UFCW 227 News

Missing

Brenda Kay Linde a Local 227 member from Kroger L-292 in Louisville, has been missing since 4-28-04. She has blue eyes, brown hair, 5'7" tall and weighs 175 lbs. Her D.O.B is 8-17-52. She drives a white 2002 KIA SPORTAGE with a black top, License Number 986 KSR. If you have seen her please call 502 333-0003. Picture unavailable Ms. Linde has been located, thanks to all that helped in the search for her.

PRESIDENT BUSH’S NEW OVERTIME PAY RESTRICTIONS

BAD FOR WORKING FAMILIES, BAD FOR THE ECONOMY
•Overtime pay makes up about one-fourth of the weekly earnings of workers that earn it ($161 per week average).
•The new restrictions on overtime pay will hurt many workers, taking money out of their pockets during an economic crunch and discouraging job creation.
•The Administration could have updated the rules without taking away workers’ overtime pay. Instead, they weakened eligibility rules and stripped overtime rights from workers making as little as $23,660 per year.

•The Bush Administration addressed the concerns of highly visible workers – like firefighters and police, which were targeted in the initial proposal – at the expense of less visible workers.
•The Bush Administration consistently misled the American people by underestimating and misrepresenting the number of workers that would have lost overtime pay under the original proposal. There is no reason to believe they are not doing the same now.

Who will lose overtime pay rights?
•The new regulation will have a large impact on workers with minimal supervisory or “leadership” responsibilities, those who perform minimal amounts of administrative work, and those with special skills, among others.
•There is an enormous new loophole that will allow management to disqualify workers from overtime by simply appointing them “team leaders” (New Section 541.203).
•Working supervisors, including assistant retail managers that spend most of their time performing non-management work will lost overtime rights.
•Workers in network and database administration, tax, finance, accounting, budgeting, auditing, insurance, quality control, purchasing, procurement, advertising, marketing, research, safety and health, personnel management, human resources, employee benefits, labor relations, public relations, government relations, and legal and regulatory compliance will be especially vulnerable to losing overtime rights.
•Journalists working in print media, radio, television, and electronic media are especially vulnerable to loss of overtime rights, as the new regulation eliminates the presumption that they are non-exempt professionals.
•The final regulation will affect the overtime rights of some blue collar workers that fall within the expanded exemption for “administrative” employees.
•Middle income earners making as little as $23, 660 per year will lose overtime rights even if they spend less than 50% of their time on administrative management work.
•The requirement that the primary duty of administrative employees must include the exercise of independent judgment and discretion is much weaker in the new rule. Also, the primary duty no longer needs to occupy 50% of the employee’s time for the employee to be exempt.
•For the first time, there is an income cap on overtime eligibility. The cap is not indexed for inflation, which will strip more workers of their overtime rights every year.

Supermarket Smackdown

It took Wal-Mart to expose their problems. But old-school grocers are revamping their formats to stave off extinction
Time April 26, 2004 By JULIE RAWE
Cocky. Ruthless. Vicious. Mean. Those are some of the ways Jerry Davis, CEO of Affiliated Foods Southwest, describes the supermarket juggernaut that is Wal-Mart. He could have added hyperefficient, low cost and customer focused. The megachain's rapidly expanding grocery business — which now accounts for a fifth of U.S. food sales — has left a trail of shuttered supermarkets in its wake. This year in particular, the damage is piling up. Winn-Dixie, once a Southern power, suspended its dividend indefinitely, causing its stock to drop 28% in January, and is expected to close more than a hundred stores. This comes on the heels of Fleming Cos.' liquidation last summer of what had been the second biggest grocery wholesaling business in the country. But even excluding that particular flameout, the industry has lost more than 50% of its market value in the past five years. "The people at Wal-Mart don't want some of the business," Davis seethes in Little Rock, Ark., where his wholesaling cooperative supplies 50 supermarkets and some 600 convenience stores in and around Arkansas. "They want all of it."

