Union Keeps Trying to Market Itself at Bristol Farms

The retired union members wearing protest signs and passing out fliers near the doors of Bristol Farms have become such a part of the scenery they might as well be abandoned grocery carts.

Most customers just walk around them.

Next week, it will be three years since the upscale Southern California food store chain opened its lone Ventura County branch--and three years since the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1036 instituted its five-day-a-week presence outside the store. Its goal: to persuade the chain’s workers to unionize.

“The first day they opened, we were here,” said Bernard Cordeau, 65, who retired after 34 years as a unionized grocery clerk and store manager. “And we’re determined to stay here until they’re willing to do some talking.”

As far as Bristol Farms management is concerned, the protesters can picket forever and it won’t make any difference. The store, in the Westlake section of Thousand Oaks, is the second-fastest growing of the chain’s 14 stores, said company president and CEO Kevin Davis: “It’s never done better.”

The union contends that Bristol Farms underpays its workers and provides them with inferior employee benefits. According to the union, beginning cashiers make $6.50 an hour at Bristol Farms--a third below a $9.78 starting salary for cashiers at unionized grocery stores, which include the major supermarket chains. Top-end cashiers can make $11 an hour at Bristol Farms, but that’s substantially below the nearly $17 an hour paid at unionized chains, the union says.

Davis would not discuss exact hourly wages, but said his workers are paid competitively, receive free basic health insurance and are permitted to buy company stock, which is not publicly traded. Managers can make $75,000 a year, he said.

Some Bristol Farms workers have previously said that they are not interested in unionizing, citing the stock options.

But the union says Bristol Farms unfairly competes for market share and harms profit margins at rival grocers that offer the kind of pay and benefits that allow 13,000 unionized grocery workers in Central California to provide for their families.

“With a union employer, a grocery store worker is able to earn a living and stay in the middle class,” said Frank Casciato, a spokesman for the union.

But Davis contends that the labor organizing effort is not about protecting the fate of workers but about creating a smoke screen through which the unionized chain stores, such as Ralphs, Vons and Gelson’s, can stifle competition. “Obviously, those stores pressure the union to try to slow down competition,” he said.

On a recent afternoon, most Bristol Farms customers walked past the protesters without so much as a nod. Some accepted the fliers they offered, but went in and bought food anyhow.

One regular Bristol Farms shopper, Skip Helms, said he doesn’t think unions serve much of a purpose in the current economy. “Today, any businessman has to pay a fair wage unless it’s a sweatshop somewhere in the bowels of L.A.,” he said.

At the Bristol Farms store, “They seem to pay a competitive wage,” he said. “We come here routinely and the people who work here seem to be happy.”

Picket Line Bonding

A handsomely dressed middle-aged man with a confident gait, Helms looks like many of the customers who visit the store at the upscale Promenade at Westlake shopping center, where the parking lot is filled with sports cars and gleaming sport utility vehicles.

Helms, a computer business owner who said he also shops at mainstream supermarkets, said Bristol Farms was the only place to quickly gather items needed for his wife’s birthday celebration: an elegant wildflower bouquet and prepared servings of potato-encrusted salmon, scallop-and-corn cakes and fruit salad.

Heidi Gilanfar, a 35-year-old Thousand Oaks restaurant chain executive, said the union picketers in no way deter her from shopping at Bristol for sushi, sashimi, unusual mushrooms and other foods she and her husband enjoy.

If Bristol Farms employees aren’t happy with their wages and benefits, “Why don’t they just go work at another grocery store?” she asked. “The industry is very competitive now. People have choices.”

As for the protesters, she said, “We joke about it. It’s like, ‘Get a life.’ ”

But for Cordeau and the three or four other men picketing on any given weekday, the protest has become a big part of their lives. As retirees, they’ve got plenty of time and energy to dedicate to the cause. They say it keeps them sharp, focused, engaged.

After three years on the low-key picket line--there’s no chanting or aggressiveness, just handshaking and conversation for shoppers who are interested--the men have bonded. They talk with one another about their families, home repair, the economy and politics. And, they say, when they convince a prospective customer not to enter the store, they achieve a small but important victory.

*

One prospective Bristol Farms employee, Jennifer Lydick, 25, chatted with the protesters on a recent afternoon but wasn’t swayed from filling out a job application. She said she had worked there once before as a part-time clerk, and now wanted a full-time position even though she expected to earn about $7.25 an hour.

Lydick, who once worked at a Vons, said she believes the benefits of unions are minimal. The hundreds of dollars in dues deducted from her paycheck annually were a waste of her money, she believed, because at her age she wasn’t interested in the political support, health or retirement benefits they brought. “They took so much out of my check, but I really didn’t get much out of it.”

Lydick admits she couldn’t live on her own for the wages she might earn at Bristol Farms. But as long as she’s living with her mother--and paying only $300 a month for room and board--she can get by just fine.

“Everybody’s really nice here,” she said. “It’s a really good store.”

Customers seem to agree with that assessment. Although Bristol Farms would not release sales numbers for its individual stores, the chain’s sales went from $73.6 million in fiscal 1998 to $105.5 million in fiscal 1999, and is projected to reach $126 million in sales for the fiscal year that ends in April 2000.

*

Independent stores such as Bristol Farms make up a growing threat, or at least a perceived threat, to unions, said Daniel J.B. Mitchell, a professor of management and public policy at UCLA.

“Unions for a long time have had the major food retail chains here in the Los Angeles area,” he said. “They’re now sort of facing competition.

“Some of it is potential that hasn’t quite gotten here yet,” he said. “Some has and is eating around the margins, such as the high-end, high-service stores. You then have this sort of ongoing Wal-Mart threat.”

He referred to the huge retail chain, which is also the second largest grocer nationally, and its cashiers and clerks who are not unionized. “There’s this concern that Wal-Mart will come in and undersell the existing grocery chains,” Mitchell said.

Frenzy of Mergers

While the local union says it still controls 80% of the local grocery market share, organized labor experienced a major decline overall in the past three decades--from representing more than a third of the U.S. work force to only about 10%. A push in recent years to increase those numbers also may help explain the union’s persistence outside the doors of such a relatively small store.

Meanwhile, Bristol Farms’ growth in recent years coincides with a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions in the national chain supermarket business. In this region, Ralphs, Vons and Lucky stores have been acquired by megachains Kroger, Safeway and Albertson’s.

These megachains divest themselves of extraneous stores and narrow their merchandise offerings to comply with federal law and to meet their own financial strategies. Consequently, chains such as Bristol Farms can acquire the divested stores and create a niche by selling specialty goods that customers can’t find at the bigger chains, which tend to carry a limited range of goods during such transitional times.

Still, Bristol Farms CEO Davis said, “It’s not us driving the process, it’s the chain stores divesting of these major chunks of stores.”

That won’t stop unions from protesting, though. Officials at Local 1036 said it has recently expanded its protests to include other nonunion stores entering Ventura County in recent months, including a Jon’s Marketplace in Simi Valley, and two Top Valu stores in Oxnard.