’ spouses.”
Los Angeles attorney Paul Causey, who represented Alpha Beta, said the supermarket chain settled because the suit would have been too costly to defend, given the number of stores involved. “They never presented one shred of evidence to prove nepotism,” he said.
He said that an estimated 85% of the Alpha Beta supermarkets are in predominantly Anglo areas where many store employees live, adding, “By law, it’s illegal to exclude a spouse (from consideration for a job).”
Under the settlement, Alpha Beta agreed to hire more blacks until they represent 7 1/2% of all “box boys,” 7% of cashier-checkers and 6% of department heads.
Alpha Beta attorney Causey pointed out that Latinos were not part of the class-action lawsuit since they are well represented within Alpha Beta, making up about 12% of the work force.
Besides hiring more blacks, Alpha Beta agreed to pay $5,000 to each of the seven blacks originally named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit before it became a class action.
