Shelving the Past

A year ago this weekend, the California grocery strike and lockout -- the longest labor standoff in U.S. supermarket history -- came to an end.

For 4 1/2 half months, 59,000 workers were idled at 852 grocery stores from the Mexico border to Mammoth Lakes. While picketers walked the lines, managers and hastily hired replacement workers struggled to keep the stores open. Loyal customers agonized over where to shop.

The dispute was a financial calamity for the grocery chains. Safeway Inc., owner of Vons and Pavilions, Kroger Co., owner of Ralphs, and Albertsons Inc. lost an estimated $1.5 billion in sales to rival stores. The damage continues to show up in quarterly profit reports, although the companies say their decision to endure the pain of the strike and lockout will pay off down the road by making them more competitive.

Most workers didn’t fare any better than their employers. Many, unable to get by on their meager strike pay from the United Food and Commercial Workers union, took part-time jobs or left the grocery business altogether. And the payoff for months of deprivation and uncertainty was dubious: a new contract putting new hires on a second-tier wage scale that ultimately pays them significantly less than veteran workers.

The economic fallout paled when compared with the effects of the crippling work stoppage that hit Southern California ports in 2002, said UCLA labor expert Kent Wong.

But “unless you were a dockworker in San Pedro or Long Beach, it didn’t have much impact on your life,” he noted. “With the supermarkets, the impact was felt much more deeply by residents throughout the Southland.”

And it still reverberates for thousands of people. Here are some of their stories:

The Rookie

At the age of 21, Emery Castaneda has a resume that reads like a road map of America’s minimum-wage economy.

Since graduating from Chaffey High School in Ontario in 2001, Castaneda has held a succession of unfulfilling, low-paying jobs. She has worked as a waitress at a 1950s-themed restaurant and as a telemarketer for a cemetery, calling people during the dinner hour to ask if they needed a burial plot. She also sold clothes in an apparel shop in El Monte, took another stab at waiting tables -- Italian this time -- and clerked in a Latino supermarket in the San Gabriel Valley.

“The last thing I was willing to do was to get stuck in a low-paying, dead-end job,” she said. “I wanted something that would allow me to help out my family.”

Then, in April, she landed a position at an Albertsons in El Monte. A cousin had touted the job as an excellent opportunity, believing that working for one of the big supermarket chains was a smart career move for someone without a college degree.

That has changed since the strike and lockout, some contend. Under the new, two-tier wage scale at Albertsons, Ralphs and Vons stores, the top rung of the pay ladder is lower and it takes longer to get there. In addition, new hires have to wait one year for company-funded health coverage -- a benefit that used to come after five months. That posed a problem for Castaneda, who suffers from chronic anemia.

Still, the job was promising at first. She was promoted to supervising and organizing the store’s liquor section after three months. Putting in as many as 37 hours a week, she was able to pass on some of her earnings to her family. (Castaneda is the second of eight children. Her father, Jose Luis Navarrette, owns a landscaping business. Her mother works the cash register at an Arco gas station in Ontario.)

In October, she said, her hours were reduced sharply. And by then, she was being dinged $10 a paycheck in union dues. At $7.75 an hour, she was taking home $136 a week -- not enough to make it on her own.

“It’s hard,” she said. “People think that because you work at Albertsons you make good money. Not anymore. You can’t live on your own in Los Angeles for $130 to $140 a week.”

Castaneda, who now lives with the cousin who persuaded her to apply at Albertsons in the first place, wants to attend community college in September. Her goal is to obtain the training she needs to get a job as a social worker specializing in working with troubled children.

“My co-workers, the ones who have been there for a long time, are always saying that they hope I decide to go back to school,” she said. “I can get a job that I’m going to look forward to every day. It will keep me on my toes. I can try to make a child’s life better.”

The Veteran

Jeannie McGrew was working as a cashier at a Safeway store in Santa Monica back in 1975 when she got a look at the good life.

McGrew, 24 at the time and single, noticed that her co-workers were mostly veterans with 20 years or more with the company. Many had earned enough to buy homes and were planning to send their kids to college.

“I never thought about changing jobs after that,” McGrew recalled. “I never looked for another job.”

McGrew worked her way up though the ranks, first as a checker, then logging in merchandise from vendors. She also worked as a bookkeeper and later was in charge of monitoring all of the prices in her store. Eventually, she reached the cherished threshold of $17.90 an hour, the highest pay rate for a clerk.

