Bracing for a strike

My part of the country is bracing for a contract confrontation between the same antagonists that led to the California grocery strike last winter. Since that strike the three national grocery chains, Safeway, Albertson’s, and Kroger’s, have negotiated a number of contracts with local grocery unions. In each case the chains have offered essentially the same deal that was offered in California. In Western Washington the contracts expired at the end of April, and negotiations have carried on while the workers continue to work under the old contract.

Negotiators have extended talks for a new labor contract at the Puget Sound region’s four largest grocery chains into early July, delaying the prospect of a possible strike or lockout.

The current contract, which had been set to expire in early May, has been extended twice in the past month as the two sides bargain over health benefits and wages for more than 16,000 workers at Safeway, Albertsons, QFC and Fred Meyer.

QFC and Fred Meyer grocery stores are owned by Kroger, The third national chain involved in the California strike.

Late last week, representatives of the grocery chains and the United Food and Commercial Workers extended the contract for three more weeks and agreed to meet six more times, with talks resuming Monday and scheduled to continue through July 7.

[…]

As in California, the key issue is health-care costs, which the group of employers says have jumped more than 73 percent since the last contract was negotiated in 2001. The companies pay 100 percent of workers’ health-care premiums. Employees cover co-pays and deductibles.

The grocers’ initial proposal for the new contract called for employees to pay a share of their health-care premiums.

It also proposed a two-tier salary system in which new employees would be paid less than veterans. Union officials said the proposal amounted to $500 million in cuts over the three-year contract.

On Friday, the UFCW submitted a counterproposal that it said would save companies $120 million by, among other things, increasing employees’ co-pays and assigning new hires to an HMO for their first year of coverage.

“It’s a start — and a good start,” said Melinda Merrill, a spokeswoman for the grocery chains. “Their proposal acknowledges that there needs to be changes, and that really is encouraging. The employers still want to explore ways to lower the cost of health benefits, but this is a good step.”

Sharon McCann, president of UFCW Local 1105, said she is disappointed that the grocery chains haven’t embraced the union’s latest offer or amended their initial proposal.

Merrill, the spokeswoman for the grocery chains, makes it sound like they are thoughtfully considering the union’s offer, but I notice they have turned up the pressure on the employees in the stores. For about two weeks the chains have been advertising to hire scab workers. Seattle has higher than average unemployment so they probably have no trouble finding takers. Today I went to my neighborhood QFC to pick up a few things and saw a sign, prominently placed in the aisle where it was visible from the checkstands advertising for hire scab workers to apply with the store manager.

My first though was that this is a pretty crude intimidation tactic. I still think it is, but there is an uglier, more subtle element. Most of the management in the stores (as opposed to at the corporate offices) is made up of people promoted from the ranks. These people have far stronger ties to the union employees than to the owners and corporate staff who they hardly ever see. Having the store managers interview scabs where the union employees can see them, serves to separate the two groups of store workers even before the strike.

Fortunately, the union is not without its own resources.

The strike and the picket line are labor’s best-known tools for exerting pressure on employers in a contract negotiation. But the strike (or, from an employers’ point of view, the lockout) is a high-risk proposition; once workers walk out (or are locked out) the dispute takes on an unpredictable momentum beyond the control of either party, with the potential for disaster for both. In such cases strikes aren’t ended by negotiation so much as they’re ended by exhaustion on both sides, who are left to convince themselves and the public that they didn’t lose as much as the other guy.

The picket line is meant to convey a message to the public of the workers’ cause and to deter the public from patronizing the business. But a good portion of the public these days, not belonging to a union or not having grown up in the tradition, is indifferent to the picket line; another segment is openly hostile toward unions and their cause.

[…]

The me-too agreement isn’t a cure-all for these problems. But it does have some attractions that make it intriguing to labor unions such as the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents grocery store employees.
Me-too agreements work like this: In situations where there are contracts covering multiple employers in the same industry expiring at roughly the same time, the union and some of those employers will negotiate a sort of contract in advance. That contract says that the union won’t strike those employers should there be a walkout. In turn, those employers agree to offer to their workers whatever is the industrywide or regionwide settlement agreed to by the largest employers.

UFCW locals in the Puget Sound region have been announcing me-too agreements with such smaller chains and independents as Town & Country Markets (Ballard, Greenwood and Shoreline Central markets), Metropolitan Markets, Market Place, Thriftway, Red Apple and Market Place stores.

For unions, me-toos have the attraction of preserving whatever benefits there are to multiemployer bargaining (keeping everyone at roughly the same wage scale) with whatever leverage can be extracted from a divide-and-conquer approach. In negotiations such as the grocery industry, local and regional labor unions are going up against national operations (Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons). The notion that their competitors will be operating unfettered while they’re being struck may be a counterbalance to that disparity of size.

