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Women, minorities lead supermarket strike
By Lee Siu Hin
South Pasadena, California, Dec. 30 (IPS)— Women, immigrants,
and people of color are at the forefront of a strike of 70,000 California
supermarket workers that will soon enter its third month in a struggle
over cuts to workers’ health care.
Clerks employed by Safeway went on strike Oct. 11 after the company,
which also owns the Vons and Pavilion supermarket chains, refused to
back down from its demand that employees begin paying more of the health
care costs for themselves and family members and that new employees
receive less money and fewer benefits.
A day later, the Ralphs and Albertsons chains, which bargain with Safeway,
locked out their workers.
The dispute occurs as Wal-mart, the world’s largest retailer, prepares
to enter the California food retail market in 2004.
Wal-Mart employees are not unionized so the company’s labor costs
are much lower, and analysts say the supermarket chains are feeling
pressure to cut their costs, perhaps one reason for the drawn-out strike,
the largest at state supermarkets in a quarter-century.
Represented by the Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), the workers
earn on average 12-14 dollars an hour in a 30-hour work week.
About 65 percent of supermarket employees are women and about 10,000,
or 17 percent, of the picketing workers are from Asia or the Pacific
Islands (and known as “APIs’’), according to Adelaide
Chen, an American-born Chinese-American and former volunteer from the
Los Angeles chapter of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA).
Chen has been helping the supermarket workers for the past two months
at stores in Alhambra and Los Angeles’s Korea town.
“I see the supermarket workers having to fight their employer so
they can afford health coverage for their children, and I know that
this cause is well worth it,” she told IPS. “The API workers
could be my many aunts, uncles, and extended family.”
Studies released last year by the APALA showed that as of 2000, US-born
API women earned only 79 percent of the earnings of US-born white men.
The median weekly salaries of foreign-born API women were only 70 percent
of the earnings of foreign-born white men.
While 43.9 percent of US-born API women have a bachelor’s degree,
those women earn a median weekly income of only 826 dollars, compared
to 1,121 dollars earned by US-born white males with a bachelor’s
degree, added the studies.
Strike organizer Diana Truong-Davis is a wife, a mother, and a Chinese
supermarket worker from the Vons store in Alhambra. She says many shoppers
cannot understand why the employees went on strike when they are better
paid then most of their fellow Chinese sweatshop workers.
“I would be happy if my employer gave us benefits!” some argued
with Truong-Davis and other striking workers.
But the union argues that if the supermarkets — the largest in
the United States — win the California dispute, benefits will be
threatened country-wide.
“If we lose here,” UFCW President Doug Dority was quoted as
saying in the Los Angeles Times, “it will set off a corporate tidal
wave that will sweep away benefits in contracts in all industries.”
Joe Montana, a supermarket worker and the picket captain from Pavilions
supermarket (owned by Vons) in the city of South Pasadena, says the
strike is justified. “Oh yeah, because what they’re [company]
offering is not reasonable,” he told IPS.
“I myself have been working here for the past 12 years. To see
them taking a step backward is not fair.”
Talks between the two sides, working with a federal mediator, broke
off Dec. 19 and will not resume until next year.
The powerful Teamsters union, whose members were supporting the strikers,
have returned to work at the distribution centers owned by the three
grocery chains that supply the more than 850 stores affected.
The union says the medical trust fund that finances workers’ medical
coverage will run out of money by the end of December. Strike funds
are also emptying, and some union locals say they have taken loans to
be able to provide workers some strike pay.
The companies have reportedly lost $500 million since the strike began.
Albertsons, for example, reported a 50-percent drop in third-quarter
profit Dec. 5.
Strikers have received strong support from many community members in
Alhambra and Monterey Park, west of Los Angeles (a major Chinese immigrant
community).
Many of them fear the supermarket giants are cutting workers’ benefits
in the first step of what they call “Wal-Martisation”: a purposeful
effort to drive down wages and working conditions and to widen union
busting against workers, who are mainly immigrants, youth and housewives.
Al Maldonado, a Latino community organizer from San Gabriel Valley’s
Neighbors for Peace & Justice and the local labor alliance, has
organized a community group to “adopt-a-store” to support
the supermarket workers.
“This is a solidarity movement to support our supermarket workers
from the community, because injury to one is injury to all,” he
says.
The group organizes a weekly solidarity rally to support the workers
at the Vons store in Alhambra. In addition, it has printed and distributed
6,000 flyers asking the community not to shop at Vons and Albertsons.
About a dozen local groups, from college campus organizations to community
bodies, have adopted a neighborhood store to support striking workers.
Jamaican unions say no to IMF
Jan. 5— Jamaican trade unions have backed the government’s
position not to re-enter a borrowing agreement with the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and endorsed the idea of a social partnership agreement
to help deal with the country’s stifling debt and encourage economic
growth.
In fact, in a New Year statement the Jamaica Confederation Trade Unions
(JCTU) pledged to promote a social dialogue, as well as emerging tripartite
discussions — between unions, the private sector and the government.
The undertakings come in the context of deepening domestic and international
concerns about the sustainability of Jamaica’s $700 billion national
debt, the servicing of which accounts for more than 60 percent of the
government’s budget and a private sector initiative to deal with
the problem.
“The confederation is firmly of the view that the way out for the
country does not lie in entering a borrowing agreement with the IMF,
but a summoning of the collective wills of the social partners and other
stakeholders in civil society, to place the common good of the country
above and beyond narrow sectoral and partisan interests,” the JCTU
said in its message.
It was delivered on the confederation’s behalf by Danny Roberts,
a vice president of the JCTU and vice president of the National Workers
Union (NWU).
The opposition has suggested that the government should seek an agreement
with the IMF, whose imprimatur on its economic programs would re-open
access to the foreign bond markets that have recently been skittish
about Jamaica.
Audley Shaw, the shadow finance minister, had interpreted the presence
of an IMF team in Jamaica last month as a signal that negotiations for
a credit arrangement was underway.
However, the finance minister, Omar Davies, said that IMF mission was
here for a customary annual review of the economy — although one
was completed last March — and ruled out a return to a borrowing
arrangements with the Fund that government ended in 1996.
Although the administration has not as yet publicly responded to the
idea, Davies is also banking on debt-servicing initiative now being
crafted by a Jamaican private sector-led group, aimed at easing the
government’s debt-servicing burden.
The proposal — a draft of which is expected to be presented to
the government within a fortnight — would involve converting up
to $25 billion of high interest debt into cheaper US-dollar indexed
bonds or zero-coupon instruments.
With less requirement for government borrowing to service debt, there
is expectation that interest rates will decline, opening the way for
more private sector investment and stronger growth.
In addition to this program, for which the administration would have
to agree to a series of good housekeeping measures, Davies has been
talking to public sector unions to moderate the growth of the government’s
wage bill, which has jumped over 60 percent in the past five years and
now accounts for 21 percent of the budget.
Parallel to the private sector debt initiative, trade unions and private
sector officials have been meeting informally, hoping to create the
outlines of a social partnership agreement. The Patterson Administration
tried to craft such an agreement in the mid-1990s but it foundered on
trade union suspicion.
The JCTU in its New Year message suggested that such a partnership agreement
was now more likely to happen.
“The confederation will continue to promote social dialogue and
tripartite discussions as valuable and democratic means of addressing
social concerns [and] building consensus and [to] examine a wide range
of economic and social issues,” it said.
It would also help to achieve “greater productivity, efficiency
and competitiveness as the means through which we must earn our way
out of this untenable economic situation.”
Source: Jamaica Observer
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