Blaming Wal-Mart is a common industry response, but it's also misguided. The grocers have contributed enormously to their own problems. Their inefficient supply chain, for instance, provided Wal-Mart with a golden opportunity. And their initial response to the new threat was fairly myopic. Like too many of his fellow grocers, Davis thought getting bigger himself would make things better. Before Wal-Mart, he says, "we tried to limit our distance from our warehouses to 300 miles. Now we're going 500 miles" to reach stores as far as the Gulf Coast. Kroger, Albertson's and Safeway each went on an acquisition spree a few years ago, but whatever savings that resulted from centralizing operations have been offset by the obliteration of local ties and customer service. And Albertson's isn't finished. The company (2003 sales: $35.4 billion) just bought New England's Shaw's from old England's J Sainsbury for nearly $2.5 billion. Apparently, the British have had it with the colonies' low ROI.

"There really is a crisis in the industry," says Gary Giblen, head analyst at boutique Manhattan research firm CL King & Associates. The sky started falling — along with same-store sales — in 2001, as alienated shoppers began steering their grocery carts not only toward Wal-Mart's food-laden Supercenters but also toward warehouse clubs, discount chains, drugstores, dollar stores and, on the high end, trendy salutes to organic produce. "Conventional supermarkets really have no reason to exist anymore," says Giblen. "They're basically becoming convenience stores."

The big national chains are undergoing a massive restructuring that will determine which among them survive. "We've made a few mistakes," concedes Safeway CEO Steve Burd, who was the industry darling for years until his cost-cutting skills sucked the life out of recent acquisitions, including Dominick's in Chicago and Genuardi's in Philadelphia. Revenues at the 1,800-store chain edged up 2%, to $35.6 billion last year, as the company logged $170 million in losses. With several big pension funds calling for his head, Burd embarked on a two-week road show last month to convince investors that his performance (Safeway's share price has dropped nearly 60% from 1999) is at least on par with his peers'. He also maintains that his tough stance on labor negotiations — which resulted in a strike in Southern California that cost the region's big three chains some $350 million in earnings last quarter — won enough concessions to stay competitive, even after Wal-Mart unleashes its Supercenters in the area. The next step, experts agree, is to continue narrowing the price gap with the world's largest retailer and find a way to justify the remaining premium. Here's what supermarkets need to do to avoid the ultimate checkout:

Differentiate Or Die
After Wal-Mart launched its Supercenter format in 1991, it took the company three years to reach $1 billion in annual U.S. grocery sales. But a mere decade later, it is topping $100 billion a year, which is almost as much as the sales of the next three biggest chains combined. "To a certain extent, Wal-Mart's strength is more of a reflection of the lack of difference among stores," says Willard Bishop, a supermarket consultant in Barrington, Ill. Conventional grocers are starting to get the message — differentiate or die — which is why some are jazzing up the old big-box routine. The northeastern Wegmans chain just opened its first store in Virginia, where it is spicing up its prepared-foods sections with daily cooking demonstrations. In Indiana, Marsh opened two stores this winter that have circular layouts. Each store has a central cafe with European-style markets on the perimeter showcasing, for example, artisanal cheeses in one room and baby food and supplies in another. And sticking with the old retail-is-detail adage, Marsh pipes mellow guitar instrumentals not only into the stores but also into the parking lots and faux-stone bathrooms.

The mood seems to work. "There's something about this place that isn't in-your-face stimulating," says Cathy Beerbower, 45, who frequents the new Marsh store in Fort Wayne, Ind. And her reason for avoiding the local Wal-Mart--"it's too chaotic"--could be the industry's salvation. Kroger is trying to emulate the swanky Whole Foods scene in a few of its 2,500 stores by adding in-store chefs, gourmet meals and upscale wines. Likewise, Safeway, which is making a huge push into quality perishables in general and prepared foods in particular, is doing so with new woodlike floors and softer lighting. "The feedback we're getting from consumers is that it's just a less stressful place to be," Burd says of the new look.

