Market Strike Hits Hard at Providing Food for the Needy

A steady stream of day-old bread and slightly damaged canned goods, donated by local supermarkets, has enabled the Food Distribution Center to feed Orange County’s hungry for the past two years.

But food center officials said Tuesday that the stream has nearly dried up because of the Southern California supermarket strike and lockout.

“Right now, we are on our very last load of food,” said Brother Thomas, program director of the Orange-based food bank.

“It’s the strike. Most of the agencies around here get their food from us, and I know that many of them are feeling the shortage for canned meats and vegetables and soups. Especially with it being the holidays; we have all these people with nothing to eat.”

The food bank and hundreds of other nonprofit agencies that provide food to hungry people are being squeezed by the labor dispute, which has cut off much of the surplus food normally donated to charity by supermarket chains.

Lacking their normal corps of Teamsters Union drivers, the seven chains affected by the strike have stopped making most of the routine deliveries of surplus groceries to a network of large food banks and food-reprocessing centers that, in turn, distribute to smaller agencies, according to a variety of food bank officials.

“We can usually count on about six truckloads a month from various chains,” Brother Thomas said, “but we haven’t had any in quite a while. We might have gotten one or two within a week of the strike,” which began on Nov. 5.

The food bank, which is run by the St. Vincent de Paul Society, distributes donated groceries and government commodities to 182 social service agencies in the county. Now, many of those agencies are feeling the pinch.

“The strike really is affecting us,” said Jean Forbath, executive director of Costa Mesa-based Share Our Selves. “We get some of our food from the Food Distribution Center and they are almost without anything.”

Also, the local markets that usually donate day-old bread directly to the group have been cutting back because they now have less to give, Forbath said.

In East Los Angeles, the Eastmont Community Center normally gives away between 50 and 65 boxes of Thanksgiving food to needy families. But this year, the center is cutting back sharply. Only 27 Thanksgiving boxes will be given out, and seven of those will have chicken, not turkey.

Los Angeles County’s biggest surplus food distributor, Community Food Resources in Vernon, estimated that donations from supermarkets make up 15% to 20% of the estimated 1.5-million pounds of food it receives and sends to the Eastmont Community Center and about 300 other local agencies each month.

Since the strike began, however, supermarket donations have dwindled to a fraction of what they were, said Doris Bloch, Community Food Resources executive director.

Main Distributors

Community Food Resources and the Long Beach Food Bank are the two main distribution points for hundreds of thousands of pounds of day-old bread, damaged canned goods and other surplus food donated by supermarket chains each year in Los Angeles County.

Patt Eriksen, the Long Beach Food Bank’s food-distribution analyst, said her organization’s biggest hardship from the strike is cutbacks in the number of emergency food boxes the food bank gives to needy applicants.

“We’ve had to turn some people away,” she said. “That’s the part that really hurts.”

Mathew Packard, director of the San Diego Food Bank, which provides food to 170 member agencies, said the absence of donated deliveries from markets has cut his organization’s food supplies between 20% and 30%.

Packard said he believes that the chains have stopped their donations not only because of a shortage of drivers but because a clogged retail-distribution system has meant less food on shelves and thus less damaged food available for donation.

As a result, representatives of several nonprofit agencies said they are having to choose between providing fewer Thanksgiving food boxes and maintaining their level of service by buying retail, rather than paying the 10-cents-a-pound fee charged by Community Food Resources.

Logistical Problems

A spokesman for the Food Employers Council, which represents the market chains, said logistical problems caused by the strike have affected donations of surplus food. Spokesmen for Ralphs and Vons, two of the chains being struck, said that surplus food is still being made available to groups that can pick it up.

Bloch said her organization is seeking surplus food supplies in other states that are available to the food bank if it pays freight costs. Forty thousand pounds of apple juice, for example, were recently acquired from Virginia through Second Harvest, a national network of food banks, she said.

Elsewhere, minor incidents of violence continue to plague the grocery industry. According to Jo Anne Bergstrom, a spokeswoman from the Huntington Beach Police Department, a 26-year-old man was arrested Monday night on suspicion of vandalizing a Vons tractor-trailer rig.

