Grocery Dispute Tests Old Friends
A retired school librarian, Patricia Bayley has read up over the years on the union movement in the United States and admires the work of the nation’s early labor pioneers. Names like Reuther and Gompers and Lewis mean something to her.
So do names like Helen and Rose and George.
They’re not labor lions, but they’ve brought the movement to Bayley’s Anaheim working-class neighborhood. They work at the Ralphs supermarket four blocks away and are among the thousands of grocery workers who have been doing battle with management since Oct. 11.
Over the years, they’ve become friends of Bayley. At 69, she has been using the store for the past 27 years.
“We’ve gotten to know these people,” she says. “We trust them.” Some employees, she says, have prayed for her and her husband when they’ve been sick.
To Bayley, that friendship makes it hard to cross the picket line. But on Tuesday morning, she took a deep breath and did it -- with an explanation.
“I explained it to the picketers,” she says. “I said, ‘Guys, I can’t get this anywhere else or at other stores for a better price than Ralphs.’ ”
What she needed was a particular brand of tea and some honey. She also picked up some lettuce. She didn’t consider any of the items frills; she says she wouldn’t cross the line for unimportant items.
“Helen and Rose were on the line this morning,” Bayley says. “I’ve known them for as long as they’ve worked there.”
And so, in little nagging ways like this, does labor strife work its way down to everyday people. Bayley says she has been inconvenienced by the strike/lockout (depending on which chain is involved) but is more worried about other seniors less mobile than she. Neither she nor her husband, Harry, drive; both have spina bifida.
Bayley can find most of what she needs at other places, but trips aren’t all that easy. Her husband uses a wheelchair; Bayley herself walks and brings home items in a two-wheeled shopping cart. For trips farther than the Ralphs, she needs to ride a bus, but that can pose problems boarding with the cart. Mind you, she’s not complaining. Or, if she did, it would be directed at the corporate bosses, she says.
Mainly, she wants the strike to end for the people on the picket lines and for her own peace of mind. She wants to feel comfortable once again in the neighborhood grocery.
“I’m not confined to the house,” she says. “For me, going to the supermarket is a chance to meet all the neighbors, a chance to speak in Spanish with a lot of them, talk about produce at the store. I can’t go down the street without a half-dozen schoolkids yelling, ‘Hi, Patty.’ ”
She figures it’ll be another week before a mediator steps in to end this dispute, which seems to revolve around management’s demand that employees contribute more for health-care plans. Bayley supports the union employees because, she says, she knows how expensive health care can be.
Those nuts and bolts aside, what Bayley misses is the sense of community in her neighborhood store.
“I grew up in an easier culture, an easier community,” Bayley says. “I was born in Missouri in a less hectic, less hurried society, in a neighborhood where everybody knew everyone, from the mailman to the milkman to the bread carrier.”
One of these days, some semblance of that will return to the neighborhood Ralphs.
Until then, I ask what her friends with the picket signs said as she crossed the line.
“They know me,” Bayley says. “They seemed to understand. I hadn’t seen them for a whole week and a half. I just said, ‘Sorry, guys, I have to cross this time.’ ”
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.
