Grocery workers gather at Safeway store to protest contract proposals
Thursday, May 13, 2004
By PAUL NYHAN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
The public campaign over a new contract for local grocery workers took a detour yesterday when police officers arrested a labor official during a rally, sparking a second protest at a nearby police station.
Union members and leaders gathered outside a Safeway store on Capitol Hill yesterday to protest proposed changes in health care benefits. As the event wound down, police officers arrested Robby Stern, legislative director of the Washington State Labor Council, after he declined to move at their request.
Many participants then left the crowded sidewalk on East John Street and moved a few blocks away to picket in front of 18 baton-wielding officers at the Seattle Police Department's East Precinct. Police locked down the station, a standard procedure during protests.
The drama likely will have little, if any, effect on the collective bargaining, according to sources on both sides. That's because Safeway didn't complain about the rally or seek any arrests, according to union and company officials. In fact, the store discussed the Capitol Hill location with organizers, Jobs with Justice and Washington Citizen Action, in advance.
But the disturbance is further proof that the latest grocery negotiations hold one of the highest public profiles of any collective bargaining in recent years. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union is trying to reach an agreement with Safeway, Albertsons, Fred Meyer and QFC stores for 16,000 workers.
Since opening talks April 2, the union publicly has blasted the companies for allegedly proposing cuts in health care benefits, lower wages for new workers and work rule changes.
The talks are garnering plenty of public attention, in part, because the same stores and union only recently resolved a bitter, five-month strike and lockout in Southern California.
While the stores may have lost hundreds of millions of dollars in that dispute, union members had to swallow a two-tiered system, which promises to pay the next generation of grocery workers less. Several labor experts view that final contract as a victory for the grocery chains.
"We need the companies to realize this isn't Southern California," Robin Olson, a clerk at the QFC store in University Village, said as he picketed outside the police station. "This is the toughest contract I can remember in my 27 years."
The initial noontime rally was orderly, although grocery workers, members of other unions and regional labor and religious leaders crowded the sidewalk, while a handful of police officers and store managers watched from across the street.
A police officer intervened toward the end, as Stern prepared to lead a final song, and asked him to move to a park 30 feet away, apparently over concerns that the rally was blocking the sidewalk.
"It's going to be three minutes and we will be gone," Stern recalled telling the officer. "It makes no sense."
Stern remained on the sidewalk during the song and was arrested after he finished. He was released less than three hours later. He was arrested on a charge of obstruction, a misdemeanor, Police Department spokesman Sean Whitcomb said.
The initial event came as no surprise to Safeway.
"The rally was what we expected, and it was peaceful. And it's unfortunate it ended" that way, said Melinda Merrill, a spokeswoman for the stores. "We hope it doesn't take the focus away from the bargaining table."
Negotiations resume tomorrow, with the last scheduled meeting a week later.
Posted by UFCW 227 at May 13, 2004 03:49 PM