From the Front Lines, Workers Tell Their Side

Time: 10 a.m., Thursday, Feb. 5. Day 118 of the supermarket labor dispute.

Location: Albertsons at Clark and Del Amo, Lakewood.

On the picket line: Several longtime employees of a nearby Ralphs.

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Stacie Arevalo, 37, picket captain and bakery manager: “When the unions offered to go to binding arbitration, I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but I did. Then the companies turned them down, and I lost hope. I started 20 years ago at Alpha Beta, which later became Ralphs. I thought I’d spend my career at this. There were great opportunities, great health benefits. I was getting promoted and was being looked at to be a key person. I thought I could retire with them. They never gave me any indication that they were going to try to take all these things away.”

Rick Steele, 48, meat department manager: “The union started prepping us a year ago. They increased the union dues for a strike fund, put out regular bulletins on the local’s website. They let us know it wasn’t going to be pretty. I started at Alpha Beta too, 29 years ago. My dad -- he was a trucker -- got me involved in an apprenticeship program. This was a trade, the grocery business. The assumption was that people would always have to eat, so you’d always have a job.”

John Gunde, 64, cashier and produce clerk: “When we were with Alpha Beta we were dealing with a local family in La Habra that owned the stores. You had seven chains in Southern California, and this strike wouldn’t have lasted. Now, the big money’s involved, and you have 70,000 workers going up against three national corporations. I don’t think the union was prepared to match the challenge.

“Some of the leaders are brand-new, a lot of the others are ready for retirement. They lost the spark of what unionization is. They’re old-timers. They lost energy, they got lulled. Fifty years ago, when I started, you’d have to go to a union meeting once a month, or you’d get fined. Maybe a dollar fine, but that was a lot in those days. It was the retail clerks union then, and they’d hold those meetings at the Shrine Auditorium. The president would keep us up to date, and they’d have microphones there for people to ask questions. There was a lot of participation.”

Rick: “I support the union leaders. I don’t care that one’s getting $270,000 a year and my local president, Greg Conger, is getting $200,000. I’ve been with him on strikes and I believe in the man. Every member had a choice when the contract came. I voted no. I took one look at the companies’ pension proposal and I voted no. Previously, the companies always tried to do little take-aways at contract time. This time, anyone raising a family knows healthcare is costly. No one here would object to paying their fair share. But this is rape.”

Stacie: “The union raised the strike fund with an assessment starting last January. My regular dues are $106.50 every three months, and the assessment is another $40 every three months. Since our health insurance stopped on Dec. 31, I’ve had to pay $430 a month to keep my prescription and medical going. It would be $507 if I wanted to keep the dental going too. I think we should go back to work while we’re resolving this. People are really hurting out here. You can’t live on $100 a week strike pay.”

Rick: “Or $200 -- if you stand on the line for 40 hours. Everybody works for a paycheck and a job, but in the stores we’d regularly go out of our way to give the customer a good experience. When I’d go home at the end of a day, I’d know I’d done everything in my ability to do the best for the customers. People just want to go back to work and have that feeling that we’re earning our paychecks.”

John: “After standing out here, we’re more tired at the end of the day than we are at work, because there’s no emotional lift to this. We hear lots of rumors -- the Albertsons people picketing over there said their store manager told them he’d gotten a call to start making up his schedules, because the workers would be back in the next week. That was two weeks ago.”

Rick: “The job’s not as fun now as it was 20 years ago. It’s not less satisfying, but less fun. Then you’d have two or three meat cutters in every store. Now it’s one. When I started as a meat cutter you had a year of training. There’d be on-the-job training 40 hours a week, with a journeyman cutter standing over you. And you had a year of college-credit courses, once a week, every Monday. They’d teach you about weights, health department issues, the right temperatures, math problems, the profitability of different cuts. Then you took a written test, and if you passed, you were a journeyman. The meat would come into the store in sides, go right into the cooler, and you’d do your cuts. Now it comes what they call prefab, block-ready. Top sirloin comes in a 10-pound package; you rip off the cellophane and you cut it down.”

Stacie: “It’s going to be different when we go back to work. I used to work so hard, right through my breaks. I won’t do that anymore. I’m going to take every break I’m entitled to. Before, I’d clock out, and then see a lady over there, and just help her, take a cake order, because there wouldn’t be anyone else in the bakery, even though I’d clocked out.”

John: “Now they’re going to have a two-tier system, and the new people won’t have the same thing we had. This is corporations wanting to change society.”

Rick: “I’m a realist. I know I’ve got so many months till retirement, and that’s my goal, to work through to retirement. I got me a nice house in Los Alamitos, raised two kids and sent them to college, beautiful wife. It was primarily this job that gave us the opportunity to live this way.

“My opinion, if anyone has 15 years or less at this job, they’re on a dead ship. They should get out. Whatever the companies don’t get in this contract, they’ll get in the future. You could see it beginning to happen in the past, but this has really broken it wide open.”

Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes

.com/hiltzik.

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On February 12, 2004 the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which had stated repeatedly that 70,000 workers were involved in the supermarket labor dispute in Central and Southern California, said that the number of people on strike or locked out was actually 59,000. A union spokeswoman, Barbara Maynard, said that 70,000 UFCW members were, in fact, covered by the labor contract with supermarkets that expired last year. But 11,000 of them worked for Stater Bros. Holdings Inc., Arden Group Inc.’s Gelson’s and other regional grocery companies and were still on the job. (See: “UFCW Revises Number of Workers in Labor Dispute,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2004, Business C-11)

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