She married, had four children and settled into a small tract house on Pearl Street in Santa Monica. She scaled back her hours so she could spend more time with her kids and help her husband, Brian, with his tree business.

“I would not have been able to do all of this” without the pay and benefits of working at Safeway, McGrew said.

McGrew was working at a Vons on Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades when rumors of a possible strike or lockout began making the rounds during the summer of 2003.

The grocery chains were determined to win contract concessions that would help them lower their labor costs so they could better compete against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other discounters that were encroaching on their turf. Lower pay scales for new hires and limiting or charging for health insurance were among the companies’ aims.

During the work stoppage, McGrew spent long days on the picket line, reporting for duty five days a week. Income from Brian’s business helped keep her family together financially, but McGrew’s other family -- the one she spent much of her life with -- was fraying.

A year after the standoff ended, McGrew said, relationships at her store are still strained, and some of her longtime co-workers are contemplating career changes. Safeway’s plan to offer buyouts to as many as one-third of its veteran workers adds to the feeling that something fundamental has changed.

“On the surface, everything seems the same, but there is an undercurrent,” she said. “People aren’t feeling very valued.”

McGrew intends to hang on as long as she can. After all, there are three kids still to put through college.

Meanwhile, unlike some of her colleagues, she is trying to get past the bitterness. She’s still cordial to customers who crossed the picket line to shop at her store. She’s friendly with the clerks who crossed the line to work during the labor stoppage and doesn’t bear a grudge against the replacement workers who held her job for four months.

“I personally have let everything go,” she said. “Everybody has their own conscience to follow.”

It helps that McGrew was working 24 hours a week before the dispute and, unlike many workers, hasn’t had her hours cut back. As a veteran worker, she also remains in a top pay bracket, and she has become used to the fact that her healthcare coverage is no longer free.

“I was able to get braces for my kids’ teeth three times for free,” McGrew said. “So I’ll have to pay for one set. How mad can I be about that?”

The Manager

At Fields Market in West Hills, Bill Rinck greets customers by name, spends spare minutes carefully arranging mini-pyramids of produce and polices the aisles for disheveled shelves.

If the onetime Ralphs supermarket manager takes an owner’s pride in his work, he has good reason. After 15 years of toiling for a chain, at age 43, Rinck is now his own boss.

It was the strike and lockout that finally made it happen.

“It was like a godsend,” said Rinck, who had wanted to start a business for several years. “If not for the unpleasantness, the stress of the strike, I might never have done it.”

Rinck vividly recalls the morning of Oct. 12, 2003. After opening the Ralphs on Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills, he locked away the butcher’s knives and the office computers -- precautions against the twin threats of violence and theft -- and then ushered his crew members out the front door and locked them outside.

Over the next few months, he would lose friends, hear his wife called “traitor” by strikers as she worked as a replacement cashier and even fear for his safety.

“I kept thinking, ‘This isn’t what I signed up for,’ ” he recalled.

During the tense weeks, he kept up a mantra in his head: “I’m going to get out.”

To that end, Rinck focused on learning every aspect of operating a grocery store. And as he hired replacement workers, took a turn in the meat department and worked as a cashier to keep his Ralphs going, Rinck gained the skills that helped him leave.

His departure two months into the strike ended a career that began at a Hughes Family Market in West Los Angeles, where Rinck started as a clerk at age 28. He quickly moved up the ranks to manager, and after Ralphs Grocery Co. bought Hughes in 1998, he dreamed of becoming a vice president.

But Rinck soon became disillusioned with the impersonal feel of a large corporation -- an impression that grew after Ralphs was acquired by out-of-state grocery giant Kroger in 1999.

“At Hughes, they knew who you were, they knew what you did and what you were capable of,” he said. “There was a personal touch.”

Rinck is striving for a similar vibe at his 25,000-square-foot market, which he opened in March with $700,000 financed with savings, real estate profit and money from a business partner. The store, tucked into a neighborhood of older ranch-style houses and new, more upscale development, carries specialty items such as Harris Ranch beef, Pastries by Edie and a full line of kosher products.

If there are more than two people in line, Rinck will open another checkout lane himself.

“I take care of them,” he said of his customers.

Rinck also tries to take care of his 25 employees, he said, although the realities of running a business have introduced him to some of the same financial pressures his old employer faces. He aims to peg his wage scale to what the big chains pay but doesn’t offer health insurance, although he’s looking into providing it.

If comments from some current Ralph’s store managers are any indication, Rinck shouldn’t be nostalgic for his old job.

