According to the Washington Post, they do.
The SoCal situation is hardly unique and the grocers want to increase health care premimums across the board. From the same article:
A potential strike in New England was averted recently.
I wonder why SoCal couldn’t do the same thing. This might have something to do with it.
Wow, I just looked in after a long absence and it seems to have taken off again.
One thing that I tried to find in the news, and couldn’t, is exactly what the two-tier system will entail. How much will the new workers get, and where would they max out, assuming a typical career path? If there even is such a thing as a typical career path?
To those who say that grocery workers just do monkey work, I respectfully disagree. Sure, it doesn’t take much to be a beginning grocery worker, and much of the work may be extremely routine. But I think an experienced clerk adds more value than an inexperienced one, and should be compensated accordingly. I’m grateful for the folks who can instantly pluck out the brand and size that I want, saving me the trouble of tediously scanning the whole aisle.
Steven Burd has been the CEO for quite awhile. Going on… I think about 10 years, maybe more. I met the guy once, seemed like an asshole but it’s not like we spoke for hours on end…
Considering that the average grocery store worker - a part-time, low-paid High School kid - probably still lives at home, no problem, dickwad.
See, Blowie, that’s why the grocery store unions got no sympathy… everyone knows that they’ve got it relatively easy. And when they try to make up bullshit like yours and fling it around like it’s chocolate… well, look what happened: The workers got screwed by their idiot union, and next to nothing was accomplished.
I’d think that you would want to know the salaries of the top managemenht officials that were making so much profit that they could afford that strike.
You don’t have 3 parties involved in this kind of situation, just 2, the employees and management. If you chose not to involve yourself in the union - well, you get what you deserve, it is your union. Me, I know what my union officials at the International make, I voted on their salary.
And I’ll suggest something else, I know what the management people make in my business also, and you can bet your ass that neither me or any other employees had a vote in those salaries.
Labor got screwed in this one, but there wouldn’t have been anything to screw them out of if it hadn’t been for the union’s. Think about that.
“Monkey work” is inflamatory speech, especially when we are talking about honest work that people depend on for health care and putting food on the table for families. And, more importantly, that you depend on unless you are someone who does not deal with a grocery store in some form or fashion.
SPOOFE: See, Blowie, that’s why the grocery store unions got no sympathy…
Actually, what the posts here have been saying is that the striking grocery store workers got lots of sympathy and support from the public. The unions that didn’t do a very good job of mobilizing that support and defending their workers are coming in for a lot of criticism, but there was overwhelming public support for the strikers themselves.
Hopefully, those inroads will discourage pampered princesses, like the grocery store unions, who already have cushions that are softer than most everyone else’s, from demanding cushions that are softer still.
This strikes me as a very weird line of argument. You seem to be saying that we should blame grocery store unions for being successful in getting decent wages and benefits for low-skilled workers, because many higher-skilled workers don’t have it as good.
Personally, considering what the cost of living’s like these days, I don’t think it’s particularly “pampered” for an experienced full-time grocery clerk to make around $35K, as in whatami’s example; nor do I see anything wrong with paying them triple overtime during the holiday season, if consumer demand and the consequent need for more worker hours justifies it. And if the employers were still doing very well in terms of profit, as blowero points out, then why should anybody complain that the employees were doing well too?
Instead of resenting it when low-education, low-skilled workers manage to bargain for better compensation than some higher-skilled workers get, and spitefully hoping that more anti-labor policies will cut down those “pampered” blue-collar “princesses”, why don’t we support the rights of all workers to improve their jobs by organizing?
I don’t see why people with only a high-school education don’t deserve decent wages and benefits for low-skilled jobs. Taking a dog-in-the-manger attitude of “if I can’t get a good job then I don’t see why a high-school graduate doing ‘monkey work’ should be allowed to have one” doesn’t seem very constructive to me.
