After a week, nearly 70,000 grocery store workers, from clerks to meat cutters to pharmacists, remain on strike.
To many, the sound of 70,000 angry workers chanting slogans brings back memories of the good old days of the noble AFL-CIO bringing greedy corporations to their knees. This, however, isn’t your grandfather’s union.
In short, unions today are cesspools of corruption and fight more for organized crime than organized labor. That’s not to say that the grocery store workers are all members of La Cosa Nostra, but it gives you an idea of just whom the union leaders are looking out for.
Simply, they are striking for selfish reasons. According to union spokeswoman Barbara Maynard, the union is walking out because its employing corporations are planning to shift $1 billion in health care costs onto workers. What she fails to mention is that the workers currently pay nothing for their health care. That’s right ‹ it’s free.
Most people already pay something for health care ‹ usually several hundred dollars ‹ even if they have company benefits. Our own UCSD health care plan charges $600 per year. Asking employees to share some of the costs for their health care is not unreasonable, especially not while the company still covers the lion’s share.
Let’s be realistic here: free health care for basically menial jobs is what’s unreasonable. Senior clerks already make $17.90 per hour for nothing more than swiping items across a barcode reader. Talk about unskilled labor. The corporations are being overly generous by paying such an amount, let alone offering any kind of health care at all.
The employees are being asked to pay $5 a week for individual coverage, or $15 for families. If they work a 40-hour week, that means that rather than earning $716 per week, they would make $701 per week. Gasp! The horrors of paying $780 per year for complete health coverage. They’ve already almost recovered the cost by working a single week, not including overtime.
Traditional grocery stores are suffering from the explosion of Wal-Mart and other superstores, which have grabbed market share. These are non-union stores, so their labor costs are significantly less. Recently, the introduction of superstores, which sell groceries alongside all sorts of other items, has caused sales in grocery stores to drop significantly. Albertsons alone has seen its market share drop from 60 percent to 40 percent within four years of Wal-Mart opening its first store.
To continue being competitive in the market, supermarkets have to cut costs somewhere, and labor costs make up 66 percent of a store’s fixed costs.
“”You can see these are major dollars we’re talking about ‹ you can’t have expenses increasing faster than revenues,” said one industry analyst. If these clerks still want their high-paying jobs in several months, they will have to endure fewer benefits, lest their employers go out of business.
Finally, let’s not forget the real loser here: the consumer. You can’t waste your time wandering the city to find a non-union store so you can avoid being yelled at for trying to buy food. What are we supposed to do ‹ starve?
To try to minimize the impact of their actions on consumers, the unions tell us to simply shop elsewhere. The only problem is that “”elsewhere”” consists of non-union stores. Immediately after the strike is over, they will again scold us for not supporting union labor. Talk about hypocrisy.
Let’s say the unions get what they want ‹ the companies cave, and continue to provide free health care. What will happen? Supermarkets will still have to find some way to continue to make a profit. So rather than cut costs, they will have to increase revenue, meaning higher prices on food. The strikers will be standing smugly behind their cash registers, making their $17.90 an hour, while real working people have to pay jacked up prices for necessary items.
Wal-Mart will get an even greater market share when people run from high prices, costing grocery stores even more money and eventually driving them out of business. Then where will people be? Not only will consumers be forced to buy their groceries from superstores, those strikers who were so pleased with themselves for milking even more free benefits from corporations will find themselves on the streets without jobs.
The union is putting ordinary people through a considerable ordeal in their ever-expanding quest for money and power, and it is inexcusable.
