When my grandfather worked as a regional organizer for the United Mine Workers in the 1930s, union members didn’t play nice. After decades of having local cops, state police, national guardsmen and company-hired “gun-thugs” beat them and shoot them and run them out of town, they had no illusions about how far companies would go to squelch their aims for decent pay and benefits. Those unions didn’t succeed in making a better life for their members without being tough.
Seeing the picket lines come down at my neighborhood grocery stores in Los Angeles this past weekend made me fantasize about the old days when unions had no illusions about the owners and managers of the companies their members worked for. What I wouldn’t have given during the past 20 weeks to see a good fist-fight between a grocery clerk and a visitor from top management. Something to put the strike/lock-out into true perspective.
No such luck.
These days, of course, U.S. companies speak softly at home and save their old-style union-crushing tactics for overseas operations, where they can often count on the government to help them out, giving them a perfect excuse if anybody complains. Unions, too, rarely even call anybody names when contract renewal time arrives, and the company starts twisting the knife.
Indeed, instead of pressing for better pay, better benefits and better conditions, the United Food & Commercial Workers union practically found itself on its knees trying to halt backsliding from Safeway, Albertson’s and Kroger. The supermarkets didn’t quite break the UFCW, but there’s no way to sugarcoat the union’s
disastrous defeat, even though its leaders
are already trying.
A just cause, but a lame effort, I’m sad to say. I know several UFCW organizers and I would never denigrate their hard work under difficult circumstances. However, I must take issue with the bad strategy of the top leaders. Putting up token “informational” picket lines instead of massive ones, letting Ralph’s off the hook while it conspired with its “rivals” to share profits, failing to maintain picket-lines at warehouses all contributed to this failed effort. Given the importance of the dispute, the AFL-CIO also dropped the ball by not providing funding to keep massive picket-lines running and union members’ health care paid.
Under the new pact approved by 86% of union members over the weekend, a two-tiered hiring system will come into effect. New workers will be hired at lower wages, be granted raises more slowly, be covered by a cheaper health plan than that which covers existing workers, and get smaller pensions when they retire. In two years, existing workers will begin paying $20-$60 a month for health care in addition to the $10 co-payment they plunked down for each medical visit under the old plan. The union did manage to keep the companies from reducing pensions of already retired workers. But that was clearly one of those items management stuck into the negotiations knowing full well it would yield as a “compromise.”
This is not the end, however. Union-busting consultants probably won’t be landing at LAX tomorrow afternoon. But it would not surprise me to see, not long from now, the first efforts to decertify the union, clearing the way for Safeway and the others to operate with an unorganizaed labor force. Just like Wal-Mart, whose labor and
business practices the supermarkets used to catalyze this dispute in the first place.
As the
Miami Herald article linked above notes:
The inclusion in the contract of a two-tier compensation scale, in which new hires top out at a lower level of wages and benefits than current employees in the same jobs, hurts the United Food and Commercial Workers union, experts said.
"Over time, more of the work force will be shifted from the higher-wage, higher-benefit jobs to lower-wage, lower-benefit jobs," said Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education. …
"I don't like to think" that a two-tier wage and benefit scale will result, she said. Roger Schnapp, a labor attorney in Newport Beach who has represented management in other strikes, called the strike and its outcome "an unmitigated disaster" for union leadership. He believes that the union probably could have achieved a better settlement if it had never begun a strike that cost its members hundreds of millions of dollars.
"I think the supermarkets handled this well," he said. "The union is basically getting back to where they were and saying, 'It's a victory that we didn't lose as much as we (could have).'"
I’m no pollyanna when it comes to unions. No need to reprise the old tale: leaders living cushy lives far removed from the rank-and-file’s; corruption; selling out; antiquated work rules that ultimately hurt everyone; contracts that protect the lazy and incompetent.
The past 20-plus years, on the other hand, we’ve been witness to a direct assault on the gains earlier unions fought and won literally with their blood. Even the most fundamental of those gains – the 8-hour day – is now under direct attack by the plutocrats, whose motives are obvious, and many libertarians whose view of proper economic relations suffers from poor understanding of real life. At the same instant fundamental advances are assaulted, we are told that unions are an anachronism.
It’s said that the supermarkets lost more than $1 billion in this dispute. Precisely the amount they claimed they needed to shave off wages and benefits to protect them from the Wal-Mart juggernaut. The losses don’t seem to bother them, nor do they seem to bother their shareholders.
That’s because this fight wasn’t about three big corporations chopping a billion dollars off labor costs associated with 70,000 workers. It was just another installment in the grand scheme that the plutocrats and their bootlicking pundithugs call “class warfare” and blame on its victims. For two decades, they’ve done their best to enlarge the income gap between not merely the top and the bottom, but between the top and everybody else, with the middle class their biggest target. One more round to their side.