Strike: Mediator maintains contact with both sides

By: EDMOND JACOBY - Staff Writer | Friday, November 14, 2003 8:51 PM PST ∞

Negotiations of a sort appear to be taking place on an ad hoc basis between Southern California grocery clerk union locals and three major supermarket chains.

Nobody is meeting with anybody face-to-face, but Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service Director Pater Hurtgen is said to be in daily contact with representatives of seven locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and with negotiators from Ralphs, Vons and Albertson's.

"Each of the parties has people assigned to the process, maybe one or two who constitute the team for each side," said John Arnold, spokesman for the mediation service.

Hurtgen "is in contact with the parties daily," Arnold said.

"He makes individual contacts with people on each side," he said, describing a slow but deliberate process of persuasion and facilitation involving personal telephone calls, faxes and e-mail.

"Our object is to get people back to the table," Arnold said.

"I don't expect anything (to happen) over the weekend; we'll pick things up again next week," he said.

As the mediation service was painting a picture of plodding but relentless progress toward resolution, the two sides in the dispute sought creative ways to put pressure on one another.

On Tuesday, while the latest round of talks was under way, the grocery chains filed an unfair labor practices complaint against one of the locals. The charge involved letters that Local 324 had sent to store employees urging them not to cross the picket lines to go to work.

The union retorted that the charge was silly, because the employees they sent the letter to were union members, all of whom had been locked out by the stores, which would not let them cross the picket lines in any event.

The locals ratcheted up the confrontation by sending members north in waves to launch picket lines at Safeway stores in the San Francisco area. Busloads of union members left Southern California, beginning Monday, filled principally with pickets from Local 1167 in the Inland Empire and Local 1428 in Pomona, and a local 135 source said its members were being asked Friday to volunteer to make the trip for a 10-day, all-expenses-paid stint in the Bay Area.

Meanwhile, the grocery stores are planning for business-as-usual during the important Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, when grocery sales peak.

Lilia Rodriguez, a Southern California spokeswoman for Albertson's, said that her chain had no plans for special sale drives or public image campaigns, but would be offering to sell all the turkey and trimmings its customers want to buy. (Albertson's Thanksgiving ads appeared on television Friday.)

It's the same line at Ralphs, where spokesman Terry O'Neil declined to speculate what the store might or might not do by way of sales or special offers, but did comment that the company traditionally donates food to organizations that feed the hungry.

"We will be partnering with various community organizations to help needy people during the holiday season," O'Neil said.

"It's something we do 12 months out of the year, and have every year for 130 years," he said.

The losses piling up for the three chains in Southern California may seem extravagant to the casual observer ---- after all, business is down at all three chains by as much as 70 percent according to some sources, a figure that has never been disputed by the supermarkets ---- but remarks by Steven Burd, chief executive officer of Vons parent Safeway and probably the strongest driving force behind the supermarkets' hard line in negotiations, make it clear that cash flow in the affected stores is a secondary concern.

Burd, whose spokespersons made much of the union's strike vote on a package labeled "not our last, best and final offer," told a gathering of Wall Street analysts last month, according to the Associated Press, that the offer on the table when the union walked off the job in his stores was as good as it gets. It was, in fact, the best offer he was going to make, he said.

He also said that however much money his supermarkets lose during a strike, it should be considered an investment in the chain's future because it will be far less than the cost of giving in to union demands for a continuation of the benefits packages the union employees have enjoyed heretofore.

Contact staff writer Edmond Jacoby at (760) 739-6675, or ejacoby@nctimes.com.