[Peace-discuss] Fwd: The Stop and Shop Strike: Grocery Store Workers Take on a Billion Dollar Multinational

[David Green]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Andy Piascik <andypiascik at yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 4:50 PM
Subject: The Stop and Shop Strike: Grocery Store Workers Take on a Billion
Dollar Multinational
To: Andy Piascik <andypiascik at yahoo.com>


Friends,

This story about the ongoing strike at Stop and Shop was published recently
at several websites. In Solidarity,

Andy

*                        Grocery Store Workers Take on a Billion Dollar
Multinational*

                                                                      by
Andy Piascik

At precisely 1:00 Eastern time on the afternoon of April 11th, 31,000
workers at 253 Stop and Shop grocery stores throughout Connecticut, Rhode
Island and Massachusetts walked off their jobs. The strike came after
several months of failed negotiations in which Stop and Shop refused to
retract an onerous set of demands for the elimination of premium pay for
Sunday work, major cuts to pensions and dramatic increases in the amount
workers would have to pay for health care.
            The strikers are members of the United Food and Commercial
Workers (UFCW). Truck drivers both union and non-union have honored the
picket lines by refusing to make their deliveries, according to strikers at
four picket lines in Bridgeport and Fairfield, Connecticut. The workers at
those stores also report that no union members have crossed the picket
line. Most stores are open as supervisors and a small number of replacement
workers have been stocking shelves and working cash registers but business
has taken a big hit.
*Solid Public Support*
Public support has been high and sympathetic supervisors have told strikers
that the take for one 16-hour day at a store in Fairfield was a meager
$2,000, a fraction of a normal day’s business. Some stores have cut their
hours because business has been so bad. Officials and members of other
unions have joined with strikers for rallies at stores in a number of
locations, including Bridgeport and Fairfield. Virtually every elected
official in the Bridgeport area as well as both US Senators are Democrats
and many have visited a picket line and/or expressed their support for the
strike, as have several Republicans from other parts of the state. An
announcement was made at a picket line yesterday that community
sympathizers and merchants have established a food bank where strikers can
get free food.
            From conversations with dozens of strikers, morale of union
members is high eight days in. Worker after worker expressed special
gratitude for the overwhelming public support they’ve received. Shoppers
who know many of the strikers by name from years of shopping have joined
the picket lines and many have brought coffee, doughnuts, pizzas and other
food and beverages to the strikers. Media coverage on local television
stations and in the Hearst dailies that dominate the newspaper market in
Connecticut has been mostly positive.
*$2 Billion Profits in 2018*
            Amidst the strikers’ enthusiasm, however, is an undercurrent of
fear and resentment. There has been no strike at Stop and Shop for 30
years, and that one was of very short duration, so the vast majority of the
chain’s workers are confronting the unbridled greed of their employers in
such an open way for the first time. The Stop and Shop stores are among
many owned by the Dutch conglomerate Ahold which reported $2 billion in
profits in 2018.
            Despite such profits and despite the fact that Stop and Shop is
far and away the dominant grocery store chain in New England (and which
also owns stores in New York and New Jersey that are covered by a different
contract and thus not on strike), Ahold is demanding significant givebacks.
The cuts in pensions and health coverage particularly rankle the strikers;
the company’s current demands, for example, include a fourfold increase in
the amount workers will have to pay in co-payments for doctor’s visits.
*Minimum Wage Pay for New Workers     *
            Picketers expressed a mix of astonishment and anger that a
massive company that is doing so well would utterly refuse to share any
portion of that wealth and instead demand significant givebacks. New hires,
all of whom are part-time, start at $10.10 an hour. Stop and Shop has
consciously cut the number of full-time positions, and stipulations that
the company forced through in previous contracts make accepting a full-time
promotion far less attractive than it could be.
            “It takes years before you can even think about getting a
full-time position,” said Rafael Quiles at the picket line outside one of
the stores in Fairfield. “And if you do go full-time, the company has the
right to transfer you to any store in the state that it wants to.” He and
others said the company does precisely that in order to discourage others
from seeking full-time.
            “Many people who take full-time jobs go back to part-time a
short while later because they don’t want to be moved to a store far away,”
added Gin Palladino, a ten-year veteran who lives just a few blocks from
