Blow to the
blue-collar
middle class

Karen was locked out of the store she'd worked in for 25 years, as her union fought a losing battle against large national supermarket chains.

By the time the Los Angeles Times reported that union and grocery negotiators were scheduled to meet Feb. 11 to resume formal contract negotiations, Karen had not worked for four months and had burned through the money she was saving for her dream of buying a house.

Some progress from both sides was expected in the first formal talks since negotiations for a new contract broke down between the United Food and Commercial Workers union and the stores, Kroger Co.’s Ralphs, Safeway Inc.’s Vons and Pavilions, and Albertsons Inc., two months earlier.

But Karen, a 44-year-old Albertsons’ office manager from Culver City, had grown skeptical and weary and was ready to quit. The tedium of standing outside the stores doing nothing for the six hours a day, six days a week required to receive the union’s strike relief pay was wearing the strikers down and eroding morale.

“Picketing seems so futile,” Karen said. “It seems like the steam’s running out. Not because we’re not winning, but because they’re not even talking. That six hour day seems like a 10 hour day. People just want it to be over.”

Karen and the other higher-tier workers received $40 for each of their six days, the boxboys received $20 for four hours a day. Her strike captain had told her that week that the union was going to cut that to four days, so she would only get $160 a week at most. For Karen, it had come down to a waiting game — how long she could hold out on her savings, matched against how long the nationwide grocery chain Albertsons Inc. could last on its revenues.

“I’ve started looking for another job. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, so I have some savings,” said Karen, who was earning more than $40,000 a year until the strike cut her income to $960 a month. “I’m not so bad off as most of the others. I have a husband who makes a good salary. He’s a firefighter. But I was saving to buy a house, and now it looks like I have to start all over again.” Starting over again has become a recurring theme in Karen’s life.

Karen is an office manager for the Albertsons supermarket in the new shopping plaza on Venice Boulevard near Robertson Boulevard in Culver City. She has worked for Albertsons full time since she was 17 years old. She had not missed more than a handful of days, until Albertsons Inc. locked out its unionized employees in response to the Oct. 11, 2003, strike called by UFCW after contract negotiations with Kroger, Safeway and Albertsons broke down.

She started out as a grocery bagger and was a checker for about 12 years. Then she worked as on-site manager, running the front of the store. “But I had to stop that because I was a single mom. It was before I married my husband. That would have meant working at night, and if you want to move up in the management, you have to do that job for a certain amount of time.”

Karen has two kids, a 9-year-old and an 18-year-old who started working as a boxboy at Albertsons about six months ago. Karen feels he has learned at too young an age some sobering lessons from the grocery strike about his value as a worker in the changing economy. She has too, and feels disillusioned by what she saw as a betrayal of her loyalty to the company.

“I was really loyal.” Karen got a lot more out of the job than the generous pay and full medical coverage for employees and their families with no employee contributions. She really enjoyed working in the social, bustling atmosphere of the supermarket. She enjoyed boosting other employees’ morale and took pride in trying to save time, work a little harder and do things more efficiently to help the company out. She even shopped at her Albertsons because she wanted to make some small investment in the company.

Karen found a new job the same week the union and the supermarkets went back to the negotiating table. The whole process of finding a new job at 44 reflects the overall change for American blue-collar workers. They used to form a solid chunk of the middle class, but huge corporations such as Kroger, Safeway, and Albertsons and, of course, Wal-Mart, have long since displaced local chains or single stores and are now competing in a world market.

The strike affected more than 70,000 workers at 853 stores across California as the supermarkets tried to fundamentally alter their business model to adapt to the new economy — a necessity, they claimed, because they would have to reduce labor costs to compete with Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s supercenters that are marching into Southern California. Suddenly, Karen was confronted with the new labor market after spending her entire adult life in the capsule of the unionized supermarkets.

Karen’s remarkable resilience and resourcefulness in tackling the task of finding a new job makes the picture look optimistic for grocery workers who will inevitably have to find other jobs as supermarkets cut labor costs.

“At Albertsons, they don’t use Excel, Word, Quickbooks or any of the Microsoft Office programs. All the job ads I saw wanted people with experience in those programs. Albertsons has its own software systems for bookkeeping,” she said. “So I started learning how to use Office programs on those CD’s you can buy to learn it at home. I have a friend who works in the human resources department of a big company, and all day long she reads people’s resumes, so she knows what the things are that her company looks for. She sat with me and asked me all these questions, and filled in a new resume for me that was much better. It would cost a couple hundred dollars to have a professional career counselor do that, so I saved that money. All the job ads had fax numbers, so I figured if I could get a fax to use for free, I could send out lots and lots of resumes really fast, and wouldn’t have to pay postage. A friend of mine let me use the fax at her office, so I sent out like 35 resumes. I got about three responses, and one of them hired me. Also, I didn’t have any clothes to wear for an office job. For 25 years, I’ve worn a uniform. I went to a President’s Day Sale and spent about $400 on four new outfits that I can wear at an office.”

As the strike neared its end, the union and the supermarkets had worked out a provisional contract, which would end the strike and get everyone back to their jobs. Karen had found another job earlier in the week and had been to visit her friends on the picket line to tell them the good news, socialize and talk about the proposed contract.

While the new contract guarantees that Karen and all the other union employees will retain their current wage levels and will have to pay a modest contribution to cover their comprehensive health benefits, all new employees will fall into a reduced two-tiered wage system that will leave only the manager-level employees with health benefits. Even though Karen can have her job back at the same wage, she is torn about whether she wants to move on and continue her new job, or go back to Albertsons. She really enjoyed the new job, and felt the strike was a breaking point with the past. She’s proud that she had found a job outside the supermarket, and felt more like a professional. But she also had a lot invested in Albertsons. In six years, she would qualify for a generous pension, as a 50-year-old with 30 years’ employment.

Karen had only begun working at her new job when she got the bad news that the company could not afford to provide her the training she would need to do the job, and she would only be able to work part time, disqualifying her for benefits.

“I knew I was going back to Alberstons at that point,” she said. “That was when they were in negotiations, about a week before the strike ended.”

While Karen was disappointed the new job didn’t work out, she was relieved the strike was over and that she still had a job to fall back on. She found a new value in her job security, despite it being shaken by the strike. “It was a relief because I didn’t have to make up my mind about what I would do,” she said. “I never realized how important it was to have that security of the job. So I was going to go back to Albertsons to work full time to get the benefits.”

After four months of striking that costing more than 70,000 grocery employees most of their income, the union negotiated a contract that was much the same as what the grocery chains had initially offered, something that embittered Karen.

“I’ve never really been a really strong union person,” she said. “The strike hasn’t changed that really. We didn’t gain anything and we were out of work all that time and we accepted the same thing they offered us in the first place. The role the union plays, in my view, is that they protect employees who should be fired anyway.”

For Karen, who never went to college, the strike was a wake up call that, in the new economy, she was going to need to have some more job skills. That boosted her motivation to continue taking classes at Santa Monica City College to get an accounting degree.