Supermarkets’ Offer Temporarily Averts a Strike : Labor: Talks continue despite no new agreement. About 80,000 workers and six major chains are affected.
Negotiators for six major supermarket chains and 80,000 retail clerks and meat cutters from San Diego to Bakersfield appeared to temporarily avert a strike at 800 markets late Sunday night. The chains made a new contract offer and union leaders agreed to continue talking beyond the old pact’s midnight expiration deadline.
Spokesmen for both sides indicated that they expected to continue talking into the early morning hours today and most likely will resume discussions on a new contract later today or Tuesday.
A strike will probably not occur unless these efforts sour, sources said.
“There is no possibility of a strike at midnight,” Bob Bleiweiss, a spokesman for nine of the 10 United Food and Commercial Workers locals participating in the contract talks, said Sunday evening. “We have seen the (new) contract (offer). We don’t like it. (But) there’s a lot of stuff to talk about. . . . There was significant progress today. We’ll keep negotiating.”
Rick Icaza, president of the 10th local--20,000-member Local 770, which is negotiating its contract separately with the markets--said earlier that he was willing to negotiate beyond the midnight deadline.
The union spokesmen and David Willauer, spokesman for the Food Employers Council, which represents the six supermarket chains, stressed that major differences remain on subjects ranging from wages to health care insurance to job security issues, such as minimum-hour guarantees for part-time workers who dominate the supermarket work force.
Negotiators for the chains--Ralphs, Vons, Lucky’s, Stater Bros., Albertsons and Alpha Beta--spent most of the weekend drafting a contract offer that was delivered to union leaders Sunday night.
While both sides declined to discuss specifics of the latest offer, market spokesman Willauer said the three-year proposal contained “significant” hourly wage increases. The old contract contained almost no increases in hourly wages, relying instead on small, annual lump-sum bonuses.
Collective bargaining agreements in the United States this year have contained average annual raises of slightly less than 4%.
Willauer declined to say whether the new offer approaches or exceeds that.
Supermarkets traditionally claim that they cannot afford such raises because they operate on low profit margins and cannot risk losing business to non-union competitors with lower labor costs.
About 73,000 supermarket clerks covered by the contract earn between $4.25 and $13.05 an hour. Another 7,000 meat cutters earn $9.31 to $14.33 an hour.
The supermarket chains have been advertising for replacement workers for the last several weeks in the event of a strike. Retail clerks have not struck since 1978, although two locals did strike for 10 hours in 1987, when a new contract was not approved by negotiators until a few hours after a midnight deadline. Meat cutters last struck in 1985.