Meanwhile, Albertson's 2,300 stores hope to reel in customers with the power of other retail brands. Its new store-within-a-store concept has carved out space not only for its well-known pharmacy, Osco, but for 1,900 Toys "R" Us alcoves, 1,000 Krispy Kreme nooks, some 300 Starbucks cafes and a dozen or so Office Depot sections. "We're really just trying to maximize choice," says Bob Dunst, Albertson's chief technology officer. That impulse helps explain why his company — along with several others, including Kroger, Marsh and H-E-B — is hedging its bets via multiple store brands that cater variously to upscale, discount and ethnic shoppers. Some supermarkets have even been installing gas stations in their parking lots to bring in more traffic.

Handle the Unions
Labor unions have represented workers at big chains like Safeway since supermarkets first appeared in the 1930s, but their inability to crack Wal-Mart leaves the chains' employers at a wage disadvantage they can't abide. Something has got to give, so Burd's most formidable target is labor, which accounts for 68% of Safeway's budget. According to consulting firm Retail Forward, Wal-Mart's labor costs are 25% to 30% less than the big unionized chains', which contributes to prices that are 15% lower.

Knowing that Wal-Mart plans to open 40 Supercenters in California in the next five years, Burd, who took the helm at Safeway in 1993 and has been lauded for trimming bloated costs, played hardball during regional negotiations with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union last fall. After its workers went on strike on Oct. 11, Albertson's and Kroger subsidiary Ralphs locked out their UFCW employees. Five grueling months later, the UFCW agreed to a two-tier plan that pays new hires less and requires them to contribute more for health care. "It still leaves [existing employees] with the highest wages, the highest health-care plan and the highest pension benefits in all of retail," says Burd. The tactic may have helped the company reach a settlement recently, without a strike, in and around the Washington-Baltimore area, another UFCW stronghold. Since a hostile work force won't help bring in new customers, Safeway wisely created a multimillion-dollar hardship fund to provide financial grants to employees who fell behind on their house, car or other payments during the strike.

Albertson's, which is giving its employees $10 million in strike-ratification bonuses, is taking other preventive measures by outsourcing some of its customer service to a new call center in Utah and reducing the overall need for checkers, hostile or otherwise. The company has installed 1,800 self-checkout aisles and plans to reach a total of 5,000 by fall. It is also using the Dallas — Fort Worth market to test a shop-and-scan technology, similar to Speedpass, that obviates the need even to go through a checkout aisle.

At Meijer, the Michigan retailer that invented the supercenter way back in 1962, the top brass would no doubt argue against such a strategy. Sales plummeted at the company when Wal-Mart started moving into its strongholds a few years ago. "They sold everything we sold and ran promotions that we could not match," says Jim Jensen, 46, who was managing a 209,000-sq.-ft. Meijer in Howell, Mich., when a Wal-Mart moved in across the street in 2000. Jensen responded with six-hour price specials, supersales and coupons galore, and when those initiatives failed to pull the store out of its death spiral, he got employees to start offering product demonstrations in every department, including fashion shows. It took a full 12 months for sales to climb back to pre-Wal-Mart levels, and, says Jensen, the most successful measure that year was also the simplest: "Talking to people, making them feel at home."

Streamline Operations
For years the supermarket industry viewed its 1% net profit margin as a badge of its efficiency. In reality, the opposite was true: the grocers earned so little because they weren't that good at managing the supply chain. Wal-Mart exploited that weakness with devastating effect on the grocers, and it has forced food suppliers to become more efficient too. For starters, the leviathan has changed the way grocery stores deal with their vendors, as everyone seeks to copy its Retail Link system, which provides real-time sales data to manufacturers. Wal-Mart also helped persuade the pack to subscribe to UCCnet's data-synchronization service, which, by cutting back on invoice errors, should save companies $1 million for every $1 billion in sales, according to a study by A.T. Kearney.

