Missteps Hurt Union in Supermarket Strike
Hoisting banners and American flags, hundreds of AFL-CIO members rallied on Wall Street last week in a show of support for the 4-month-old California supermarket strike.
Stock analysts hardly noticed. They were more interested in the message delivered the day before, when three grocery companies flatly rejected a United Food and Commercial Workers union proposal that the contract dispute be submitted to binding arbitration.
That episode revealed “increasing weakness in position” on the part of the UFCW, Lisa Cartwright of brokerage Smith Barney wrote to clients as the union activists, bundled up against the cold, assembled near the New York Stock Exchange. She didn’t mention them.
The Wall Street fumble was the latest misstep in a strike that has been criticized as lacking a clear, consistent and forceful strategy. Unlike the three-week-long walkout by Los Angeles janitors in 2000, which is studied by scholars for its innovation and successful outcome, the supermarket strike is likely to be remembered for its miscalculations, academics and other observers said.
The “Justice for Janitors” strikers “knew what they were doing and why they were doing it,” said Michael Theodore, a Los Angeles attorney who has represented management in labor disputes. “They scared the living daylights out of people.” This strike, he said, seems “tepid and apathetic.”
With contract negotiations set to resume today after a seven-week hiatus and Safeway Inc.’s quarterly earnings report due out Thursday, labor leaders have been anxious to inject new energy into the campaign.
The supermarkets’ resolve appears only to have strengthened since UFCW members walked off their jobs at Safeway’s Vons and Pavilions stores Oct. 11, spurring Kroger Co.’s Ralphs and Albertsons Inc. to lock out their union workers. The companies have stayed on point by limiting communications to carefully worded joint statements and advertisements.
By contrast, tactics hailed by the UFCW as silver bullets have been tried and discarded. The union persuaded the Teamsters to join the strike, but they stuck it out for only 30 days. The AFL-CIO was called in, then told to hold off, then allowed to take over national strategy.
Local UFCW leaders have often been at odds: Two weeks after the strike began, picket lines were removed from Ralphs stores to give consumers shopping options and to shore up the lines outside Vons, Pavilions and Albertsons, but before long that ploy fell apart. Strikers started picketing in front of Ralphs stores in Orange County and behind Ralphs stores in San Diego, while in Los Angeles the picket-line question was left up to each store’s picket captain.
How could a venerable union get it so wrong?
It could be that no matter the approach, labor simply wouldn’t be able to win a fight against supermarkets committed to significantly lowering their costs as they prepare for an assault from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other big discount grocers.
“It’s not that they [at the UFCW] were idiots,” said Harry Katz, a professor specializing in collective bargaining at Cornell University. “There was a reasonable basis for hope that they were going to win. The startling thing is the resilience of Safeway and the aggressiveness of the employers.”
At the same time, the union has been faulted. For one thing, as underscored by the Ralphs muddle, the UFCW in many ways hasn’t kept up with the times. While the supermarket industry has consolidated into a handful of national corporations, the UFCW is still structured as it was back in the days of family-owned regional grocery chains, with many small, autonomous local chapters loosely affiliated under a national umbrella.
What’s more, long-standing rivalries between several of the seven locals in Central and Southern California have surfaced repeatedly. The day the strike began, for example, the presidents of locals in Los Angeles and Orange counties bickered over who should be first at the microphone, with the conflict resolved when a third president took the stage. Leaders also sparred over who would speak for the union during an interview with ABC’s Peter Jennings, a quarrel that ended when the interview was canceled.
The Washington-based UFCW International, which represents 1.4 million grocery workers, meatpackers and others in the United States and Canada, has had its own issues.
Led by President Doug Dority, the UFCW has been slow to embrace many of the reforms that have swept through organized labor in recent years, such as pouring resources into organizing new members. Dority opposed John Sweeney during his successful run for the AFL-CIO presidency six years ago on a progressive platform.
As the showdown with supermarkets in California loomed, the UFCW took the old-fashioned approach that served it so well in the 1970s, when it spearheaded several successful strikes. It focused on arranging picket lines and building up a strike fund, rebuffing suggestions that it take a page from the Los Angeles janitors’ strike, which was marked by large, boisterous public demonstrations.
“We know how to run a grocery strike,” one high-ranking UFCW official said early on in the campaign, after complaining about labor activists’ suggestions that the union organize some high-profile public events with allies in the community. “You win it at the stores, on the picket line.”
There are signs that there, the UFCW has been successful: It says only 9% of Vons and Pavilions workers have gone back to work. (Ralphs and Albertsons employees can’t return because they were locked out.) Customer support appears to be still quite high. All the while, the three companies have been racking up hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sales.
“This strike has been unbelievably successful by every measure except one,” said a person close to union negotiators. “Unfortunately, that’s the result.”
Last month, after the supermarkets rejected what the union described as attempts to reach a compromise over the core issues of wages and health benefits, UFCW President Dority agreed to let AFL-CIO strategists try their hand.
Ruth Milkman, director of the UC Institute for Labor and Employment, called it an “open question” as to whether the more aggressive effort would work but said, “It’s got a much better hope of being effective than what’s been done to date.”
The AFL-CIO has organized large demonstrations at Safeway stores in half a dozen cities around the country, leading to 12 arrests in Oakland. Ron Judd, an AFL-CIO strategist, has promised civil disobedience and “peaceful guerrilla tactics” in the days to come.
Two Safeway board members, Paul Hazen and Robert I. MacDonnell, got a taste last weekend when they played in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am Tournament. As they prepared to tee off, three union sympathizers in the crowd chanted, “Vons workers are human beings, not golf balls.”
In Los Angeles, political and community leaders have stepped up their involvement, with Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn declaring at a news conference that “the union’s cause is just” and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony writing Safeway’s chief executive, Steve Burd, a letter urging him to break the stalemate. The signs that serve as backdrops for UFCW news conferences are different, reflecting a change in how the union is defending its position on health benefits, for which its members paid no premiums under their last contract: Instead of “Save Our Health Care,” the signs say “Holding the Line for America’s Health Care.”
The California Teachers Assn. is running a statewide radio campaign asking shoppers to stay out of Vons, Pavilions, Ralphs and Albertsons stores. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union is assessing its members a monthly surcharge to help pay for striking workers’ health benefits.
AFL-CIO officials are trying to shake stock analysts’ faith in the supermarkets. “We have to show them how committed and disciplined we are about our actions,” Judd said. “We want Wall Street to get a sense of the breadth and depth of what we’re willing to do.”
People familiar with the AFL-CIO operation said the binding arbitration proposal made by the local union presidents caught the federation by surprise and may have confused the message it has been trying to convey. But Judd portrayed it as a bump on a long road.
