Question: What's behind the grocery strike? Answer: Corporate
Greed
By Jim
Smith
The rest of this article is
simply elaboration on that simple point.
Things started going downhill for working people
in the 1970s. It was in the 70s that the standard of living, the value of a
paycheck, was at its all time high. By the late 70s, a wave of plant closings
shook the L.A. area, inflation undermined the value of a dollar (and drove Jimmy
Carter from the White House), the homeless started reappearing for the first
time since the Great Depression, corporations started looking overseas to make a
buck and Wall Street started calling the shots down to the factory level. At
that point, the current supermarket and MTA strikes became
inevitable.
You can bundle all of the
economic changes together, tie a ribbon around them, and call it neoliberalism.
That's a big word for most Americans, who are economic whizzes if they can
balance a checkbook, but in most of the world its a household term, and a hated
one.
Neoliberalism means a return to
the economic liberalism of Adam Smith (an old English guy who wrote "The Wealth
of Nations," 200 years ago). He's mostly known for writing that the market place
should be unfettered by government restrictions, such as restrictions on trade,
child labor, unions, minimum wage, pensions, etc.
Economic liberalism and neoliberalism has
nothing at all to do with political liberalism. Most political liberals oppose
neoliberalism, and want some sort of government intervention to even the playing
field between rich and poor.
Since the
1970s, neoliberalism has: shifted manufacturing from the U.S. to low-wage
countries around the world by legalizing pillage with trade treaties such as
NAFTA, GATT, WTO and the upcoming FTAA; destroyed much of the local industries
and agriculture in those countries, forcing millions to migrate to the U.S.;
created bigger and bigger merged corporations at a fantastic rate (because of
this merger-mania, California is no longer headquarters to most of its biggest
businesses including BofA, Chevron, ARCO, etc); created intense pressure on
corporate management to serve the whims of Wall Street by busting unions,
driving down wages and taking away health
benefits.
The struggle of grocery
workers to resist this juggernaut is highly visible because 70,000 people on
strike or locked-out of their jobs by the stores, but it otherwise follows a
pattern familiar to labor negotiators. The management strategy is usually to
come at the unions with so many take away demands that the workers sometimes
feel victorious if they repel half of them.
The attack on the workers at Ralphs
(owned by Kroger), Vons (owned by Safeway) and Albertsons include a two-tier
wage system which would allow new hires to be paid much less than current
employees. In a few years, everyone is making the lower wage since workers being
paid on the higher wage tier would be harassed out of their jobs by management.
The new workers also would not receive much in the way of health or pension
benefits.
The two-tier proposal ploy
is actually quite clever for management. Many workers will think, "I'll still
get my pay and benefits, so why should I fight for those who haven't even been
hired yet?" Demands for cuts in pension benefits likewise cause a division
between older and younger workers, who don't ever think about retirement (except
maybe winning the Lotto).
Divide and
conquer is a long-held practice by employers. The 19th Century Robber Baron,
Henry Frick, reported boasted that he could “hire half the working class
to kill the other half.”
While
the MTA mechanics work for a “public” agency, they might as well be
employed by a corporation. The MTA began behaving like a corporation years ago,
when it built its “Taj Mahal” palace near Union Station, compensated
its executives at corporate pay rates and treated its workers - and bus riders -
as annoyances, at best. The mechanics faced the same situation as the grocery
workers when it came to saving their health care - strike or
surrender.
Health care has also been a
source of friction in labor negotiations since the 70s when the insurance
companies began to understand that tremendous profits could be made off people's
illnesses. Blue Cross went from non-profit to for-profit. Kaiser began cutting
costs, and services, in order to compete with new, bare-bones (pardon the
terminology) HMOs. Monthly premiums began to skyrocket as did deductibles and
co-payments.
Today in California, 7
million people have no medical insurance at all. Millions more have lousy health
plans that cause people to choose between paying the rent or seeing a doctor.
This is a choice that the members of the United Food and Commercial Workers, and
MTA workers, don't want to be forced into. They would prefer to walk the picket
line rather than put their family's health in jeopardy.
Whether or not grocery workers have
good health care that allows them to visit a doctor when they feel ill, should
be a concern for all of us. Do we really want people who are handling our food
to be unable to seek medical care when they come down with something? If anyone
should be able to visit a doctor for free, it should be grocery, restaurant and
fast-food workers. Sadly, most of them are not able to do
so.
There is a simple solution to the
health care scandal. Just take the insurance companies out of the loop, and
everyone can have quality health care. Such a solution is called a single-payer
plan. There is a bill in the State Senate, SB 921 - The Healthcare for All
Californians Act, sponsored by Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica, which would cover
all of us - every Californian - with high quality health care. The state
government, not the insurance corporations, would handle the paperwork.
Amazingly, says Kuehl, this miracle could be accomplished without any new
spending for health care. Simply by consolidating money that is already being
spent on health care, the system could be adequately funded.
Such a system has been in place in
Canada for years. When Canadian unions and management bargain, health care is
not even an issue. No one in Canada is walking the street, or walking a picket
line, without health care. Civilized countries around the world provide
universal health care coverage. Even third-world Cuba has a top-notch health
care system for everyone. They've done this with a fraction of the wealth of the
U.S. because they've made health care a priority (No wonder Bush doesn't want
Americans visiting the island). Shame on the U.S. And shame on us in California
if we don't demand that SB 921 becomes law. Corporate greed has got to
go!
Posted: Sat
- November 1, 2003 at 04:51 PM