Posted on 06/25/2007 5:40:46 PM PDT by Extremely Extreme Extremist
(AP) LOS ANGELES -- Grocery workers across Southern California rejected a partial contract proposal and gave their union the right to strike if already stalled labor negotiations with three supermarket chains fail.
Employees at Albertsons, Ralphs and Vons filed into fairground halls, hotels and sports arenas Sunday to cast their ballots. Union officials said later the measure authorizing a walkout overwhelmingly passed. A formal announcement was expected Monday.
"We had a really, really high turnout," said Mike Shimpock, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers. "Our members were very motivated to send the companies a message it's not satisfied with what's on the table and with how long the negotiations have been going on."
The union called the vote after negotiations failed to yield a comprehensive offer from the markets by a union-imposed Thursday deadline. The authorization does not mean a strike is imminent.
Employees at the Ralphs and Vons chains were asked to grant their union negotiators the power to order a strike and whether they endorsed a partial contract offer. Albertsons employees already had given the union clearance to send them to the picket line, and were simply asked about the contract proposal on pay and health coverage.
The chains criticized the decision to hold a vote on an incomplete proposal as premature and accused the union of walking away from the negotiations and stalling progress toward a deal.
"If union leaders were honest with our employees, they'd tell them we're making progress on the core issues of wages, pensions and health care eligibility and are scheduled to continue those discussions next week," Michael Bustamante, a consultant for Ralphs, said in a statement.
The union maintains the supermarkets have been dragging out the negotiations, which began in January.
Three-year contracts covering 65,000 workers at 785 stores from San Luis Obispo and Bakersfield south to San Diego expired in March. The contract has been renewing automatically on a daily basis and will continue to do so until any of the parties opts to end the process.
The union wants to regain concessions made three years ago that created a two-tiered system splitting employees into separate wage and benefit classes.
Prior to that deal, veteran employees qualified for health care after four months and didn't have to pay any health premiums. Now, workers have had to wait 12 months or more to qualify for health coverage; longer for their dependents; and have been asked to pay premiums for health care.
The supermarkets have offered to remove the wage cap for employees hired after 2004, allowing them to eventually earn as much as veteran employees. The union says the terms are too onerous, as they would require the mostly part-time employees work more than 10 years to get reach the top pay scale.
The latest company proposals also only offer wage increases to the top tier of workers, according to the union.
The union and the supermarkets appear closer to agreement on the framework of employees' health plan, having agreed in principle to expand benefits and to shorten the time it takes for workers and their dependents to qualify for health care.
Still, both sides remain far apart on how much money the employers and the workers should contribute to fund the plan.
Ralphs Grocery Co. is a unit of Cincinnati-based Kroger Co. Vons Cos. is owned by Safeway Inc. of Pleasanton, Calif. Albertsons is owned by Supervalu Inc. of Eden Prairie, Minn.
Live by the union, die by the union.... Don’t these dolts realize that people could go elsewhere????
Evidently they didn’t learn their lesson from the last California Grocery Worker’s strike.
With few exceptions, most grocery store jobs could be (and are) handled by 16-yo kids...I’d replace the lot of them as soon as they walked.
“Evidently they didn’t learn their lesson from the last California Grocery Worker’s strike.”
Please refresh my memory...
“...as they would require the mostly part-time employees work more than 10 years to get reach the top pay scale.”
Two thoughts:
1. Who is going to work part-time for 10 years in a Grocery Store to reach the top pay scale unless they really, really feel it is their calling in life to be a Grocer...and if that’s the case, they’d have started their own store a decade ago, and...
2. If it’s a part time job, for fun or profit, or p*ss-poor planning with your finances throughout your life, GRANDPA, who the flip cares?
It’s a ‘Whole New World Order,’ folks. You should hear the TEENS I work with whining about the fact that they’re only making $8 an hour in a job a semi-trained & diapered Chimp could do, LOL!
And I guess since they can’t break the spine of Wal-Mart, the Unions need to go back to Square-One. Again. *SHRUG*
Super Markets don’t have the mark up that other merchants have, so if labor cost the selling price groceries will immediately go up and their customers will go elsewhere. Some of the union will find themselves working for a nonunion Wallmart. Poor head work on the part of United Food and Commercial Workers
More and more stores are going with self-scan checkouts. It doesn't take any more smarts for a customer to use these than it does to use an ATM.
Good New for Trader Joes again! They got us last time the unions striked (struck?) and we never went back.
In So Cal they striked for a few weeks and were thrashed by the shoppers who fled to Trader Joes and other non-union stores. It was a debacle for them. (Also, a bunch still worked using other names and SS numbers for the same stores. I believe that some of the court cases were settled recently.
Also, the union boss was making over $300K a year while the employees were on strike.
I prefer a self scan checkout than go though a check with a person.. You are right, they are pawns and the union leadership does not care about them..
The majority of women shopping there still looked their usual hot, sexy selves, but the cashiers and the bagboys/girls looked scared to death and were way overly polite to the point of getting smacked if they went too much further.
News vans from KABC and KCAL were camped in the parking lot.
I didn't cross the picket line during the last strike, but, there's no way I'm going to buy fruit and veggies from Jorge on the corner this time.
Here are the basic jobs in a supermarket...
Carriages - You walk around the parking lot taking empty carriages and putting them back in the store.
Bagging - You stand at the end of a register taking items off the conveyor belt and you place them in either plastic or paper bags.
Cashiering - You take the items the customer places on the conveyor belt for you and figure out where the bar codes are located. Once you do, you put the bar code over the "scanner" and put it back on the belt for the bagger.
Stocker - You take boxes from the warehouse, wheel them into the supermarket, unbox the items and place them on a shelf.
Warehouse - You drive around in a forklift, taking pallets of items off trucks and stacking them up in the warehouse in a predetermined location.
Manager - You basically walk around the store with a red jacket making sure all the above people are doing their jobs and not hanging out in the breakroom snacking on "damaged" goods.
Well, there you pretty much have it. There are a few other jobs too like taking blocks of meat and cheese and running them through a slicer at the deli or weighing out fish and wrapping it in wax paper in the seafood section but basically you can be taught just about any job in a supermarket in about 15 minutes provided your IQ is at or above room temperature.
About the most complicated job you will have in a supermarket is a butcher and increasingly, supermarkets outsource their butcher work anyhow.
They have a union for this job? Wow. That’s sad.
First of all...love your tag line, LOL! And I hope you get along well with your Father!
Secondly...I manage a Garden Center, and if you just change a few words, that’s pretty much all the teens at our place are expected to do. Our oldest employee is into her 80’s. She’s a cashier and just likes to get out a few days a week. She only works 3 hour shifts or so, in her support hose under her mini skirts. She’s a hoot. ;)
We had a really good crew this year; kids that were articulate and we could trust with the customers. Kids who actually would HELP a customer or find one of us to do so if there was a technical question to answer about plants, trees, shrubs, or grass seed or pest control.
Sadly, we’ll have to train up a whole new crop of them again next year, and we can’t pay a huge wage because our “Corporate Entity” is incredibly CHEAP. These kids make $7-$8 an hour...and COMPLAIN about it as if we’re keeping them from their basement labs where they’re curing cancer or something, LOL! None of them is older than eighteen. *SIGH*
BUT...we have all local kids; proving that we DON’T need to hire illegals to do this grunt work, and we lost our BEST worker to a local Dairy Farm where he can make $12 an hour milking cows all day. And being in a Farm Family, I know for a fact that he earns every penny of that! :)
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