Lee Siu Hin

SOUTH PASADENA, USA, Dec 30 2003 (IPS) — Women, immigrants and people of colour are at the forefront of a strike of 70,000 California supermarket workers that will soon enter its third month in a struggle over cuts to workers’ health care.

Clerks employed by Safeway went on strike Oct. 11 after the company, which also owns the Vons and Pavilion supermarket chains, refused to back down from its demand that employees begin paying more of the health care costs for themselves and family members and that new employees receive less money and fewer benefits.

A day later, the Ralphs and Albertsons chains, which bargain with Safeway, locked out their workers.

The dispute occurs as the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, prepares to enter the California food retail market in 2004.

Wal-Mart employees are not unionised so the company’s labour costs are much lower, and analysts say the supermarket chains are feeling pressure to cut their costs, perhaps one reason for the drawn-out strike, the largest at state supermarkets in a quarter-century.

Represented by the Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) the workers earn on average 12-14 dollars an hour in a 30-hour work week.

About 65 percent of supermarket employees are women and about 10,000 or 17 percent of the picketing workers are from Asia or the Pacific Islands (and known as ”APIs”), according to Adelaide Chen, an American-born Chinese-American and former volunteer from the Los Angeles chapter of the Asian Pacific American Labour Alliance (APALA).

Chen has been helping the supermarket workers for the past two months at stores in Alhambra and Los Angeles’s Korea town.

"I see the supermarket workers having to fight their employer so they can afford health coverage for their children, and I know that this cause is well worth it," she told IPS. "The API workers could be my many aunts, uncles, and extended family."

Studies released last year by the APALA showed that as of 2000, U.S.-born API women earned only 79 percent of the earnings of U.S.-born white men. The median weekly salaries of foreign-born API women were only 70 percent of the earnings of foreign-born white men.

While 43.9 percent of U.S.-born API women have a bachelor’s degree, those women earn a median weekly income of only 826 dollars, compared to 1,121 dollars earned by U.S.-born white males with a bachelor’s degree, added the studies.

Strike organiser Diana Truong-Davis is a wife, a mother and a Chinese supermarket worker from the Vons store in Alhambra. She says many shoppers cannot understand why the employees went on strike when they are better paid then most of their fellow Chinese sweatshop workers.

"I would be happy if my employer gave us benefits!" some argued with Truong-Davis and other striking workers.

But the union argues that if the supermarkets – the largest in the United States – win the California dispute, benefits will be threatened country-wide.

"If we lose here," UFCW President Doug Dority was quoted as saying in the ‘Los Angeles Times’, "it will set off a corporate tidal wave that will sweep away benefits in contracts in all industries."

Joe Montana, a supermarket worker and the picket captain from Pavilions supermarket (owned by Vons) in the city of South Pasadena, says the strike is justified. "Oh yeah, because what they’re (company) offering is not reasonable," he told IPS.

"I myself have been working here for the past 12 years. To see them taking a step backward is not fair."

Talks between the two sides, working with a federal mediator, broke off Dec. 19 and will not resume until next year.

The powerful Teamsters union, whose members were supporting the strikers, have returned to work at the distribution centres owned by the three grocery chains that supply the more than 850 stores affected.

The union says the medical trust fund that finances workers’ medical coverage will run out of money by the end of December. Strike funds are also emptying, and some union locals say they have taken loans to be able to provide workers some strike pay.

The companies have reportedly lost 500 million dollars since the strike began. Albertsons, for example, reported a 50-percent drop in third-quarter profit Dec. 5.

Strikers have received strong support from many community members in Alhambra and Monterey Park, west of Los Angeles (a major Chinese immigrant community).

Many of them fear the supermarket giants are cutting workers’ benefits in the first step of what they call "Wal-Martisation": a purposeful effort to drive down wages and working conditions and to widen union busting against workers, who are mainly immigrants, youth and housewives.

Al Maldonado, a Latino community organiser from San Gabriel Valley’s Neighbours for Peace & Justice and the local labour alliance, has organised a community group to "adopt-a-store" to support the supermarket workers.

"This is a solidarity movement to support our supermarket workers from the community, because injury to one is injury to all," he says.

The group organises a weekly solidarity rally to support the workers at the Vons store in Alhambra. In addition, it has printed and distributed 6,000 flyers asking the community not to shop at Vons and Albertsons.

About a dozen local groups, from college campus organisations to community bodies, have adopted a neighbourhood store to support striking workers.