(Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News circulated the following story by Andrew Galvin of the The Orange County Register on March 24.)
SAN DIEGO, Calif. — Even as grocery shopping returns to normal for millions of Southern Californians after the 20-week strike and lockout at Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons ended last month, the clerks’ union and the employers are continuing to duke it out behind the scenes.
Many supermarkets appear fully stocked with fresh produce and other inventory. Some services that disappeared during the strike, such as in-store coffee bars and fresh-seafood counters, have returned.
Lori Novotny, who was shopping at a Ralphs in Huntington Beach on Tuesday morning, said the store appeared to be about 90 percent back to normal. The only things missing, she said, were the familiar faces of some former employees who never returned from the lockout, “and the ones that are here don’t seem as happy as they used to be.”
For some employees who did return, the future has dimmed considerably.
Jediah Andrews, 23, a meat clerk at Ralphs, said the most he can hope to earn if he is promoted to meat cutter is $16.38 an hour, down from the $19.18 top pay for current meat cutters. That’s because the new contract that members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union ratified last month calls for newly hired or promoted employees to be paid according to a lower tier of wages and benefits.
Andrews had hoped to make a career with Ralphs. “Now it’s kind of shaky,” he said.
The two-tier issue has also surfaced in a dispute involving hundreds of workers who were surprised to discover that they were being paid about $10 less per hour than they expected for Sunday work.
The UFCW is taking the matter to arbitration, said Greg Conger, president of Local 324 in Buena Park.
The dispute arose when supermarkets assigned lower-paid employees classified as general-merchandise clerks to fill in as cashiers on Sundays.
Under the old contract, experienced general-merchandise clerks who received such assignments were bumped up to the top cashier wage of $17.90 an hour for those shifts, plus time-and-a-half for working on Sunday, for a total of $26.85 an hour.
However, those same employees are now being paid $16.10 an hour for a Sunday cashier shift — $15.10 an hour plus $1 an hour more for working on Sunday — based on the lower wage tier in the new contract, Conger said.
Conger said the chains are violating the contract by applying the lower tier to employees who are temporarily bumped up in job classification, rather than being permanently promoted.
“This is not a gray area,” he said. “This is a strict violation.”
The union is seeking an arbitrator’s ruling that the higher pay scale should apply in such instances. It’s also asking for back pay for workers who were paid on the lower scale for shifts already worked.
Ralphs spokesman Terry O’Neil defended the use of the lower pay scale for such situations.
“That is the provision under the contract that was ratified,” he said.
O’Neil declined to comment on the union’s decision to take the issue to arbitration.
Meanwhile, Vons laid off an undisclosed number of union workers after the strike, then called many of them back to work. Laid-off workers don’t lose their seniority and are still paid under the higher scale when they return.
When the strike ended, “We did not have the business for (all UFCW members) to come back,” said Sandra Calderon, a Vons spokeswoman. However, “the business has come back quickly … we’ve already recalled many of our employees who were initially put on layoffs.”
Conger said he didn’t know how many Vons workers were laid off, and “neither does Vons. They’ve done this on a haphazard basis and so they have no idea what they’re doing. … I’m told there are people being laid off and then rehired almost immediately. … It’s a real mess.”
TWO TIERS:
Top hourly wages for supermarket workers currently in various job classifications:
–Meat cutter: $19.18
–Food clerk: $17.90
–General-merchandise clerk: $12.17
Top hourly wages for workers hired or promoted since Feb. 29:
–Meat cutter: $16.38
–Food clerk: $15.10
–General-merchandise clerk: $11.05