Corporate Greed has caused the supermarket strike

By James R. Smith

Workers' health care and standard of living is being held hostage by a few corporate executives who are concerned only about greater profits and not about human needs.

Question: What's behind the supermarket strike? Answer: Corporate Greed.

By James R Smith

The rest of this article is simply elaboration on that simple point. Things started going downhill in the 1970s, literally. It was in the 70s that the standard of living, the value of a paycheck was at its all time high. By the late 70s, a wave of plant closings shook the L.A. area, inflation undermined the value of a dollar (and drove Jimmy Carter from the White House), corporations started looking overseas to make a buck and Wall Street started calling the shots. At that point, the current grocery strike became inevitable.

You can bundle of all the economic changes together, tie a ribbon around it, and call it neoliberalism. That's a big word for most Americans who are economic whizzes if they can balance a checkbook, but it most of the world its a household term, and a hated one.

Neoliberalism means a return to the economic liberalism of Adam Smith (an old English guy who wrote "the Wealth of Nations," 200 years ago). He's mostly known for says the market place should be unfettered by government restrictions, such as restrictions on trade, child labor, unions, minimum wage, pensions, etc. Economic liberalism and neoliberalism has nothing at all to do with political liberalism. Most political liberals oppose neoliberalism, and want some sort of government intervention to even the playing field between rich and poor.

Since the 1970s, neoliberalism has: shifted manufacturing from the U.S. to low-wage countries around the world by legalizing pillage with trade treaties such as NAFTA, GATT, WTO and the upcoming FTAA; destroyed much of the local industries and agriculture in those countries, forcing millions to migrate to the U.S.; created bigger and bigger merged corporations at a fantastic rate (because of this merger-mania, California is no longer headquaters to most of its biggest businesses including BofA, Chevron, ARCO, etc); created intense pressure on corporate management to serve the whims of Wall Street by busting unions, driving down wages and taking away health benefits.

The struggle of grocery workers to resist this juggernaut is highly visible because 70,000 people or on strike or locked-out of their jobs by the stores, but it otherwise follows a pattern familiar to labor negotiators. The management strategy in these cases is usually to come at the unions with so many take away demands that the workers sometimes feel victorious if they repel half of them.

The attack on the workers at Ralphs (owned by Kroger), Vons (owned by Safeway) and Albertsons include a two-tier wage system which would allow new hires to be paid much less than current employees. In a few years, everyone is making the lower wage since workers being paid on the higher wage tier would be harassed out of their jobs by management. The new workers also would not receive much in the way of health or pension benefits. The two-tier proposal ploy is actually quite clever for management. Many workers will think, "I'll still get my pay and benefits, so why should I fight for those who haven't even been hired yet?" Demands for cuts in pension benefits likewise cause a division between older and younger workers, who don't ever think about retirement (except maybe winning the Lotto).

Health care has also been a source of friction in labor negotiations since the 70s when the insurance companies began to understand that tremendous profits could be made off people's illnesses. Blue Cross went from non-profit to for-profit. Kaiser began cutting costs, and services, in order to compete with new, bare-bones (pardon the terminology) HMOs. Monthly premiums began to skyrocket as did deductibles and co- payments.

Today in California, seven million people have no medical insurance at all. Millions more have lousy health plans that cause people to choose between paying the rent or seeing a doctor. This is a choice that the members of the United Food and Commercial Workers don't want to be forced into. They would prefer to walk the picket line rather than put their family's health in jeopardy.

Whether or not grocery workers have good health care that allows them to visit a doctor when they feel ill, without having to take out a loan, should be a concern for all of us. Do we really want people who are handling our food to be unable to seek medical care when they are feeling ill? If anyone should be able to visit a doctor for free, it should be grocery, restaurant and fast-food workers. Sadly, most of them are not able to do so.

There is a simple solution to the health care scandal. Just take the insurance companies out of the loop, and everyone can have quality health care. Such a solution is called a single-payer plan. There is a bill in the State Senate, SB 921 - The Healthcare for All Californians Act, sponsored by Sheila Kuehl of Santa Monica, which would cover all of us - every Californian - with high quality health care. The state government, not the insurance corporations, would handle the paperwork. Amazingly, says Kuehl, this miracle could be accomplished without any new spending for health care. Simply by consolidating money that is already being spent on health care, the system could be adequately funded.

Such a system has been in place in Canada for years. When Canadian unions and management bargain, health care is not even an issue. No one in Canada is walking the street, or walking a picket line, without health care. Civilized countries around the world provide universal health care coverage. Even third-world Cuba has a top-notch health care system for everyone. They've done this with a fraction of the wealth of the U.S. because they've made health care a priority (No wonder Bush doesn't want Americans visiting the island). Shame on the U.S. And shame on us in California if we don't demand that SB 921 becomes law. Corporate greed has got to go!