Walking a Line of Hope and Despair

Once, I was on strike for seven of the longest weeks of my life.

The first week, I burned with the fires of righteous indignation and sang the song of solidarity.

The second week, I had costly plumbing and electrical problems at my house, and began to panic.

By the third week, I was mowing lawns and delivering box lunches for a deli to supplement my picket line pay, and I was beginning to wonder if I might miss a mortgage payment.

By the fourth week, I bought into every rumor on the picket line, good and bad, and slowly began to lose my mind.

All of which is my way of saying that next week will mark four months for 70,000 Southern California supermarket workers who are locked out or on strike. That’s an unimaginably long time for an endurance test that’s doing no one -- employers, employees or customers -- any good.

In Inglewood last week, I spent some time on the picket at a Vons on Imperial Highway. Vons is owned by Safeway, which, in December, awarded stock worth more than $9 million to eight vice presidents.

It seems to me that if profits are down in the middle of the strike and there’s still $9 million to throw around like candy, it tells you the Safeway company was charging us shoppers way too much for a quart of milk and a box of cornflakes, or that it can take better care of employees who do the grunt work.

But congratulations to all eight members of the millionaire’s club, and here’s a suggestion:

If you can find it in your heart to scrape up a few dollars among you, send it to Leo McClelland. McClelland, 31, walks the picket line at the Inglewood Vons with his fingers crossed, because he has a 6-year-old son with cerebral palsy and the boy had surgery last year.

McClelland hopes his son doesn’t have any new problems, and doesn’t run out of his medicine. And he hopes employees can hang on to decent medical benefits if and when this thing gets settled, even though they know they’ll take a hit in that area.

“That’s why we’re out here,” said McClelland. He earned $12 an hour in the meat department after eight years on the job, but was OK with a modest annual salary of roughly $25,000 because of generous health benefits.

On Tuesday, a colleague passed me a tip from the picket line at an Albertson’s in Torrance. It seemed that employees had a list of all the striking and locked-out employees they knew who had committed suicide or died since the stalemate began Oct. 11.

I got hold of Atul Jariwala on his cellphone and he told me he thought the number of dead had grown beyond 100. It sounded unlikely, but I know from experience that you can make yourself believe just about anything when you’re out there on a picket line and bills are piling up at home.

When I got to the store at Hawthorne and Torrance boulevards, Jariwala and others said Emily Moran might have the list, but she had the night shift on the picket line. Jariwala called her at home and handed me the phone.

“I don’t have the list,” Moran said. “But if you’re asking whether a lot of people who were down in the dumps had committed suicide or died, I was one of the people who was down in the dumps.

“A lot of people are losing their homes and have no money to feed their kids. Two weeks ago, I could have driven my van off a cliff.”

Part of the frustration, Moran said, has to do with the rumor mill and daily developments that raise or dash your hopes.

“They’ll tell you we’re winning or we’re headed back to the tables,” she said, “and then nothing happens.”

And then you see that a few union officials are making more than $200,000, as my colleague Michael Hiltzik reported.

Yes, Irene Zuniga said, as the four-month mark approaches, it sometimes feels like she’s hit a wall. “Absolutely,” said the 40-year-old, whose 18- and 19-year-old kids are helping support her.

“Between the strike,” said Norma Jauregui, “and the strain of working other jobs to get by, you almost feel like you could take a gun and blow your head off.”

One person on the line said she’d heard that a Ralphs employee named Carlos committed suicide. Another said that a young woman at the Albertson’s was “practically homeless,” hadn’t been seen and could be a suicide victim.

I later checked with a union spokeswoman who said she hadn’t heard of any suicides, but had heard about “several deaths” that “probably would not have taken place if there was no strike.”

As for all the rumors, it sounds like the fog of war. Reality warps when Thanksgiving comes and goes, and then Christmas, and then New Year’s Day, and a month after that, you’re still out here with no end in sight and bills stacked to the ceiling.

Then you read that eight Safeway execs are carving up $9 million, and the sting of it gets you get back on the picket line, angry enough to make it through one more day.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez.

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