Feels like a people’s war is brewing

I’ve always been a union man. I helped bring the Newspaper Guild to Oakland a lot of years ago, and I carry a card in the Writers Guild of America in L.A. I’ve never crossed a picket line, and I never will.

As a result, I often have major disagreements with those who flat-out consider organized labor a drain on the economy. They’re so anti-union that sometimes they’ll go out of their way to cross picket lines just to show their disdain. But not this time.

I’m talking about the strike/lockout that involves the United Food and Commercial Workers and 859 grocery stores in Southern and Central California. I’ve found that the parking lots of a lot of stores being picketed are oddly empty during the hours when people usually shop. And, peeking in the window, it looks like you could roll a watermelon down the aisles of some of the stores and not hit a soul.

I hung around a Woodland Hills Vons one afternoon, and then a Ralphs later on, and heard from shoppers who had come by to support those walking the picket lines. I also heard from some who said they were sick of the little man being trod upon by corporate giants. One woman didn’t give a rat’s kazoo what the issues were. She announced in a tone not intended to encourage debate, “We’re at war with CEOs!”

The theme has been repeated in radio and television interviews with many of the shoppers who are respecting the picket lines. They aren’t all union members or left-leaning sympathizers, but the kinds of people who get property taxes lowered and governors thrown out of office. The little old ladies are at it again.

They’re a metaphor for activists who have been making things happen lately, and they’re beginning to lean in favor of those in the lower margins of society. I saw that same stirring in the early days of the petition drive that became Proposition 13, and at the tables of those gathering signatures to recall Gray Davis. They turn outrage into votes the way profiteers turn labor’s sweat into gold.

Issues aside, I sense a growing indignation against those who make millions of dollars on the backs of those who make hundreds. Contradictions abound. We see workers asking for a 50-cent hourly raise while the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange walks away with a pay package of $187 million.

Census figures reveal that the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Household incomes in the lower brackets are slipping while the income of the top 5% of the nation’s wage earners is rising. Almost 35 million Americans lived in poverty last year, which was close to

2 million more than the previous year.

In the same period that many were scratching around for food, chief executives at Southern California’s 100 largest companies were receiving double-digit pay increases even as many were downsizing, which is a euphemism for canning workers at the lower levels. An L.A. Times survey revealed that one CEO received a 153% annual pay hike, to $2.9 million, even though the company suffered a $275-million loss.

We live in an age of bloated concepts of money. Where once hundreds of dollars represented a kind of financial pinnacle, now its height is measured in hundreds of thousands. Millions pale beside billions, and billions beside trillions. People I know, whose salaries are modest, will stand in long lines to buy lottery tickets when the payoff hovers around $100 million, but won’t even bother to buy a ticket if it’s only $10 million. Who needs $10 million? Chicken feed.

I became radicalized two years ago when Enron collapsed, but not before it paid an average of $5.3 million to each of its 140 senior officers in bonuses and stock grants. I got even crazier when Global Crossing went down. The company managed to pay $15 million in lump-sum pension payments to its executives, while its rank-and-file employees lost $250 million in their pension plan. And so ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Corporate greed and, in some cases, corporate dishonesty are bad enough, but I also wonder at the cosmic rewards to those who add little more than a slam dunk to the nation’s cultural agenda. The idea that a high school basketball phenomenon can make $90 million in an endorsement deal before he even begins playing professionally is not only beyond comprehension, it’s surreal.

So when grocery clerks, mechanics or cops strike over issues of health insurance or a few extra bucks, don’t come to me with theories of economic impact or the extra money we’re going to have to pay for tomatoes. I have a feeling that there’s a people’s war brewing against greed and excess, against the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, and we’d better start taking it seriously. Little old ladies are on the march.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE ---

The article states inaccurately that 35 million Americans lived in poverty in 2002. The figure, based on Census Bureau data, refers to the number of people in America and does not specify whether they are citizens.

--- END NOTE ---