For the smaller grocery operations who agree to me-toos, the benefits include being able to operate without the cost and hassle of a strike should one occur, and maybe even pick up some new customers.

Two of the smaller chains have branches close to my home. My normal shopping habit is to spread the wealth around, so I know these stores well and will have no problem transferring the portion of my business that QFC gets to the others. The only question is, if it comes to a strike would I ever transfer my business back to QFC afterwards.

One for Our Side

U.S. to Drop Benefit Cuts Linked to Drug Discounts
By ROBERT PEAR

Published: NY Times, June 13, 2004

WASHINGTON, June 12 – The Bush administration said Saturday that it would rescind a federal policy that threatened to cut food stamp benefits for several million low-income elderly and disabled people who save money on their medicines by using the new Medicare drug discount cards.

The administration’s reversal came two days before President Bush was scheduled to visit Missouri to promote use of the cards, which have received a tepid reaction from many Medicare beneficiaries.

In interviews this week, state officials across the country said low-income people who used the cards could find their food stamp benefits reduced as a result. The cuts, they said, were a direct result of federal regulations and a policy statement issued by the Agriculture Department on March 10.

The purpose of the discount cards is to reduce out-of-pocket drug costs. But when a person’s drug expenses go down, state officials said, the food stamp program assumes that the person has more money available to spend on other needs, including food. So the person may receive a smaller food stamp allotment, they said.

Judy K. Toelle, the food stamp director in South Dakota, confirmed that such cuts would occur under the federal rules. For example, she said, a woman with monthly income of $1,060, shelter expenses of $555 and drug costs of $325 now receives $51 a month in food stamps. But, she said, if the card reduced her out-of-pocket drug costs by $100, the woman would get $41 less in food stamps, so the net saving would be $59.

Food stamp officials in California, Colorado, Missouri , New Mexico and Washington State said they were simply following federal rules in reducing food stamp benefits to take account of the fact that people with discount cards spent less on prescription drugs. Those regulations have not been changed.

But after inquiries from The New York Times, Eric M. Bost, an under secretary of agriculture, said, “We will immediately be clarifying policy guidance to ensure that food stamp applicants or recipients who use the new Medicare discount card will experience no impact on their eligibility or benefits.”

The abrupt shift highlights the confusion between federal and state officials, and between the two federal agencies that administer Medicare and food stamps.

‘Confusion’? The only confusion is that Bost, the guy who thinks hunger shelters are shopping centers for suburban Moms, forgot that Bush was trying to get re-elected on the old ‘compassionate conservative’ ploy. So somebody reminded him.

Elections are good for stuff like this.

Workers Are Catching On

By Peter Wallsten, LA Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Osvaldo Millet makes a good living — $43 an hour plus overtime — as a hospital pharmacist in Miami. The overtime pays for vacations and other extras for his family of five, but that money might disappear under a Bush administration initiative.

Jeff Deckard is a member of the National Rifle Assn. who voted for Ronald Reagan and isn’t fond of the Democratic Party’s more liberal views. But the Reynoldsburg, Ohio, electrician has soured on President Bush. Deckard is out of work and his unemployment checks will soon end if the Republican-led Congress doesn’t extend benefits.

The worries of Millet and Deckard reflect a political challenge for Bush as he increasingly pins his reelection hopes on the fruits of a recovering economy that has posted nine consecutive months of job gains.

Bush is an unabashedly pro-business president. But he is also working to forge an image as a friend of the American worker, part of his effort to win such battleground states as Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

However, some of his policies — including new overtime regulations and his push to eliminate rules designed to reduce repetitive-stress injuries — carry a risk of alienating voters who otherwise would lean toward supporting him.

“It doesn’t seem to me that he looks out for the working person,” said Millet, 43, a Cuban-born Republican who has never voted for a Democratic candidate for president but is now considering doing so.

And Deckard already has begun voting for Democratic candidates because he is unhappy with how GOP workplace policies are affecting him.

On the campaign trail, the president has cited recent job gains, tax cuts and his support for worker retraining programs. Administration officials have said that workers are safer and more financially secure than before Bush took office, with workplace injuries at an all-time low and back wages collected on behalf of workers at an 11-year high.

But even some supporters of the administration said that Bush has often favored the interests of business over those of labor — a fact that they like.

“When it comes to business-versus-labor issues,” said Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth, an advocacy group that favors low taxes and limited government, “Bush has been down the line pro-business in a way that we think is praiseworthy.”

‘Nine consecutive months of job gains’ tranlates into this: it has taken 9 months to regain less than a third of the jobs that were lost in the first three years of the Bush Administration, which–do the math–means that it would take another year-and-a-half of similar record gains every month just to get back to where we were when he took office. Workers may be a little slow to catch on to tricks and dodges, but we’re not stupid. Eventually, we get it.