A HEROIC DEFENSE AND A CRUEL SYSTEM

By David Bacon - submitted to portside

[moderator’s note see also: Lessons from the Picket

Line By Peter Dreier and Kelly Candaele, AlterNet;

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portside/message/5578]

LOS ANGELES, CA (3/4/04) - The southern California
grocery strikers are true working-class heroes.
Seventy thousand held fast to their strike over four
and a half months, a remarkable achievement in the
current "jobless recovery." Many had to find other
jobs to make mortgage, rent or car payments, yet 20,000
were still walking picket lines the day the strike
ended.

What kept them going was not simply courage, although
they had their share of it. It was the urgent desire
to hold onto health benefits, not just for themselves,
but for the generation of grocery clerks, baggers and
meat cutters to come. It was a heroic defense within a
system spiraling out of control - one that, ultimately,
they could not win.

When the strike started, store workers faced a proposal
that would have forced them to pay $95 a week for
health insurance after three years. Since three-
quarters of the workers are part-timers, and their
average weekly pay only $312, healthcare would have
been beyond their reach.

In the new agreement, the returning strikers will
eventually pay some money for insurance, although not
the drastic payments the stores originally demanded.
But for those hired from now on, health care will be
just a dream. Safeway, Albertsons and Krogers will
contribute just $1.10/hour for their health benefits,
compared to $3.80 for the existing workforce.

In just a few years, those lower-tier workers will be
the majority. Most will be unable to qualify for
benefits — who will make up the difference between
$1.10 and the actual cost of insurance, which is rising
at 15% a year. They’ll join the 48 million Americans
who have no healthcare because they can’t afford it.
But these new additions will be union workers, in jobs
that for generations supported a middle-class standard
of living.

It’s not just the extreme poor now who must go without
medical care. Even those with stable, "decent" jobs
increasingly can’t get it either. Throughout the
strike, Safeway, Albertson’s and Krogers said they
needed the cut because competitor Wal-Mart, with
expansion plans throughout the state, has no unions,
pays low wages, and contributes so little towards
healthcare that when its workers get sick, they show up
in the county hospital emergency room.

This is the future for new workers in southern
California grocery stores - the Wal-Martization of
healthcare for California working families. No wonder
that so many workers held out on strike for so long.
And no wonder that workers in stores in northern
California, as well as Washington DC, Washington State,
Hawaii, and Colorado, all of whom face the same
companies across the bargaining table later this year,
are gearing up for similar labor wars.

And it’s not just grocery stores. "We’re expecting a
major confrontation with hotel chains over health care
costs when our contract comes up this summer," says
Mike Casey, president of San Francisco’s Local 2 of the
Hotel and Restaurant Employees. The Service Employees
Union will be negotiating with hospital chains in all
major west coast cities this year, and health care
costs will be the number one issue. If the union can’t
fend off similar demands, those who provide the
healthcare will be unable themselves to afford it.

The current system forces workers and their families to
fight their employers, to decide who will pay premiums
rising at 15% a year. It virtually guarantees war
after labor war.

This is a uniquely American dilemma. The southern
California grocery strike could never take place in
Europe, Canada, or Mexico, because there are no
premiums for private health care insurance there to
fight over. These countries have national health care
programs, in which taxes pay for medical care for all
people, as their right.

Californians took a step last year towards a solution
to this problem, when the legislature passed SB-2.
Under the law, large employers, like Wal-Mart, will
have to provide healthcare coverage for their
employees. They won’t be able to undercut their
competitors by forcing their workers into the emergency
room.

Governor Schwarzenegger, however, has already promised
employers an initiative to repeal it. If the governor
wins, strikes like the one in Los Angeles will become
more frequent and bitter. Employers will demand benefit
cuts in order to compete, and workers will either have
to give up healthcare or fight.

In the end, only a single-payer system like that
sponsored by Sen. Sheila Kuehl can bring a permanent
end to these terrible conflicts. Kuehl points out that
if all the current healthcare dollars spent in
California were used to pay for a single system,
instead of on wasteful competing private insurance
plans, every state resident could be guaranteed high
quality healthcare.

The grocery strikers deserve thanks for their effort to
preserve as much coverage as possible under the present
broken system. But broken it is. We should not ask
tens of thousands more to make similar sacrifices in
its defense.

[David Bacon is a reporter and photographer
specializing in labor issues. He can be reached at:
dbacon@igc.org]