------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug. 12, 2004 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
NEW ENGLAND GROCERY WORKERS PREPARE TO FIGHT GREEDY GIANT
By Alex Gould Providence, R.I.
In this intense period of mergers, consolidations and restructuring within the food retailing industry, the Wal-Marti zation of labor shows no signs of ending.
On June 4, Shaw's Supermarkets, a New England chain recently bought by Albertsons, announced the layoffs of up to 275 of its highest-paid full- time workers. Albertsons was sending a Wal-Mart message to United Food and Com mer cial Workers union Local 791 and its 6,300 members working at Shaw's in Massa chusetts, Rhode Island and Maine only days before bargaining on the next contract was set to officially begin.
On June 10, Albertsons, a Fortune 500 company that extracted $556 million in profits from its low-wage workforce in 2003, submitted proposals that made it clear it would do anything to squeeze more profits from its employees. Along with the layoffs came a slashing contract proposal--cuts in wages, benefits, vacations and overtime. Mean while prices of food and other products continue to skyrocket.
Brian Ravenelle, UFCW Local 791 steward at the Pawtucket, R.I., Shaw's, told Workers World that "squeeze" was too mild a word. Although the situation was still undecided, he estimated that six workers at his store would lose their jobs.
"People are extremely upset about the layoffs, and that they are being asked to drive 40 to 50 miles to a lower-paying job," Ravenelle said. "If Shaw's succeeds in laying off any full-timers, these higher-paid workers can choose to leave or to displace one of the many general- service clerks or part-timers at the lower wage scale. They're extremely upset about the company's take-it-or-leave-it attitude."
Local 791 filed a grievance, and has so far refused to accept any of the layoffs. According to Local 791 Recording Secre tary Peter Derouen, less than a third of Shaw's employees are classified as full-time. The rest, while they may regularly work 40 hours a week, are general service clerks, or part-time clerks, who start at minimum wage ($6.75 per hour in Rhode Island).
On August 1, Local 791 members will vote on whether to accept the contract pro posal or strike. Derouen stated that the rank and file had prepared a community mobilization and strike support plan in conjunction with the Massa chusetts and Rhode Island AFL-CIO.
The union published a full-page ad in the Providence Journal exposing Albert son's plans to lay off and downsize the workers, many of whom are women and people of color.
"We do not want to strike," Derouen told WW, "but we are totally prepared to."
MERGERS SHARPEN BATTLE LINES
Albertsons is an international food retailing conglomerate. Like Wal- Mart, Safeway, Ahold, Kroger, etc., it's the product of an intense period of mergers and consolidation in the retail food industry that picked up speed in 1996 and shows no sign of ending soon.
Phil Kaufman, a researcher for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Wash ing ton, D.C., estimated that by 2002, just four corporations took over 29 percent of retail food sales in the U.S., up from under 17 percent in 1992. Twenty corporations sold over half the groceries in the U.S. in 2002, according to Kaufman.
He notes that his numbers are conservative, since he factors out sales of non-food items, while major supermarkets have increased their sales of everything from paper goods to hardware to electronics and clothing.
In the report, "Consolidation in Food Retailing," issued in 2000 by the USDA, Kaufman wrote: "Consolidating food retailers often cite the potential for lower costs as an incentive for becoming larger. These retailers believe they can decrease costs through supply-chain management practices--coordinated activities that generate operating, procurement, marketing, and distribution efficiencies.
"Expected efficiency gains and lower investment requirements will allow them to maintain profitability while keeping prices competitive with mass-merchandisers, warehouse club stores, and other emerging and potential rivals."
What are these "efficiencies" that consolidation "produces," and how does it produce them? Since sales are holding steady or dropping at Albert sons, its owners must make more profit off the same sales dollar by squeezing more work out of supermarket employees for less money.
"Efficiency" is a euphemism for the retail chains' all-out attack on wages, health care, pensions, and working conditions, with union-busting Wal-Mart in the lead. Nothing exemplifies the brutal race for "efficiencies" better than the criminal conspiracy of Safeway, Kroger and Albert sons to scrap the health benefits and wage gains of Southern California supermarket workers last fall.
YES TO MILLION WORKER MARCH
It's time for a labor-community offensive for health care, a living wage and full employment, not endless wars that divert billions of dollars from much-needed social services.
Unfortunately, the UFCW and the entire AFL-CIO leadership is throwing millions of dollars into the effort to replace war criminal George Bush with war criminal John Kerry. But a growing number of rank-and-file activists and militants are questioning organized labor's ties to the Democratic Party.
John Kerry ensured that legislation extending unemployment benefits would fail by one vote in the Senate when he didn't show up. He supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and the World Trade Organization that put millions of workers and peasants around the world under the direct rule of U.S. corporations and banks.
He voted for the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security agency, which took away union rights from tens of thousands of federal employees and increased the repression of immigrant workers. And he proposes to send 40,000 more young working-class women and men to occupied Iraq and squander $100 million a day to protect oil company investments there.
The millions of dollars collected by the AFL-CIO that are being spent on Kerry's campaign would be better spent on a united fighting campaign to organize Wal-Mart, defend workers at Shaw's, reach out to the low-wage unorganized workforce and to the unemployed, and fight to eliminate the wage and benefit gap between full-time and part-time retail workers.
The Million Worker March set for October 17 in Washington, D.C., is a good way for organized labor to seize the initiative on its own terms. Let's all support the members of UFCW Local 791 so that they can celebrate their victory with the workers, communities and anti-war movement at the Million Worker March!
[The writer is a member of UFCW Local 328.]
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