But perhaps Wal-Mart's greatest industry legacy will be helping supermarkets wean themselves from a slew of so-called vendor allowances, which suppliers pay to cover everything from how an item is promoted to how much shelf space it gets to how much of it is sold. These allowances have little to do with consumers and add complexity to operations. Yet the industry has relied on them for profits — instead of, say, finding and selling the stuff that shoppers really want. Grocery manufacturers, who have leaned on the allowance system to help launch new products and unload unpopular ones, were forced to shift gears because Wal-Mart forgoes all allowances and simply negotiates — famously and ferociously — for a lower total price, or dead net cost.

Since then, Albertson's and other big chains have publicly vowed to follow suit. Safeway, for instance, has gone dead net with a few vendors but admits that the evolution is slow because it takes so long to sift through years' worth of byzantine allowances in order to compute — and compare — dead net. "It's a little bit like translating some ancient scrolls that you might find in the Dead Sea that are in a language that you don't know," Burd told analysts. It's an honest — and stunning — admission that Safeway doesn't know what its true costs are.

But even with the advent of dead net cost, supermarkets will never be able to go head to head with Wal-Mart on the price of every item. "That way lies madness," as one Wall Street analyst put it. The only viable alternative is to narrow the perceived price gap by bringing down the cost of a select group of products that customers are prone to use when comparing prices. "The art is knowing which items," says Bishop, who for a fee lets clients in on the secret.

Keep Customers Loyal
The new variable in this food war is that customer loyalty is either dead or very much divided. Last year Stephen Hoch, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, published a two-year study of Chicago-area shoppers that showed 73% of consumers regularly bought grocery items at two or more stores. And cherry picking isn't just a metropolitan phenomenon. In Racine, Wis., for example, special-education teacher Stacey Goetz, 26, routinely treks to Sam's Club for meat, Aldi for dairy products and a health-food store for oat flour and sugar-free waffles. In between these trips, she scours supermarket flyers for good deals.

Despite this trend, the industry is still banking on the notion of good old-fashioned customer inertia. "For consumers that are not pure price or niche driven, location is the No. 1 reason for choosing one retailer over another," says Burd. "We have hundreds of locations that retailers would refer to as Main and Main."

It's no surprise, then, that Wal-Mart isn't content to stick with giant stores on the outskirts of town. For the past five years, it has been tinkering with a smaller Neighborhood Market that is designed to penetrate urban centers and, says Burt Flickinger III, managing director of New York City's Strategic Resources Group, "occupy the empty stores of bankrupt supermarkets."

This means that even as the big chains are scrambling to compete, they all know that Wal-Mart is just getting started. "We could be so much better than we are," Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott told TIME. "We are not as good in food as we need to be yet, so there's a lot of upside." He rattles off expansion plans for the company's Supercenters, Sam's Clubs and Neighborhood Markets and notes that even in the Wal-Marts that aren't adding perishable sections, the plan is to sell more food. In other words, the grocery wars are just beginning. "You will see it on all fronts," Scott says, "in all the things we do, food will be a key part of it."

Grocery Stores Bracing For Potential Employee Strike

SEATTLE - The contract is quickly running out between several big name grocery stores and their employees. It affects workers at Safeway, Albertsons, Fred Meyer, and QFC stores.

New developments in the negotiations Friday have angered some workers.

If you looked through the newspaper Friday, you probably saw full page ads looking for replacement workers.

Several big grocery store chains are looking for replacement workers if union members at stores hit the picket line.

But many employees say these ads are just meant to scare workers.

Paul Henry, a worker at QFC, called the signs, "an intimidation tactic, that there is a sign there that says we are advertising for your job."

Henry is just a year and half from retiring. He says grocery stores want to make people like him a thing of the past.

"I get the feeling now that they want it to be disposable type jobs where a person would walk in, work a couple years and then walk out and they would hire a new person," Henry said.

