Somehow surviving on $20 per day strike pay, the United Food and Commercial Workers continue to maintain a picket line outside Vons and Albertsons grocery stores in Southern California. Seventy thousand workers are on strike against Safeway/Vons in Southern California -- and locked out by Albertsons and Kroger/Ralphs. Despite a 91% profit growth over the last five years, the grocery chain owners are demanding wholesale cuts in employee health care benefits. Workers from seven locals voted over 90% to reject the offer by three of the largest supermarket operators in the country, Vons (Safeway-owned), Ralphs (Kroger-owned) and Albertsons and set up picket lines October 11, 2003.

The stakes in this conflict are high: a victory for management will give the green light to owners across the grocery store sector and beyond that it is possible to leave their workers without healthcare coverage. On the other hand, a worker victory will maintain standards for those under contract and indicate that other chains, including Wal-Mart, must take seriously employee determination to win fair treatment on this issue. It is understandable why both sides have been willing to hold out for so long.

This job action is also about three competing visions of how health care should be dispensed in California. The informal, individual system means that workers ought to buy their own health plans rather than negotiate for them collectively. In such an arrangement, younger and healthier workers will most likely simply not purchase coverage, leading to spiraling rates for those who most need it. Alternatively, large companies such as Albertsons and Wal-Mart would ensure health plans for those who do the actual work in these stores. A third vision would see a single payer system where everyone has access to collectively purchased health care. This is the “Canadian” system currently under attack in Canada by Gordon Campbell and his neoliberal counterparts.

In Southern California, the United Food and Commercial Workers are fighting against the first vision, and they continue to enjoy considerable support. In the Santa Barbara area, for example, frustration with the ongoing inconvenience caused by this labor dispute has resulted in more customers crossing the picket line, but new, community-based displays of support have also occurred recently. In keeping with their conventional historic role, the University of California students in Santa Barbara have been most opposed to the workers at the local Albertsons. While all of the stores involved in this labor dispute have lost sales since the job action began last fall, decreased revenue has been least perceptible at the Albertsons closest to the UCSB campus, where indeed UCSB students do most of the scabbing.

At this particular Albertsons, the workers are understandably unhappy at this collegial effort to sabotage their livelihoods, but those on the line are not surprised. In a telling and widespread observation outside the UCSB Albertsons, UFCW workers feel that the students are so likely to cross the line because they are the least informed sector of the local populace. So those who enjoy the privilege of going to class rather than going to work are the least educated about the issues that actually matter to the surrounding community, which probably goes to show that the universities are actually doing a good job of their larger function. That is, serving as institutions that foster a sense of entitlement and reproduce class privilege, all of which so often comes at the expense of working people.

But the situation on campus is complicated. As more people are realizing that this dispute is unlikely to end any time soon, some students are starting to organize to join solidarity pickets that are happening with greater frequency. When presented with leaflets about this issue, some students express their opposition but there is a consistent element among the student body that respect the picket line. Many of these students feel their individual support for the local workers to be ineffectual, and they are starting to organize more coordinated gestures of support. And the UFCW really appreciates the psychological boost that a honk, some snacks, or a troupe of chanting students can bring. As people who are risking their jobs and losing their wages to make a stand that will say so much about the direction that labor standards will take in this state, and ultimately as workers on the front lines of the class war in which we all have a stake, the UFCW certainly deserves our support.

Update: Over the past weekend, 86 per cent of grocery workers who cast ballots approved the contract negotiated by the United Food and Commercial Workers union and should be returning to work soon. The contract offers a one-time bonus, but no raises. The ratified contract also requires grocery workers to pay for health care benefits for the first time. See the UFCW website at www.ufcw.org for ongoing updates.

At my local Albertson's, the workers who I spoke to in the past few days are understandably anxious to get back to work. They said that the terms of the contract were satisfactory under the circumstances. Thank you, United Food and Commercial Workers, for taking this stand on healthcare, an issue that effects us all. The terms of the new contract certainly appear less than perfect, but thanks to your efforts, bosses across California and across the country are now aware of how seriously workers take this issue, and how hard they are willing to fight for it.

John Munro is a PhD student at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

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