The pending acquisition
of Safeway by Cerberus Capital Management, owner of Albertsons and
other retail chains, provides additional evidence of a new wave of
consolidation in the supermarket industry.
Fortunately, our members have UFCW 8-Golden State to stand up for them through this time of uncertainty.
Prior
to the Cerberus-Safeway deal, the giant grocery conglomerate Kroger
Inc. revealed it had purchased Harris Teeter, an upscale chain based in
the southeastern U.S.
These companies and others have stated they
need to be bigger to take on Walmart, which has been the country’s
top-volume grocer for at least a decade. Walmart is infamous for using
its size
to force its suppliers to cut costs and gain a competitive edge.
In recent years we’ve observed similar trends of consolidation in the airline, banking and telecommunications industries.
While
we’ve seen companies come and go, one thing remains constant: our
Union. In our 77-year history, UFCW 8-Golden State has built a
remarkable record in fighting for the best interests of our members. Our
only priority is service to our Union sisters and brothers.
Regardless
of what happens in the course of the Cerberus-Safeway merger, we will
do everything in our power to ensure our members’ contractual and legal
rights are protected.
This holds true for any development in the corporate offices and work sites affecting our Union family.
In
addition to contract enforcement, UFCW 8-Golden State works tirelessly
to negotiate the best wages, benefits and job protections in the
industries we serve, from wholesale meat processors to distilleries to
doctors’ offices.
We also fight to safeguard your job by
protecting Union market share (see our cover story on the closing of
Fresh Markets in Sacramento as a recent and vivid example).
We
fight for better laws in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., to give
working families a break. We fight in the courts — most recently winning
a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court (see page 7) — to protect the legal
rights of workers to speak up.
We build alliances to uphold
guaranteed lifetime security for people who retire. And we strive
constantly to provide added benefits to our members, including
discounts, access to special services and valuable tools for achieving
financial security.
All of these Union achievements and more are possible because ...
Solidarity Works!
Haves and Have-Nots
Unions are the solution for the growing income gap
The stock market is booming and investors are getting rich. So why does everyone else feel so poor?
The answer is both simple to state and sad to contemplate. As the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman recently pointed out, 95 percent of the gains from the economic recovery since 2009 have gone to 1 percent of the population.
“In fact,” Krugman wrote in The New York Times, “more than 60 percent of the gains went to the top 0.1 percent, people with annual incomes of more than $1.9 million.”
In the meantime, America’s middle and working classes are consigned to picking up the table scraps left by the feasting elites. We see employment levels inching up slowly, but the new jobs tend to pay much less than those that were lost in the Great Recession.
The result is a growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots.
As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, now a professor at UC Berkeley, points out in his current documentary film, Inequality for All, 400 Americans now have more wealth than 150 million citizens who comprise the “bottom half” of the economy.
New aristocracy
We are in danger of becoming a society in which a small aristocratic nobility rules over a vast population of commoners. Didn’t we fight a revolution against that kind of system?
In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called attention to the growing crisis threatening the middle class. During his speech, he called for raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour. He also called for extending benefits for the long-term unemployed. And throughout his address he tossed around the buzzword “opportunity.”
That’s all well and good. We should support these initiatives wholeheartedly. Everybody is in favor of “opportunity.” But the president failed to mention the obvious solution, which is to empower working people to assert themselves and claim their fair share of economic growth.
We can restate that solution in a single word: Unions.
We need to fix America’s labor laws to create more opportunities to join Unions so more workers can participate in collective bargaining and enjoy the benefits of Union contracts.
A proven solution
This worked spectacularly the last time our country dealt seriously with a crisis of the middle class. The National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935 at the worst point of the Great Depression, facilitated a rapid expansion of Unions, which in turn led to a strong middle class and the richest economy the world has ever seen.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt said “If I went to work in a factory, the first thing I'd do is join a Union,” he was demonstrating leadership that empowered a generation.
Unfortunately, American corporations and their advocates in government have devised ways to reverse the historic growth of Unions, leaving our work force weaker, fearful and progressively poorer. This must change if we want to achieve an economy for all of us, not just the super-rich.
A couple of years ago, many well meaning citizens chose to express their frustration over income inequality through the Occupy movement. Unfortunately, this movement had little focus and offered no comprehensive solution for the crisis. It had the effect of venting steam that could have been channeled toward fixing our broken system.
It’s time for Americans to gather together again, but this time with focus on such vital areas as pensions, health care and, above all, the right to organize, organize, organize.
As members of UFCW 8-Golden State already know, Solidarity Works!
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