Workers Are Stopped Far From Safeway CEO’s Home

Scores of religious leaders and supermarket workers, some with children in tow, had traveled hundreds of miles from Southern California to personally deliver a message to Safeway Inc. Chief Executive Steven Burd.

But on Wednesday morning, when they arrived in Alamo, east of Oakland, they were stopped about a mile from the gates to his affluent community. Sheriffs allowed six clergy members to hike a steep private road to the entrance, where they had hoped to hand Burd thousands of cards and letters urging an end to the long-running supermarket strike and lockout.

Instead, they were met by security guards and local police, and a nattily dressed man who identified himself as Guy Worth, Burd’s personal representative.

“Our message to you is to please come back to the bargaining table and don’t leave until there is an agreement,” said the Rev. Sandy Richards of the Church in Ocean Park in Santa Monica.

Worth promised to deliver the messages, then joined hands in prayers. He had nothing else to say.

For some of the about 200 workers who took part in the clergy-led campaign billed as the “Grocery Workers Justice Pilgrimage,” the turndown in Alamo was yet another indignity in the 3 1/2- month-old labor dispute between the United Food and Commercial Workers union and Safeway’s Vons and Pavilions, Albertsons and Ralphs supermarket chains. The dispute has idled about 70,000 workers in Central and Southern California.

“What do you mean I can’t go up?” asked 21-year-old Cynthia Hernandez, a checker and stocker at a Vons in Rolling Hills who was prepared to push her 2-year-old daughter in a stroller up the long hill to the gates of Burd’s community.

“I want him to see our faces,” said Hernandez, noting she was struggling to put food on the table. “I want him to know that we exist.”

Yet nobody at the rally seemed to know for sure whether Burd was home, or at Safeway’s corporate headquarters in nearby Pleasanton. The union has been frustrated by what they see as Burd’s harsh stance in demanding concessions on wages and benefits.

Safeway spokesman Brian Dowling said Burd was not at home during the Wednesday morning rally and march. Of the campaign, he said: “We’ve got a great deal of respect for the clergy, and Mr. Burd will clearly read their letters.” But he noted that “this does nothing to advance the cause of resolving the dispute in Southern California. What will resolve the dispute ... are the unions coming back to the table and reasonably addressing the issues confronting the employers in Southern California.”

The campaign was organized by CLUE, or Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, a group made up of about 400 religious leaders in Los Angeles County. Thetrip began early Tuesday with a rally and prayer session at a Pavilions in Sherman Oaks, where Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders offered a succession of blessings, songs and good wishes, along with some choice words for Burd, who is said to be an active member of a church in Walnut Creek.

“We are praying for this man, Burd, who has been so recalcitrant, so cold to his workers. He needs to know about the lives he is affecting,” said the Rev. Jim Conn, urban strategist for the United Methodist Church of Southern California.

For some of the grocery workers, the bus ride to the Bay Area was long and somber, despite efforts by folks like Fidel Sanchez, an organizer for the Pico Union Shalom Ministry, who serenaded the passengers with a rendition of Spanish songs.

On Tuesday night, the workers and their families were taken to Holy Name High School in Oakland, where they spent a night on thin pads and in sleeping bags on the gymnasium floor.

Claudia Gabriel, 36, who worked the produce section at a Ralphs in Sherman Oaks, brought her three sons on the trip.

“We’ve already used all of our savings. Even our family members are one day going to get tired of helping us out,” Gabriel said. “Burd can do something for us. He can do something big for us.”

Times staff writer Melinda Fulmer contributed to this report.

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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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