(The following column by Michael Kinsman appeared on the San Diego Union Tribune?s website on October 27.)
SAN DIEGO — If you think the Southern California grocery store strike is someone else’s problem, you might want to take off your blinders.
Increasingly, the labor stalemate that has put 70,000 supermarket workers in the street is becoming everyone’s strike.
It has put the challenge of how to cope with escalating health care costs on our doorstep, wherever we live. We see pickets in front of grocery stores where we once shopped and can’t help but think about their plight whether or not we choose to shop there.
“Health care and food,” says Craig Barkacs, professor of law, ethics and negotiation at the University of San Diego. “It doesn’t get any more fundamental than that.”
The two-week-old grocery strike is unlike any strike we have seen in recent times. It commands our attention when we see supermarket checkers we know standing in front of our neighborhood markets.
Barkacs says it was a brilliant strategy by the leaders of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. We can look the other way when construction workers we don’t know picket a job site or when an electronics plant has lines of workers we don’t know protesting in front of it.
But we can’t escape that our acquaintances are on strike.
“This has been a very powerful strike,” Barkacs says. “It might be affecting people in a visceral way. It seems more up close and personal than other strikes.”
We may not know supermarket workers well, but we do know them. When we stand in the checkout line, we have conversations with them, swap stories or tell jokes. These are people we recognize instantly.
Perhaps more importantly, they are striking to protect something we all need: health care benefits.
Every company that offers medical benefits to its workers and every individual who seeks out their own health care coverage is well aware of the crisis caused by escalating costs.
America has long depended upon employers to provide health care benefits, and many workers have been asked to share in the cost of those benefits in recent years. The supermarket workers and their union have negotiated one of the best health care packages around.
But now they are not only being asked to share in the costs, the union says it is likely there will be caps put in place on some services that will limit the value of these medical benefits.
The sharp double-digit annual cost increases for medical insurance are daunting. Even the most generous employers are looking for ways to limit their exposure to these increases, which makes perfect sense.
The strike has called attention to our health care crisis, forcing us to deal with something we have shied away from. It doesn’t matter who is paying the bill, costs are out of control.
“Yes, this strike is about us,” says Teresa Stegman, a 28-year supermarket employee picketing outside her employer’s store in Allied Gardens. “But we’re out for here for everybody else, too. What happens to our health benefits will happen to others. We know that now.”