Public Employee Press

The World of Work
Grocery strike settled

Over 70,000 grocery workers struck for four months in Southern California. In the February settlement, they held onto their health-care benefits and beat back a proposal that would have forced current employees to pay up to $95 a week for premiums.

But under the United Food and Commercial Workers pact, employees will eventually contribute to their health care and new employees will assume a far greater burden to receive health benefits. Employers will contribute $1.10 per hour toward the health-care of new workers while continuing for now to pay $3.80 an hour for existing workers. The settlement also establishes a two-tiered wage system that will bring in new workers at a substantially lower rate than current employees.

The employers—Safeway, Kroger’s and Albertson’s—cited competition from Wal-Mart to justify deep cutbacks in health benefits. In recent years, the retail giant — the nation’s largest employer, with 1.2 million employees — has made a big push into the grocery business.

The average supermarket employee makes $10.35 an hour, but sales clerks at Wal-Mart got only $8.23 an hour in 2001. Because of their low wages, many of Wal-Mart’s employees cannot afford to enroll in the company’s health-care plan.

Wal-Mart is a notorious anti-union company that has faced lawsuits over unequal pay, discrimination and required off-the-clock work. Even an internal audit found “extensive violations of child-labor laws and state regulations requiring time for breaks and meals.”