The grocery chains declined requests to allow store managers to be interviewed. But some Ralphs managers who spoke on condition that they not be named said many employees had lingering feelings of distrust and anger; some said their jobs were harder because of higher turnover.

And Rinck, in fact, isn’t wistful.

“I never miss it,” he said. “I do exactly what I was doing before, without all the pressure and demands that were put on us. I don’t need that extra pressure.”

The Replacement

On a recent chilly and wet Saturday afternoon, Demond Camper sat at a seldom-used picnic table in Ted Watkins Park in Watts, wondering how much longer he would have to wait for another run of good luck.

The last one had arrived unexpectedly in the fall of 2003. Three major grocery store chains, their regular workers on strike or locked out, were looking for replacements to staff registers, stock produce bins and shelves, sweep floors and bag groceries.

At the time, Camper had been unemployed for nine months. When a local job-referral service said he could earn $12 an hour -- more than he had ever made in his life -- he needed no further encouragement. He took a job as a produce clerk at the Vons at Lincoln and Broadway in Santa Monica.

There was a catch, though. Once the labor dispute ended and the union employees returned, the several thousand replacement workers were likely to be handed their walking papers.

“I’m still going to go in to work until I hear otherwise,” Camper said shortly after the chains and the union reached agreement on a new contract last February.

He heard otherwise pretty quickly. Within days, he had been replaced.

Soon he found himself back in his old routine: periods of unemployment punctuated by temporary jobs for minimum wage.

His last stint of work was typical -- three weeks of moving flowers at a warehouse in the rush before Valentine’s Day. The pay was $7.55 an hour.

“It’s been temporary work, basically,” Camper said. “Warehouses. Distribution centers. Moving things around.”

A burly 28-year-old, he isn’t afraid of heavy lifting; at Vons he routinely hoisted 60-pound boxes of fruit. It’s the paychecks he sees now that are wearing him out.

“When you make $7, $7.75 an hour, your check is gone before you get it.”

Camper, who lives with his grandparents in a tidy, bright-blue house not far from the Watts Towers, has been hampered by a 1999 misdemeanor conviction for carrying a concealed weapon and a later felony conviction for lying on an application for a job at Los Angeles International Airport.

Camper expressed frustration over the fact that three months of steady work -- during which he showed up on time and performed, he said, without complaints from his supervisors -- hasn’t translated into a permanent job.

He maintains a positive attitude by focusing on music and his dream of landing a recording contract someday. Performing as the rapper ES-MAC, Camper used part of his pay from Vons to finish a self-produced CD of his own songs, “My LIFE, Let Me Live It.”

Without financing or the backing of a label, Camper is trying to break into the music business the hard way. He scrapes money together to cut copies of his CD and then works the clubs at night, getting play time for his songs. Camper also has sold copies out of the trunk of his car.

He keeps samples of his music handy. After all, there’s no telling when that next lucky break may come knocking.

“I’m mostly gangsta rap, but this is some lighter stuff,” he said with a laugh while handing over a CD. “I don’t want to freak you out.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Standoff

* Oct. 10, 2003: Members of seven locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers union vote to reject the supermarkets’ last contract offer and authorize a strike.

* Oct. 11: The union strikes Vons and Pavilions, owned by Safeway Inc.

* Oct. 12: Albertsons Inc. and Kroger Co.’s Ralphs markets, bargaining jointly with Safeway, lock out their UFCW workers. In all, 59,000 people are idled at 852 grocery stores in Central and Southern California.

* Dec. 5: Albertsons releases financial results indicating that the three chains together had lost well more than $500 million in sales since the dispute began.

* Dec. 19: The union makes a contract offer to the stores, but the supermarkets reject it and talks break off.

* Jan. 11, 2004: Both sides disclose that they held secret, informal negotiations to break the impasse but that they ended with no resolution.

* Jan. 30: State Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer sues the chains, alleging that a mutual-aid pact they designed to help them withstand the strike and lockout violates federal antitrust laws. The chains deny wrongdoing.

* Feb. 11: The stores and union resume talks with a federal mediator, the first formal negotiations in seven weeks.

* Feb. 12: Safeway reports a massive fourth-quarter loss, and estimates of the three chains’ combined sales losses during the dispute climb to more than $1.5 billion.

* Feb. 26: After 16 straight days of bargaining, the two sides reach a tentative agreement on a three- year contract.

* Feb. 29: Grocery workers approve the new contract.

*

Source: Times research

Los Angeles Times