Personally, I’m glad the strike is over so that I can stop going out of my way to shop at Von’s. Shortly after the strike began, Mrs. Six and I happened to stop at one on the way home from work, so that we could get a particular item that wasn’t routinely carried by our usual store (FoodMax). As we were crossing the picket line, one striker spit at us and another called us an obscene name. Since then, I’ve been stopping there on the way home every day, if only to buy a bottle of Pepsi from a cash register cooler, and we became regular shoppers for our weekly grocery run.
Now we’ve gone back to the warehouse stores for the majority of our shopping.
Yes, you’ve done a wonderful job of refuting everything the union has said. :rolleyes: It’s obvious that you just want to act like a baby, insult people, and denigrate honest workers who are trying to make a modest living because you believe yourself to be their intellectual superior. Fuck you, jackass.
Gee… I definitely agree with blowero on this one.
I’m not saying I agree with all the union stuff, but way to put someone down for working a job. “Relatively easy” as compared to what? I’m not saying it’s the toughest job in the world, or the hardest one to learn. These people do deserve to make a good wage though. They go to work, put in their hours and many of them put in their heart. It’s important to them to do a good job just like many other people in all different jobs.
Tell me what the magic thing is that makes them deserve to be better paid? Is it going to college? I know lots of stupid people who can’t do the job their in that went to college. Maybe it’s if they wear a suit and tie? No, probably not. You tell me what the magic thing is that makes someones job not “monkey work”, maybe that’s a career I’ll pursue.
Oh, blowero RE: the WM 1% of sales. I know there are lots of assumptions in my little post. I’m not saying I can prove it because well, it’s in the future and tough to prove things like that. I think I made a valid point though that WM is a threat to all three of the chains. I’m not saying it’s gonna put them out of business, but it will affect their sales and profits.
I looked around though and couldn’t find any cite (other than those identical to the Union’s) that said 1%… oh well. I guess we’ll have to disagree about that untill we see otherwise.
Back when the strike began, there was a GD thread on it. The strike, and subsequent disaster, really was the union’s fault, but not because they got greedy.
The real problem is that the unions have been 100% unsuccesful at unionizing Walmart. As someone pointed out, Southern California supermarkets did have a good relationship with the union. If the union had made inroads at Walmart, that relationship would have continued. But the supermarkets were not going to compete on a completely uneven playing field. If the union can’t bring Walmart’s labour costs up to those of its competitors, then those competitors are going to bring their labour costs down to those of Walmart.
The argument that Walmart will only have 1% of the Southern California market share over the next three years is specious even if true. If Walmart comes in and cleans the collective clock of Vons, Albertsons and Ralphs, you can bet it will expand at breakneck speed and gobble up just as much market share as it possibly can. The supermarkets want to begin to address the structural problems they have now and it’s hard to blame them.
I thought the Wal-Mart threat was somewhat fallacious, at least in the big cities. In the densely populated, urban neighborhoods, are they really going to start plunking down Wal*Marts? Where would they put them? Or are the traditional grocery chains going to wither away and we’ll all have to start driving 10 or 20 miles to shop even if we happen to live in the middle of a city?
They got the fuckers in Memphis, one less than 20 minutes from my house. Its in a big strip mall next to a Kroger’s I shop. Down with Wal-Mart!
Well, WM is #1 in the Dallas/FW Metro area. That’s a pretty large city I think. Also, WM is now (for the last 2 years actually) putting up what they call Neighborhood Markets. These are smaller than the supercenters but larger than most average grocery stores. They can still sell for lower prices but without having to find the large land area to build on in urban areas.
Pretty much anywhere they want as long as they find a government official willing to invoke Eminent Domain for them.
As indicated in the Post article I linked earlier, the two largest grocery chains in this area no longer have the majority share here even without Wal-Mart. The closest Wal-Mart grocery is nearly 50 miles away in Fredricksburg.
