I have to respond to the outrageous comments made in Bettie Heldring's Nov. 23 letter. Heldring heard a rumor that the clerks at her grocery store make $53.70 per hour. And, I suppose, since she heard it, it must be the truth.

Sadly, this is just the kind of rumor that corporate America wants to spread to hide their corporate greed and make the unions out to be the scapegoats.

According to Heldring, grocery clerks make $111,696 per year, if I still remember how to do math.

The truth is, the highest-paid grocery workers earn less than $40,000 per year and the average workers make less than $30,000 per year if they are fortunate enough to work full time. Most grocery clerks work an average of 24 hours per week, as that is all the stores allow them.

Many full-time workers struggle to maintain their full-time status because management manipulates the hours to make it very difficult to get the hours required. The medical plan is tied to hours worked, and clerks must have 20 hours per week minimum -- if they are not granted sufficient hours, they lose their medical insurance.

The corporations' proposal for part-time only status for new hires would put all workers at risk of losing medical coverage because the new, cheaper hires could be used to take hours from full-time workers and gut their medical coverage.

The grocery workers made serious wage concessions about 15 years ago to help the grocery chains fight off competitors. They have regained the wages they gave up only in the past two years. Now the corporations want to take away their hard-earned benefits.

This strike is not just about the increased medical cost, but the effect the new-hire policy will have on the company-funded pension program. The new plan will bankrupt the pension plan, leaving the vested workers with no plan at all.

Managers of the grocery corporations want to push their pension responsibilities onto the taxpayers and force their workers onto the already overburdened Social Security program.

Heldring wrote that she knows people who work 12-hour days without breaks. This comment is especially coldhearted. These benefits were gained by people who risked their lives fighting corporate thugs who were hired to break strikes by force and brutality in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In some cases, police and the military were used if the CEO had enough clout.

We will not allow sweatshops and indentured servitude to return, with 16-hour workdays and seven-day workweeks so the CEOs and their cronies and the "finer" people of America can make more millions in profit.

For your information I am an activated Marine reservist, a veteran of Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom and I work in my civilian job as a locomotive maintenance general foreman for the Union Pacific Railroad, which is a unionized position. I am a journeyman machinist by trade. My wife is a full-service food clerk for Safeway in Longmont, Colo. We have two children who are college graduates and four in college now.

Master Sgt. Steve O. Holland of Loveland, Colo., is based at Camp Pendleton.