Food Store Unions Add Pickets at 30 Safeways

Teamsters and meat cutters escalated their strike against seven Southern California supermarket chains Saturday by posting picket lines at some Safeway stores in the Southland.

In the first four days of the increasingly bitter labor dispute, the unions had concentrated their picketing activity on 164 Vons retail stores and the food warehouses of the chains.

Dan Swinton, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Teamsters Union, the two striking unions, said they had decided to broaden their picketing because of the slow progress of negotiations. He said the unions had established picket lines at 30 of Safeway’s 182 Southern California stores.

Talks Restarted

Negotiations between the unions and the Food Employers Council were scheduled to resume Saturday afternoon at the Anaheim Hilton, but they never got off the ground.

Just before 6 p.m., representatives of the Food Employers Council left the hotel. Joe McLaughlin, president of the group, said the Teamsters had failed to give them a written counterproposal to a new offer the employers had made late Friday night on a key issue--management’s demand that it be allowed to subcontract work now done by 12,000 unionized drivers, warehouse personnel and office employees represented by the Teamsters.

“We’ve been here for three hours waiting and I think we’re just wasting time,” McLaughlin said. “I assume they’ll tell the mediator when they want to make a response.”

The two sides have been stalemated for several days on the subcontracting question. Frank Allen of the federal Mediation and Conciliation Service said it was “unusual” for one side to ask for a formal written proposal on one issue at this stage of negotiations. “Usually, the parties just exchange hand notes,” he said, “but this is a hard-core issue.”

Jerry Vercruse, chief negotiator for the Teamsters, said members of the union’s bargaining committee had been holding a caucus discussing their response to the employers’ proposal when they learned that the management representatives had left.

Vercruse said he was surprised. “They just don’t want to negotiate,” he asserted. This is the same charge management has been making about the Teamsters.

Bargaining had recessed at 1 a.m. Saturday, after lengthy discussions on the sticky subcontracting question. Management spokesman David Willauer said the chains need to subcontract to reduce labor costs. But Vercruse said giving management the right to subcontract would inevitably mean a loss of jobs for his members.

It was not clear when negotiations would resume.

Subcontracting is the only issue the Teamsters and the Food Employers have discussed in the last three days of negotiations.

Willauer stressed that even if the two sides resolve the subcontracting issue, they still will be far from a settlement. “We only have eight or nine more tough issues,” he added sardonically.

Among those other issues are management’s demands that it be allowed to impose a lower wage scale for newly hired employees, that it can move into new warehouses without automatically granting the union recognition at the new locations and that it can impose a 3-year wage freeze.

The chains involved in the dispute are Albertson’s, Alpha Beta, Hughes, Lucky, Ralphs, Safeway and Vons. Between them, they have 980 retail stores from the Mexican border to Santa Barbara and Bakersfield to the north and the Nevada border to the east.

Thus far, seven chains--Big Bear, Boys, Foods Co., Gelsons, Mayfair, Pioneer and Stater Bros.--have signed interim agreements with the unions, meaning that they will not be struck and that they will abide by whatever settlement ultimately is reached between the unions and the Food Employers Council.

At a Safeway on 3rd St. and Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles Saturday, a spirited group of picketers from the Teamsters and the meat cutters urged shoppers to stay away, with limited success. David Montano, 26, who normally is a meat cutter for a Ralphs store across the street, said this was his first strike.

“I make $13.48 as a journeyman cutter and I’m guaranteed 40 hours a week work,” Montano said. “They want to take away our 40-hour guarantee and reduce it to 20,” he said, referring to another management demand that his union opposes.

“If we have only 20 hours, I’d have to put my wife to work,” said Montano, who is married and the father of two girls.

Management also wants to introduce a new, lower-paid classification of worker called a “meat clerk,” who would perform about 70% of the tasks now done by a meat cutter. It also is demanding that it be able to reduce the number of hours a store is required to have a journeyman meat cutter on duty.

Standing a few feet away from Montano, Daneil Guiliani, a veteran Safeway meat wrapper, also urged shoppers to do their buying elsewhere. In fact, she did something she has never done before Saturday afternoon: she urged potential customers in the Safeway parking lot to cross the street and do their shopping at Safeway’s rival, Ralphs.

Guiliani took this unusual step because the unions have not yet started picketing at Ralphs’ 126 retail outlets even though Ralphs, like the other chains, has locked out its meat cutters, meat wrappers and Teamsters.

“It feels funny to send people away,” said Guiliani, who has worked at Safeway 11 years. “But it also feels funny being locked out.” She said she makes $11.79 an hour as a meat wrapper and that she, too, is fighting for the retention of the 40-hour guarantee. Guiliani also said she is worried about a management proposal that could mean employees would have less health care coverage in the future.

On Friday, a Vons spokesman said that the strike had cut the chain’s sales by 10%. On Saturday, a clerk who works at a recently opened Vons store in Paramount said the strike is having a greater effect on the produce, baked goods and frozen food selection than on the meat supply. Charles Koehl, a produce clerk, said that pickets have disrupted deliveries enough so that the store’s produce section completely ran out of cantaloupe and broccoli.

“We get lots of bananas, but we don’t get anything else,” Koehl said. “And those come in ripe. If we don’t sell them right away, they rot.”

He said the store’s baked goods section is suffering, too. Koehl said he discovered why while helping to unload a truck that arrived at the store Friday. Replacement workers at the warehouse apparently had failed to strap down the merchandise. “Pies and cakes and everything, it was all completely crushed,” Koehl said.

Koehl said the combination of low supplies inside and angry strikers outside had resulted in a noticeable decrease in customers.

Koehl, 36, said he is continuing to work despite the fact that he supports the strikers’ goals because he needs the money and because the meat cutters failed to honor the picket lines of clerks when they struck seven years ago. He also said he is angry because he had been hit on the head with a picket stick when he arrived for work at 3 a.m. Friday.

In a related development Saturday, Ralphs announced that it is offering a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those persons responsible for destroying an employee’s vehicle and injuring its four occupants last week in an incident that occurred at Ralphs’ distribution center on San Fernando Road in Los Angeles.

Byron Allumbaugh, Ralphs’ chairman, said at a press conference that the company is also offering $1,000 rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone responsible for major damage to workers’ or the company’s property during the strike.