Aaron Arntson, a Huntington Beach resident, was identified by a Vons truck driver who alleged that Arntson placed a T-shaped puncturing device under the rear wheel of his truck, which was making a delivery at the 8891 Atlanta Ave. market at 9:10 p.m.

Described as Employee

Arntson, described by police as a “grocery story employee” not affiliated with Vons, was charged with committing a malicious act and was being held in the Huntington Beach jail on bond. Damage to the truck was estimated at $250, Bergstrom said.

For retail shoppers, life in the aisles of a typical Southern California market continued to be a game of chance Tuesday. A survey of two dozen Los Angeles County markets by Times reporters found that unpredictable shelf shortages were continuing.

No future talks were scheduled in the strike by 12,000 Teamster drivers and 10,000 members of the United Food & Commercial Workers, which represents meat cutters.

Federal mediator Frank Allen said he asked both sides Tuesday “to reassess their positions” to see if there is any room for compromise. He said he would be speaking to labor and management privately to see if a settlement can be reached in the strike-lockout, which was triggered by management’s attempt to weaken union work rules that the unions say are critical to job security.

Both unions are on strike against Vons and are locked out at six other chains: Albertson’s, Alpha Beta, Hughes Markets, Lucky, Ralphs and Safeway.

Some Shortages

At some markets, there were few shortage problems Tuesday. Others, particularly those surveyed in West Los Angeles, had shortages of frozen foods and dairy supplies and seemed to have been unable to recover from the weekend of heavy Thanksgiving shopping. Generally, shoppers enjoyed less variety than usual.

In Los Angeles, a Hughes Market on National Boulevard, which last Thursday had no shortages, was running out of fresh fruit, frozen dinners, eggs and juice on Tuesday. A Lucky market in Santa Monica, which on Thursday was short only on milk, was by Tuesday running low on bread, butter, spices, milk, wine and frozen foods.

Spokesmen for the markets have insisted that shortages, which cropped up frequently in the first two weeks of the strike, are being eased as replacement drivers and other workers grow accustomed to the distribution process.

However, business is booming at independent markets that have been relatively unaffected by the strike. At a McCowans Market in San Pedro, co-owner Ted McCowan said Tuesday that business was up 20% to 30%, and that he expected to run out of turkeys by Thursday.

The labor dispute has had a minimal effect on Thanksgiving turkey supplies, since supermarket chains contracted for the birds several months ago.

Expire at Same Time

The food retailers’ planning for the Thanksgiving holiday included contingencies to deal with the strike and lockout beyond early turkey deliveries, according to one supermarket executive.

“The meat cutters’ and Teamsters’ contracts are always scheduled to expire at the same time, and that’s always a few weeks before the Thanksgiving season,” said Harland Polk, vice president of sales for Hughes Markets.

“In the years we have had strikes, it is always at Thanksgiving . . . . It’s a (labor union) strategic move to have a strike at the holiday.”

In a related development Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Irving A. Shimer granted a preliminary injunction sought by the supermarkets to reinforce restrictions on Teamster picketing.

The injunction essentially duplicates a series of temporary restraining orders that had limited pickets and strike activities at warehouses, distribution centers, and at Vons and Safeway.

The order limits the Teamsters to five pickets at building entrances and bans blocking of entrances. Separate court orders restrict activities of the meat-cutters’ union.

Meanwhile, the district attorney’s office has filed felony charges against a meat-cutters’ union member arrested this week on suspicion of having told a non-striking employee that he planned to inject poison into meat at the Lucky store in Norwalk where both persons worked.

Joie Nowka, 45, of Los Alamitos would face a maximum prison sentence of three years if convicted of maliciously and falsely informing another person that poison has been placed in food, Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Samoian said Tuesday. Lucky officials checked the meat at the Firestone Boulevard store after the incident last week and discovered no problems.

Nowka, who could have been charged with either a misdemeanor or a felony, was arrested at home Monday by sheriff’s deputies. He is free on $5,000 bail.

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Juan Arancibia, Sue Avery, Mayerene Barker, Jeff Burbank, Daniel P. Puzo, Roberto Rodriguez and Dorothy Townsend.