Negotiations to end the Southern California grocery clerks strike and lockout ended abruptly Friday night after an all-day session that left federal mediation chief Peter Hurtgen clearly frustrated.

Hurtgen immediately announced that the talks had been "recessed indefinitely," a term not previously used throughout the tortuous history of the face-to-face meetings.

Hurtgen's decision to stop the talks without any clear hope of recalling the parties was made after negotiators for both the union workers and the three supermarket chains told him "they saw no purpose in continuing," an announcement by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service said.

The parties are grappling with difficult issues, Hurtgen said, and they are not likely to return to the table until next year.

Hurtgen said he will remain in contact with both sides and will call them back to negotiate "when I determine that it may be productive to do so."

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union offered a proposal termed "comprehensive" by union spokeswoman Ellen Anreder, who said the union's offer was structured to save Vons, Ralphs and Albertson's "hundreds of millions of dollars a year through major cost containment measures." The union previously had been chided by supermarket spokesmen for not countering the chains' proposals.

"At the end of the day, it was very clear to everyone sitting in that room that sitting in that room was not going to get us to the end of the strike," Anreder said.

The latest of the contract offers was presented Dec. 2, and, according to Ralphs spokesman Terry O'Neil, it included an offer to meet the union's principal objection, a reduction of health care benefits.

In the early 1990s, the supermarkets changed the type of funding used to pay for health benefits, adopting a so-called maintenance of benefits plan. Under that plan, the supermarkets agreed to contribute the funds necessary to ensure that benefits would be available to the workers.

The change meant that the trust fund could be operated with a smaller cash reserve, and the supermarkets withdrew hundreds of millions of dollars from the reserve fund. With the contract they proposed in August, the stores said they intended to abandon the maintenance-of-benefits model, and that workers would be responsible for paying for increases in benefit costs.

The union cried "foul," and the two sides have been butting heads over the health benefits issue in every session of negotiations.

According to O'Neil, the three supermarkets proposed Dec. 2 "to fund the trust at a substantial level."

The proposal brought to the table Friday by the union called instead for the maintenance-of-benefits model to be continued.

"The union is willing to make a reasonable modification to the health and welfare plans to save $1 per hour," said an outline of the proposal obtained by the North County Times.

The union proposal also called for pay increases of 30 cents per hour immediately, and 35 cents per hour in 2004 and 2005. That would amount to about a 2 percent pay raise for the average grocery clerk.

The employers had instead offered a 30-cent-per-hour bonus, which would pay each clerk already employed at a supermarket 30 cents for each hour worked during the previous year. It, too, represented a 2 percent boost in pay, but only once. The clerks would not receive an increase in their base pay.

"They're just stonewalling," Anreder said of the supermarket negotiators. "It's clear to us that their intention is not to put an end to the strike, they just want to break us.

"What we presented was a comprehensive proposal, and if they didn't want to accept it, O.K. But it should have been seen as a starting point for talks, and they just dismissed it out of hand."

O'Neill said the proposal "still didn't take into account the major issues that are surrounding the labor dispute, which includes the skyrocketing cost of health care."

"It wasn't much of a move from what the union had been saying back at the beginning of negotiations, all the way back in August," he said.

The struggle between the grocery chains and their clerks mimics the U.S. economy in microcosm, and is being closely watched for that reason by both the labor movement and industry leaders.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports almost no growth in cash wages for non-supervisory workers nationwide in the last six months. The average wage the bureau reported is $15.46, just 3 cents higher than in July. It is, according to Dean Baker, an economist for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the slowest wage growth in four decades.

That notwithstanding, since the mid-1990s worker productivity growth, which has been substantial, has translated not into wage gains but into growing profit figures. That has happened because, as workers became more productive, payroll cuts and layoffs allowed employers to get by with declining numbers of more productive workers.

Economists have said they're troubled by the trend, in part because employees and consumers are one in the same. Paychecks fuel economic expansion, and growth swelling paychecks ensure a healthy economy. Others, however, have pointed to profit growth as a resource for investment in future economic development.

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