LOCKYER LESS THAN IMPARTIAL.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

CALIFORNIA Attorney General Bill Lockyer says that his investigation of the big three supermarket chains, launched in the midst of a fierce collective-bargaining dispute, has nothing to do with politics.

It bears no relation to the fact that labor-union cash is the lifeblood of the Democratic Party, or that the United Food and Commercial Workers gave $35,000 to his 2002 re-election campaign.

Not even his unabashed support for the strikers, whose rallies he's been known to attend, factors into his suspicion that the supermarket chains are running afoul of state and federal antitrust laws.

``I don't deny sympathy for the striking men and women on those picket lines,'' Lockyer explains, ``but I can separate those sympathies from the duty to do my job in a careful and prudent way.''

He's not picking sides, he says, just enforcing the law: ``These companies cannot fix prices under ordinary circumstances. The question is, are they allowed to do that by a secret agreement that maintains prices in a way that violates a free and open market?''

Coming from Lockyer, such passion for the free market would be refreshing - if it weren't so nakedly insincere.

Ostensibly, Lockyer is concerned that Ralphs, Vons and Albertson's aren't ``playing fair'' because they've been sharing revenues to weather the strike and overcome the UFCW's divide-and-conquer strategy. But the purpose of anti-trust laws is to safeguard against price-fixing, collusion and other anticompetitive practices that can be used to gouge customers and create virtual monopolies. That's a far cry from simply sharing profits, a long-standing, legal practice that both airlines and automakers have used to survive past strikes.

Yet if Lockyer is concerned about protecting a ``free and open market,'' there's much about this strike that should concern him - provided he can, in fact, separate his critical judgment from his political sympathies.

For starters, there's the very notion of a single collective bargaining agreement covering the three biggest employers in a vital industry. A uniform contract shields the big three supermarkets from the need to compete for workers, while giving employees above-market pay rates.

The net result: Inflated profits for big business and inflated salaries for big labor, with the costs passed along to the customers, who have few other options.

Now that's price-fixing.

As for virtual monopolies, Lockyer need look no further than the Teamsters, who have demonstrated the ability to single-handedly control the commercial shipping industry. By refusing to ship groceries to the supermarkets, Teamster truckers have caused the grocery shelves to go all but barren, thereby depriving consumers of market choices.

Now that's an anticompetitive practice. To the extent that the UFCW and the Teamsters have conspired to put the screws to the supermarkets, it's collusion, too.

But it's all perfectly legal, thanks to decades of pro-labor legislation that have rendered modern-day collective bargaining anything but ``a free and open market.''

In a ``free and open market,'' businesses wouldn't need to accommodate pickets who loiter on their property and intimidate potential customers. They would be able to issue a legal injunction against trespassing - something the law now keeps them from doing.

In a ``free and open market,'' workers can't refuse to do their jobs, as the Teamsters have done, and expect to remain employed at day's end.

And in a ``free and open market,'' no one gets the free health-care plan that the UFCW demands for its members.

Lockyer ought to be careful what he wishes for.

But, of course, it's not a ``free and open market'' that the attorney general, in his clumsy way, is trying to achieve. It's a politicized market, in which labor contracts aren't decided at the bargaining table but in political backrooms, in which opportunistic politicians can skew the rules on behalf of the side they favor - or the side that favors them.

After all, in a free and open market, politicians who have already taken sides wouldn't jump into collective-bargaining disputes. They would do the honorable thing and recuse themselves.

If Lockyer cared for the integrity of his office - to say nothing of a free and open market - he would do just that.