Stores, Union Striking Out
With the supermarket strike and lockout in Southern and Central California entering its fourth month, many grocery workers are losing faith in a union that severely underestimated the grocery chains’ resolve. But rather than take advantage of the union’s failed forecasting, the grocery chains need to learn from it or risk their own miscalculation.
The unions’ first misstep occurred a year before the strike began. Grocery chain executives called union leaders to a meeting to talk about the need to rein in medical benefits to compete with nonunion stores like Wal-Mart, which pays lower wages and offers minimal benefits. Union leaders shrugged off the overture, opting to start a national strike fund rather than restructure contracts. The last grocery strike, after all, lasted only five days. But that was 25 years ago, and the landscape has changed dramatically, not just because of discount food stores but because of out-of-control health-care premiums.
The United Food and Commercial Workers union fought hard over the years for Cadillac health-care benefits. That the union also fought hard to keep them nearly untouched was understandable. It just wasn’t a smart tactic in an age when every company is grappling with escalating costs.
The union’s refusal to budge allowed the chains to emphasize how much better grocery store workers’ benefits were than those of average workers, who long ago began to pay higher deductibles, larger co-payments and a greater share of premiums. The grocery stores were thus able to distract attention from their hardball offer, which was not just to share the pain but to cap employer contributions, pushing increases solely onto the employee. That could have put the cost of insurance out of workers’ reach within a few years.
The solution for workers is somewhere between contributing nothing and paying for every future increase, but by the time the union conceded that in December, the grocery stores refused to budge.
So workers who went on strike to protect health benefits lost them at the end of the year when their contracts expired. But there is no shortage of ironies in this sad strike. The grocery stores that demanded health-care cuts to compete more closely with Wal-Mart are losing customers, some perhaps for good, to picket lines and poor service. In this strike, the only winners are the discount and nonunion stores getting new business -- and plotting to keep it.
As more working Americans are forced off insurance rolls and into emergency rooms, the federal government will be forced to deal with a crisis only it can fix. But if the union and the grocery chains hope to survive until then, they will have to compromise instead of fighting to the death.
