San Diego Workers Join Walkout at Supermarkets

A strike by 10,000 meat cutters and 12,000 Teamsters against Southern California supermarkets got off to a slow start Tuesday, but both sides predicted that the dispute will expand today and there will be a long strike.

Pickets went up at 164 Vons stores, but company officials and striking union members agreed that support from retail clerks--considered crucial to the strike’s effectiveness--was spotty, with many crossing picket lines. Vons had been designated by the unions as the target store to begin the strike.

The Food Employers Council, which has represented most of the major supermarket chains in negotiations with the meat cutters and Teamsters, said eight other chains started locking out members of both striking unions late Tuesday.

“When you strike one of us, you strike all of us,” said Bob Voigt, a Food Employers Council spokesman.

However, in San Diego and Imperial counties, spokesmen for Teamsters Local 542 and the meat cutters union, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 229A, reported in the late afternoon that the other stores had not locked out their meat cutter and Teamsters employees.

About 150 meat cutters struck 31 Vons stores in San Diego and Imperial counties. Thomas Rodgers, Secretary-Treasurer of Local 542, said that about 150 drivers and warehouse workers struck the Vons Distribution Center in San Diego at 11 a.m.

Voigt said he expected that picketing would start today at Albertsons, Alpha Beta, Foods Co., Hughes, Food Basket, Ralphs, Safeway and Stater Bros. stores. That would bring 1,080 stores from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara into the dispute.

Big Bear, a San Diego County chain, and Mayfair, which has stores in San Diego, earlier signed interim agreements with the unions and will remain open. These markets agreed to abide by whatever contract is ultimately reached between the unions and the Food Employers Council.

The meat cutters and Teamsters last struck in 1982, but one strike lasted only five hours and the other six. Representatives of each side predicted Tuesday that the current strike will last considerably longer, perhaps extending beyond the five-week industrywide walkout in 1973.

“Once the strike gets going, the companies get stronger,” Voigt asserted.

No further negotiations are currently scheduled.

The meat cutters’ strike began at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, one hour after the breakdown of last-ditch negotiations.

Management wants to cut the guaranteed workday of meat cutters from eight to four hours; introduce a new, lower-paid classification of worker called a “meat clerk,” who would perform some of the tasks now done by a meat cutter, and reduce the number of hours per day that they must have a journeyman meat cutter on duty.

The principal unresolved issues with the Teamsters involve management’s demand that it be allowed to impose a lower wage scale for newly hired employees and be allowed to subcontract more work and move into new warehouses without automatically granting the union recognition at the new locations.

Striking San Diego area Teamster drivers and warehousemen who picketed in front of the Vons Distribution Center on Miramar Road complained that management had offered 73 “takeaways” to the union.

Dave Donner, a Teamsters shop steward at the center, said that a disagreement over medical benefits is one of the major stumbling blocks for both sides.

“Right now the company pays about $319 per month per employee into a medical plan. They want to hold it at that for a couple of years. If that happens, we’re going to end up putting in about $200 a month out of our own pocket before the next contract is negotiated,” said Donner.

He said that wages are apparently not a major issue. Teamsters earn an average of $13.90 per hour and union negotiators have proposed a 50-cent-a-year pay increase over three years, Donner said.

Both the strikers and management are anxious to have the store clerks on their side. Vons management sent letters to its clerks in recent weeks, stressing that they could not be penalized by their union if they came to work, because they are operating under a contract that will not expire until 1987. The letters also informed the clerks that although they could not be fired if they honored the picket lines, they could be replaced by newly hired workers, according to the clerks and Vons officials.

Norman Bell, spokeswoman for the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 135 in San Diego, said that some local members are honoring the picket lines at Vons stores.

“We won’t have a hard figure until Wednesday, but we’ve got a lot of people honoring the picket line,” Bell said Tuesday. “We have people filing for financial assistance now that they’re honoring the picket line.”

He explained that the union will provide assistance from the local’s reserves “based on need” to members who honor the meat cutters and Teamsters’ picket lines.

Times staff writers Barbara Baird, Leonard Greenwood, Denise Hamilton and Roberto Rodriguez in Los Angeles County; Steve Emmons in Orange County, and H.G. Reza in San Diego contributed to this story.