The Teamster action followed a United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) announcement that it would expand picketing to nine Albertsons, Ralphs, and Vons distribution centers after six weeks on strike.

On October 11, members of UFCW Local 770 walked out at Safeway, Vons, and Pavilions stores. The next day the owners of Ralphs and Albertsons, who bargain jointly with Safeway, locked out workers there. Since then some 70,000 workers at more than 850 stores in central and Southern California have been walking picket lines. All three stores have hired thousands of scabs.

The UFCW has accused the grocery companies of violating California antitrust law by making a secret pact to share revenue generated during the strike. The bosses aim to use their “pain-sharing” agreement to neutralize the union’s decision to stop picketing at Ralphs stores, and instead beef up the pickets at the two other chains.

The distribution centers supply goods to the three grocery chains. Acuña said most of the drivers “who bring the food to the warehouses are nonunion, but that all the drivers who deliver to the grocery chains are union.”

In anticipation of the Teamster job action, the grocery bosses hired replacement workers to load trucks inside the distribution centers and drive loaded trucks to the stores. “We saw a bunch of scabs driving in vehicles with license plates from Nevada earlier today,” said Anna Marie Kallas, who is locked out from Ralphs. She and several co-workers were walking the picket lines the day after Thanksgiving.

“Only two pickets are allowed to walk in front of the entrance to the warehouse. This means much of the time we’re standing around which we don’t like,” she said. Teamsters who honor the picket line are not allowed to picket or carry picket signs. Some Teamsters, however, joined the pickets at the Ralphs distribution center here.

The Teamsters union, which has signed labor agreements with the grocery chains, has sanctioned the UFCW picket lines as “a legitimate ‘bona fide’ primary picket line.” At this time no Teamsters are working in any of the warehouses.

From the beginning of the strike, the grocery bosses have been taking a hard line. They assert that they must wrest health-care and wage concessions from the union, claiming they need to cut costs in order to compete with nonunion competitors like Wal-Mart and Target. The grocery bosses regularly place full-page anti-union ads in English and Spanish in the big-business press.

A recent Merrill Lynch report says the grocery companies are together losing $40 million a week in sales to the smaller chains. But this is small change when compared to the fact that Albertsons, Ralphs and Vons rake in more than $30 billion apiece in annual sales. A report in the business section of the November 27 Los Angeles Times noted “the supermarkets want to use the Southern California contract as a template that will lower their labor expense elsewhere as other employee contracts come up for renewal.”

“We’ve made many concessions over the years to keep health benefits. This is my fourth strike,” said UFCW picket captain Louis Tanahara, who has worked 29 years at Albertsons, while picketing its distribution center in La Habra November 29. “Now they want to even take away our medical benefits and make us third-class citizens.” As at the Compton facility earlier that day, several vans loaded with scabs drove into the center.

“They are trying to take our jobs,” Tanahara said. But he added: “Morale is still high. The only thing we have to fight back with is solidarity. And that’s what we’ll keep doing.”

In a related development, 2,800 transit mechanics ended a 35-day walkout here November 17. They had shut down the third-largest transit system in the country. Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1277 voted by an 85 percent margin to return to work although the main strike issue, medical benefits, remains unsolved. The union agreed to nonbinding arbitration. It won modest wage concessions and the right to strike should the union reject the mediator’s proposal.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home