In California, 47,000 members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union have voted to approve a strike if supermarket companies Albertsons and Ralphs don’t agree to their demands, says the Los Angeles Times. The two companies also include Vons, Pavilions and all Safeway stores.
Albertsons and Ralphs have “offered a one 10-cent per hour wage increase through 2018, as well as two bonuses of 10 cents an hour and 15 cents an hour during that time,” Rick Icaza, the president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770 told the Times. But workers remain disappointed that the stores have refused to improve their healthcare coverage, have reduced their contributions to employee pensions, and want workers to retire at 60 instead of 65. The grocery companies and union have 10 meetings scheduled through the end of July, the paper said.
For their part, the companies say they are committed to finding an agreement with the strikers. No doubt store leaders remember 2004, when a similar situation resulted in a 141-day strike, costing $1.5 billion in missed sales. Neither side came out of that fight unscathed. “Veteran grocery workers absorbed a 35 percent cut to their pensions to make a deal in 2004, while new employees took an even sharper cut. Clerks, meat cutters and baggers have seen their pay decline since then, after adjusting for inflation,” says the Times. This time around, though, the stores don’t have quite as much muscle as they once did. Their share of the Los Angeles market has dropped from 60 percent to 33 percent in recent years.