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December 2003

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Attention LA Shoppers

By Lee Siu hin
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December 2003
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Since mid-October, 70,000 supermarket clerks from nearly 900 Vons, Albertsons, and Ralphs supermarkets in southern California have been engaged in a round-the-clock strike (or have been locked out of work by management) in response to management’s proposal to cut their health benefits in half. At the same time, thousands of mechanics and bus drivers from the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) also launched a strike when management demanded it be allowed to take over the employee’s health care trust fund. 

The three supermarket giants are everywhere, from San Diego to San Luis Obispo. Their employee’s average pay and benefits are better than working in sweatshops in downtown Los Angeles and the management of these chains wants the workers to contribute more to the rising costs of health care so the stores can better compete with nonunion rivals like Wal-Mart. When United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), Local 770, representing employees of the three supermarket giants, refused to accept the companies’ demands, the union tried to negotiate with management for two months before talks deadlocked on October 5. The UFCW called for a strike on October 12. 

The majority of the striking workers and organizers are women, housewives, immigrants, people of color, and inner city youth, including thousands of Asian Pacific Islanders (APIs). Corporate executives of the supermarket chains underestimated these women and immigrant employees, assuming that people who barely speak English wouldn’t go on strike.

The Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), the API- wing of the AFL-CIO, has been working closely with API striking workers and has launched a public education campaign in the Chinese community to win support. Most Chinese immigrants live west of downtown Los Angeles, in areas such as Alhambra, Monterey Park (the Chinese “Beverly Hills”), El Monte, Roland Heights, and San Gabriel. 

Despite popular stereotypes about the API community, many Chinese immigrants still live at the poverty level. Chinese immigrants who cannot speak English end up working in Chinese-run grocery stories or restaurants with minimum wage and no benefits. Those who are lucky enough to speak English or who have some job skills can work in offices, at the post-office, or in “foreigner-run” (in Chinese terms, anything not run by Chinese is considered “foreigner-run”) stores. 

At the beginning, many shoppers couldn’t understand why, when they are paid better than most of their fellow Chinese workers, they were still going to strike. “I would be happy if my employers gave us benefits,” some argued with Diana Truong-Davis, the picket captain. But Truong-Davis says if this labor struggle fails, their pay and benefits will eventually drop to sweatshop levels. 

According to the union and strike organizers, corporate executives from Vons, Albertsons, and Ralphs have refused to negotiate on the key issue of benefit cuts, waging an expensive PR campaign and taking out full-page ads in local newspapers against the striking workers. The Los Angeles Times, which runs many lavish paid ads for  the supermarket chains, has covered the strike, but their editorials clearly support the supermarket owners. Several local Chinese-run newspapers have also taken sides against the strike or limited their coverage to the “good news” about the surge of business at Chinese-run supermarkets as a result of  the strike. 

Currently the UFCW and APALA are supporting the strike and helping striking API workers, considering this a very important labor struggle in light of upcoming labor contract negotiations with other southern California supermarket chains—some of whom incidentally are also owned by the supermarket giants (for example, Food 4 Less is owned by Ralphs and workers are represented by the UFCW, but they are not on strike because their contracts will not expire until next year). For their part, management is not backing off, blaming the long strike on the unions. Some of the contested issues include:

  • Health Care: The employers say they just want their employees to share a “reasonable” portion of their health care costs—the so-called $5 a week for individuals and $15 for families. However, according to the union, this is a lie. The employers also want to increase co-payments, institute deductibles, and place caps on payments for prescriptions and surgeries. This amounts to a 50 percent cut in medical benefits that would shift almost a billion dollars in health care costs onto the workers over the term of the contract. 
  • Wages: The supermarkets’ PR argues that employees are well paid. According to the strikers, the companies selectively cite only the highest wage levels of full-time food clerks to back their claims—as if these wages are typical. Many employees earn less than $10 an hour; 75 percent of supermarket employees work part-time and must keep their schedules open so they can be called in to work at any time. On average, these on-call workers only make $312 a week.

Strike organizers believe that it’s not just the living standards of 70,000 workers—mostly youth, women, people of color, and immigrants—that are at stake here, but the future of other labor struggles in Los Angeles as well. 

Lee Siu Hin is an organizer from ActionLA in Los Angeles, a reporter for Pacifica Radio KPFK-Los Angeles, and a council member of United Students Against Sweatshops. 
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