CFJ Position Statement in Support of the UFCW Grocery Workers Strike

Statement of Support:
The Center for Food & Justice expresses support for the United Food and Commercial Workers in the current strike and lockout in Southern California and other communities around the country. We support the UFCW’s efforts to create a food retail sector that treats workers with dignity and respect; promotes healthy and affordable food that is accessible to everyone; and promotes the social and economic well-being of the communities it serves.

The strike raises several key critical issues related to building a more just sustainable and democratic food system.

Dignity and respect for workers: Job stability, living wages and health care

The issues at the heart of the strike and lockout are the grocery corporations’ attempts to roll back health care benefits and impose a two-tier wage structure that would deny new workers a living wage. In rejecting these regressive proposals, UFCW members are protecting their standards of living – and standing up for working families in all walks of life who face, or may soon face, similar threats to health and wage benefits.

Quality, Healthy, Affordable Food

The grocery chains’ moves to slash worker benefits is a discouraging sign that the companies are considering pursuing a low-road business model that would harm workers, consumers, and communities. Some call this approach the “Wal-Mart way.” It is based on huge regional stores, and low prices that have been pushed down by exploiting workers and selling low-quality, standardized products. There is little room for neighborhood markets or fresh, seasonal, and local food in this approach.

If the nation’s supermarkets follow Wal-Mart’s lead, the chains will offer more processed, packaged food items and continue to close stores in low-income urban areas. Fortunately, there is an alternative that would be better for workers, consumers, communities, and may even help the stores’ bottom line.

Supermarkets could gain important advantages if they challenged the Wal-Mart approach by offering quality, local food. For example, several supermarket stores have noted that when they have featured fresh and local foods and increased the availability of produce items, store sales have increased. Stocking more ethnic food items, many also locally produced or processed, is another way to draw shoppers in an increasingly diverse nation.

Support for local economy and community

Supermarkets gained customer loyalty when they were first established in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s precisely because they had relationships with local growers and producers, developed a stable work force, and offered a single place to shop that served multiple community needs. Recent supermarket trends of consolidation and cost savings from its work force not only shift the chains towards a Wal-Mart approach but set up a competitive battle that only Wal-Mart can win and communities and workers and supermarkets alike will lose.

For years, the largest of the supermarket chains like Safeway and Kroger have been seeking out bigger sized lots and closing down stores in inner city communities as part of their own consolidation into larger corporate entities. These actions eliminate their local, neighborhood and community associations.

Treating a work force with respect, beginning with decent wages and health benefits, can create an advantage. It is a truism of the supermarket strike that part of the reason customers are not crossing the picket lines is the relationships they have established with long-term workers. This is one of the few ways that the big stores still maintain a community feel.

An opportunity for grocery chains

Instead of going the way of Wal-Mart – depressing wages, sourcing products from sweatshops, promoting cheap food that undermines health, and homogenizing the shopping experience - grocery chains should see the coming of Wal-Mart as an opportunity to highlight their differences, and to maintain and grow their customer base by providing an alternative to the Wal-Mart model. This alternative stresses establishing local neighborhood relationships, connecting with and serving these communities, and promoting high standards of living for the families that live and work there.

Supporters:
Center for Food & Justice, Los Angeles, California
Community Food Security Coalition, Venice, California
Frances Moore Lappé (Hope’s Edge and the Small Planet Fund), Cambridge, Massachusetts
Lane County Food Coalition, Eugene, OR
Meredith Kleinhenz RD, Portland, OR
Missouri Rural Crisis Center, Columbia, MO
Public Citizen's Energy and Environment Program, Washington DC
Urban Nutrition Initiative, Philadelphia, PA
World Hunger Year, New York, NY
Yomaira Tamayo, Philadelphia, PA
Center for Informed Food Choices, Oakland, CA

If you or your organization would like to sign on in support of the UFCW please send us an e-mail!