the store where she works. “I’d rather work part-time here and get another
part-time job close to home than have to travel a long distance to work
full-time.”
            Kizzy Lewis is a full-timer who has worked in 12 stores in her
25 years at Stop and Shop. “They had me working as far away as Stamford and
at other stores all over Fairfield County,” she said. “After all these
years, I hope this is my last one.” Lewis also ridiculed the gas allotment
the company pays for those it transfers, pointing out that the worker is
responsible for the first 15 miles both to and from work.
*Workers Struggling Amidst Fabulous Wealth*
            For many workers, hourly wages that are equal to or just a
little above the federal minimum do not go far. Consider that Fairfield
County is one of the wealthiest and most expensive areas in the country
where the contrast between the Super Rich who live in places like New
Canaan and Greenwich and workers at Stop and Shop couldn’t be starker. A
number of strikers live in Bridgeport, the least expensive housing market
in the area, but even rents in Bridgeport can be as high as $1,000 a month
for a one-bedroom apartment. For people making $10.10 per hour, that is out
of reach. People spoke of co-workers well into their 20s who live with
their parents or other family members because they cannot afford to live on
their own.
            As with so many workers in the United States today, some of the
strikers have more than one job. One man on the picket line said he
averages 65 hours a week between his two jobs and is still barely making
ends meet. A woman striker said she’s negotiating with her boss at her
other job about getting more hours if the strike lasts.
It’s important that the Stop and Shop strikers win, just as it was
important that the tens of thousands of teachers around the country won
their strikes in the last year. It’s also important, though, that workers,
their supporters and allies and union staffers who are so inclined take a
long, harsh look at the state of things. The Stop and Shop workers’ strike
is essentially defensive; they are resisting the company’s attempts at more
takebacks and the union, according to workers, is putting forward few
demands of their own. So no noteworthy wage increases or other improvements
await them even if they score a complete victory. In the short term at
minimum, their lives will continue to get harder
Winning and Seeds of Greater Possibilities
            There are, however, seeds of greater possibilities and future
victories in the strength and togetherness the workers are experiencing in
their strike. By virtually every account including those by sources
generally hostile to unions, workers and strikes, the Stop and Shop strike
has been overwhelming successful. The company is losing money in a big way,
for one, and the hard line it has drawn has raised the awareness of many
strikers: about their relationship to their employers, about the power of
collective action, about the power of an entire workforce withdrawing its
labor, about how perilous life in the 21st century United States has become
for the working class.
Speaking about the experience of the strike thus far, one worker said the
following: “Most of us like our jobs because we have so many regular
customers who make it feel like a community and they far outnumber the
customers who make our lives difficult. What really makes it hard to like
your job is not the customers who give you a bad time but knowing that
you’re getting a bad deal from the company. The pay is too low, the
benefits aren’t enough, working on weekends is mandatory, all that stuff.
And then to see that they want to cut our pensions even further, make us
pay more if we go to the doctor, cut Sunday premium pay and give us nothing
in return for all that … it’s too much. All these people you see on this
picket line and all the other picket lines at all the other Stop and Shop
stores, none of them is ever going to forget this.”
Asked if he meant the togetherness of the strikers or the conduct of the
company, he said simply, “Both.”
Perhaps one big lesson that can reverberate far and wide beyond Stop and
Shop is the power of the strike. After years and years where the number of
strikes dwindled to a pitifully small number, accompanied by a barrage of
negativity from media and political elites, workers are beginning to see
that it is one of the most effective ways to fight back. That’s true of
teachers, nurses and other healthcare workers, electrical workers at Wabtec
in Erie, grocery store workers throughout southern New England. Equally
large challenges will be to bring that fighting spirit and solidarity into
the workplace and the union hall as well as for workers from a variety of
workplaces both union and non-union to build organizations of mutual
support where they can also strategize about how to build a different kind
of society.

*Bridgeport native Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning
author whose most recent book is the novel *In Motion*.  He can be reached
at andypiascik at yahoo.com <andypiascik at yahoo.com>.*
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