Grocery workers give authority for strike.

Byline: CHRISTIAN WIHTOL Register-Guard Business Editor

Seeking to turn up the heat at the negotiating table, grocery and meat employees at Lane County's Fred Meyer, Safeway and Albertsons stores voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to authorize their union to call a strike.

In an all-day vote at the DoubleTree hotel in Springfield, 90 percent of grocery clerks and 95 percent of meat cutters gave union leadership the authority to call a strike, said Gary Lyle, a representative of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555.

Strike authorizations - which are a far cry from the union actually calling a strike - are a standard weapon in labor-management bargaining.

For Lane County's unionized grocery workers, that bargaining has bogged down over money, including health-care costs and pay.

Labor contracts for roughly 1,400 workers at Lane County's Safeway, Fred Meyer and Albertsons grocery stores expired in February. The sides have made little progress in talks since then.

The grocery chains, collectively represented by Tigard-based Northwest Food Employers Inc., want to have workers carry some of the burden of increased health-care costs, said Melinda Merrill, a spokeswoman for the employer group. Currently, the chains pay the entire medical insurance premiums for full-time employees and their families. Also, the employers want to create a two-tier wage system in which new employees would receive lower compensation, including a health care plan that costs employers less, Merrill said.

"We want the least possible impact on current employees," Merrill said.

The grocery chains say that spiralling health-care costs have put an undue burden on the stores. Plus, they say that fast-growing nonunion competitors such as Wal-Mart, Costco and Winco provide inferior compensation packages. The unionized chains say they need to cut their labor and health-care costs accordingly.

The push for a two-tier wage structure appalls union leaders.

"It's a cancer," said John Etten, the local union's lead negotiator. "What happens with a two-tier system is that the new guys start out making much less, and it takes them much longer to reach the top pay level."

"It saves (the companies) money because it slows down the wage progression," Etten added.

While a worker under an existing contract might move from apprentice to journeyman in four years, a new employee under a two-tiered contract might take eight years to reach top scale, Etten said.

Details of what each side has proposed were not available. Merrill said the proposals and counterproposals evolve during bargaining sessions.

Merrill said employers want to avert a strike.

"A strike authorization vote is kind of a routine part of the process," she said. The employers "are working hard to come to an agreement."

The last grocery strike in Oregon was in 1994, when workers struck Portland-area Safeway stores, and Albertsons and Fred Meyer stores in the Portland area locked out employees in response, Etten said. The strike lasted 89 days and was settled in a compromise deal, he said.

Steven Burd, chief executive officer of California-based Safeway, has fought unions since taking the top job at Safeway in 1993. In 1995, he replaced 4,000 full-time union employees in Canada with part-time workers, according to a profile of Safeway by Hoover's Handbook, a business research company. Labor disputes, including strikes and lockouts in Colorado and Canada, cut into the company's improving sales and profits in 1996 and 1997, according to Hoover's Handbook.

Etten said the three unionized chains make handsome profits and could be more generous with employees.

Safeway reported a record profit of $1.25 billion on sales of $34.3 billion in 2001. Albertsons posted a profit of $501 million on sales of $37.9 billion in the fiscal year that ended earlier this year. And the Kroger chain, which owns Fred Meyer, posted a profit of $1 billion on sales of $50 billion in the fiscal year that ended earlier this year.

The chains pay their chief executives too much, union officials added.

Burd last year received $2.15 million in salary and bonus. That's "obscene," Etten said.

Safeway, Albertsons and Fred Meyer, although rivals, have long negotiated union contracts as a group to secure a level playing field on labor costs.

The labor tension in Lane County is part of a broad conflict along the West Coast as unionized chains seek cuts when contracts come up for renegotiation. Grocery workers in the Corvallis, Albany and Salem areas also voted Wednesday, with 80 percent of clerks and 86 percent of meat cutters backing the authorization. Their contracts expired earlier this month, Etten said.

The anxiety among unionized grocery workers about the arrival of nonunion Wal-Mart extends into California.

In Southern California, the UFCW represents 75,000 supermarket employees.

Their contracts expire in October 2003, with negotiations set to begin in May, the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper reported earlier this summer.

Already, unionized grocery chains in Southern California, such as Vons, Ralphs and Albertsons, are letting workers know that the Wal-Mart threat means an end to automatic wage increases with every new contract, the newspaper said.

Analysts say the coming showdown may determine whether checkout clerks and meat cutters - long some of the leading blue-collar wage earners in Southern California - will be relegated to pay scales just above minimum wage.

"It used to be that the supermarket clerk job was a skilled labor position in which you had to work the cash register and remember the price of produce," Gary Wright, a retail analyst at G.A. Wright Inc. in Denver, told the Union-Tribune. "But scanning has taken a lot of that advantage away. Those workers can now be easily replaced."

Unionized clerks in California can make about $17 an hour, compared to $10 or less at Wal-Mart, the newspaper said.