Seeking the View Between Picket Line and Checkout Line

The woman was one of those health food types, concerned about unsavory chemical ingredients and about how the food she eats gets to her table.

She pushed a shopping cart loaded with organically grown fruit and vegetables across the parking lot of the West Los Angeles food store, past the men with the picket signs.

They held up their placards. She looked the other way.

Like many shoppers at Whole Foods Market, located in an upscale neighborhood at National Boulevard and Barrington Avenue, the woman suffers no guilt over crossing a picket line.

For three months, a union has been picketing the store, urging a boycott because of what it calls inferior wages and benefits at the chain’s 10 locations throughout Los Angeles.

In this war of words and actions, the company has fired back: It unfurled a huge banner across the parking lot to notify shoppers that the pickets aren’t even store employees, but rather people hired by the union to harass both management and shoppers.

For weeks now, thousands of shoppers have passed through this demilitarized zone, the kind of scene we walk by all the time, a tiny urban drama where the players and their motives often go unnoticed.

Some customers have regrets over crossing this line drawn across the blacktop. Others have decided to go elsewhere, but most have chosen to merely look the other way.

“I have no guilt at all,” said one homemaker. “My experience is that all labor disputes eventually get worked out in the long run.”

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Whole Foods Market--formerly Mrs. Gooch’s--feels like a grocery store for the future, with rock ‘n’ roll piped over the sound system, a healthy living book section and a bulletin board where customer comments are posted, along with management response.

Employee Diane Gentilini says workers are happy here. And she expresses a sentiment widespread among the store’s 150 employees: “We don’t want any unions here.”

Mike Straeter, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local 1442, which represents thousands of workers at major supermarkets, contends that Whole Foods manipulates that viewpoint.

“The corporate attitude is anti-union, so they screen people before they hire them. There’s a peer system that causes people to become corporate conformists,” he said. “Conformity is OK, but if the outlook becomes robotic, you have to wonder if there is any freedom of expression at all in the company.”

On the picket line, 18-year-old Sal Cortez admits that he has never worked inside a grocery store.

A staff member of Local 1442, he is among half a dozen people paid $7.25 an hour to stand in front of the store five days a week. Some of his colleagues aren’t even union members, just guys looking for work, hired off the street to send a message.

Picketing, Cortez says, is pretty boring. Most people ignore him. Others offer encouragement; still others have given him the finger or even run their cars at him as they pull in or out of the parking lot.

Cortez hands out the union’s mission statement, which tells shoppers that the store’s inferior wages and benefits will drive down the standard of living for others in the local grocery industry.

He also distributes a consumer alert sheet warning against reported unsanitary conditions--a list of health department violations and customer complaints the union says were filed against Whole Foods stores in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Straeter and the market agree that the pressure is taking its toll--a cut in business of up to 15%, the union estimates.

Yet the more telling story being played out at Whole Foods is how little power most unions have today.

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Unions represent barely more than 10% of the private sector work force, a third of what they claimed in the 1950s. With so little power, they have lost clout in organizing. Employers can drag their heels when workers try to unionize, and can successfully intimidate employees during the process, making it hard to win a representation election.

In response, many unions have tried what they call “corporate campaigns”--ways to embarrass a company into unilaterally recognizing a union as the workers’ bargaining agent without the cumbersome election process, or to simply send a message of toughness to those workplaces they already have under contract.

“Why are they picking on us?” asked Rich Cundiff, president of Whole Foods’ Southern California region, who proceeded to answer his own question. “I think the union has to make a statement to store chains like Ralphs and Vons, which are unionized, that when their contracts come up for renewal, they will have these guys in front of their doors if they don’t toe the line.”

Caught in the middle are shoppers like Pete Hagelis, who looked at both sides this week and found sympathy for neither.

“Let them fight it out, but don’t get me involved,” he said as he loaded his groceries into his trunk.

“Whether it’s union bigwigs or store management, it’s all just big business, one against the other. In the end, the little guy always loses out.”