O.K., point taken. WalMart is a potential problem. I couldn’t find any info either, other than what the union said. WalMart’s website was down (that’s kind of interesting, isn’t it?) So maybe both sides of the dispute exaggerated their positions. I just have a hard time with the idea that people should have to give up their health insurance just so management can maximize its profit. If there’s one thing you can count on in a labor dispute, it’s that management will claim dire straits financially, whether it’s true or not. I think they at least exaggerated the WalMart threat.
I agree, it’s hard to blame the Big 3 for wanting to wipe the floor with WalMart, but then isn’t it also hard to blame the workers for striking? I really don’t have a hard time putting myself in their position: You have a good job - you’re not getting rich or anything but it’s at least over minimum wage and has health care. All of a sudden they’re telling you there are going to be major cuts in your health coverage, to the point that you might not be able to afford it - and at a time when the company is doing very well financially. It doesn’t sound unreasonable to me; I don’t get the feeling that it’s a bunch of spoiled brats with a false sense of entitlement, as some people seem to think. And I think that’s why so much of the public honored the picket lines.
Here’s a sort of unrelated question: What prevents the Big 3 from just firing everyone and going non-union? Seems like that’s their real objective. So why haven’t they done it?
I would assume the union has a clause in there for major layoffs like that. Of course, the union majorly fucked up this strike and it’s negotiations as it is, so who knows. I’d also imagine that the stores would get some terrible publicity from it, and might not even be able to recover from a mass layoff like that, especially if they are losing market shares as it is.
Crap like this makes me glad I have an awesome union. The leaders in California should be all out of jobs. And, if people paid attention to their union meetings and votes, they very well could be out of their leadership positions.
I’m pretty sure that’s against the law. When I get home I’ll try to look it up if no one has beat me to it.
Well, I’m looking at the National Labor Relations Act and I think I’ve found the applicable part that would violate the law.
From the act
And section 157 says
So by firing all the employees just to break the union the employer is interfering with the employees rights to organize.
Anyone read it that way?
SPOOFE, is it just an innate talent of yours to post about shit you have no clue about, or is it a desire in your life to just come across as an ignorant asshole?
You might have worked at some bookstore or a music store or some other retail job, but unless you’ve worked in a grocery store you haven’t dealt with the customers who can get truly obnoxious and grating (I had one customer threaten to beat me up for not cleaning a slicer after each customer’s order, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg). And considering the number of people I know from working at a grocery store with bad backs, slipped disks, etc. (including myself) I don’t want to hear any shit about how “easy it is”. No, it is not the most difficult job in the world, but it sure as shit ain’t a walk in the park either.
Furthermore, don’t believe what you might hear about how much grocery store workers make. You only top twenty bucks an hour in the DC area if you’re management or were hired before 1984. Everyone else tops out at about sixteen-fifty or less (tiered system), and that takes about four years to reach (you start around seven or so). Oh, and benefits don’t kick in in my union until you’ve been there for over eighteen months. What all of this means is that most grocery store workers nowadays don’t make shit because of all the crap they have to put up with to actually reach top pay and benefits (turnover for new hires in my store is under a month, and I know it’s a problem chain wide, and considering that Safeway has the exact same contract in my area they probably have the same problem). Literally, over half the people in my store make under ten bucks an hour. Of course, you’re so busy buying into Safeway and the other companies’ bullshit that it never occurred to you that grocery store workers don’t have to make top pay and more than a few earn shit pay.
What this turnover means for the people like myself who actually stuck around is more work because we’re always understaffed and half our workforce is so new they don’t have a clue what they’re doing. So, again, it is a hard job.
Oh, and except for some of the kids who work out front, most of the people I’ve met in the grocery industry don’t live at home, and more than a few are trying to support their own families (for shit wages I might add).
Now, unless you’d like to ignorantly continue making a dipshit out of yourself by insulting myself and everyone else who busts his ass working in a grocery store, why don’t you shut the fuck up.