The union's contract with Safeway, QFC, and Fred Meyer expires on May 2. The stores say the ads and signs are not to scare employees.

"It's a normal part of the process for the employers to prepare for a strike just like the union has been doing for the last several months," said Melinda Merrill with Allied Employers. "It is absolutely not an indication of where we think negotiations are going."

Both sides have been looking to California, where a bitter grocery strike went on for months.

While both sides say they are doing all they can to avoid that here, the stores say they can't afford to pay the kind of wages and benefits they are right now.

"The labor costs of the current contract are too high," Merrill said. "The cost of health and welfare benefits need to be brought under control."

Cuts in benefits at stores in California already brought out picket signs at a Seattle Safeway store in February. The union says you should be worried if big grocery stores are able to slash what they pay their workers.

"Once it goes that way for our workers in the grocery store, it could go that way for workers in other industries that buy groceries in our grocery stores," said Brenda Willis with UFCW 1105.

Henry adds: "It's an attempt to push us down into the working poor. I mean that is what the effect will be."

Even though the contract with the stores expires on May 2, both sides are still talking, and say they are willing to keep talking even after the contract runs out.

UFCW: Kroger Risks Revenue Hemorrhage with Attack on Worker Health Benefits

Workers in Houston, Cincinnati, Louisville, Las Vegas, Northern California, Denver, Seattle and Detroit Mobilize for Fight to Save Health Care
Cincinnati-Based Supermarket Giant Could Face Multi-City Strikes

CINCINNATI, April 23 /PRNewswire/ -- Kroger stockholders were recently stunned when the company forked over more than a $100 million to the supermarket operator's leading competitors as a payoff from the more than 4 month long Southern California grocery strike. Waging war on workers' health benefits doesn't come cheaply, and the nation's largest supermarket chain had to pay the bill after it agreed to cover its competitor's losses when it joined with Safeway and Albertsons to take on 70,000 Southern California members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) in a fight over affordable health care.

Kroger did not limit its revenue loss to California. It also sent workers into the streets and its customers off to its competitors when it forced a strike over health benefits in West Virginia last year. Now, Kroger is risking a revenue hemorrhage as its short-sighted, benefit-busting demands could send tens of thousands of the company's workers into the streets from Houston to Seattle, and from Cincinnati to Denver. The majority of Kroger's revenue stream could dry up if the company fails to reach agreements that maintain affordable health care.

"Kroger has consistently underestimated workers' resolve in the fight for affordable health care. For the company health care benefits are a matter of dollars and cents, for workers health care benefits are a matter of life and death," said UFCW International Collective Bargaining Director Pat O'Neill.

In a nationwide effort, the UFCW International is systematically laying the groundwork in preparation for the possibility of multi-city strikes. From picket signs to community outreach, coordinated programs are being planned to mobilize support for affordable health care, as well as to assist the workers forced to strike to keep their health care.

While the details vary from city to city, the thrust of the company's attack is to effectively eliminate affordable health care in the future. Houston is currently the hot spot for a potential strike. Company demands there would impose costs that would push health care out of reach for many workers, and could leave substantial number of workers without any coverage at all.

"Kroger needs to make a commitment to maintaining affordable benefits. The workers have made record profits for the company. Some of those profits now should be used to maintain the workers' benefits. Attempts to eliminate affordable health care will only lead to the elimination of profits, customers and market share. Workers will negotiate in good faith to keep the stores open and the customers served, but workers will fight for health care," stated O'Neill.

WHITE HOUSE DISHES UP PAY CUTS FOR AMERICAN WORKERS

The Bush Administration’s Idea of Fairness: Everybody Gets a Cut—Tax Cuts for the Wealthy, Pay Cuts for Workers

George W. Bush's new overtime rules pick up his pace for lowering living standards for American workers and putting more dollars into the bank accounts of his corporate campaign donors. The most anti-worker While House in the modern political era just gave workers their biggest pay cut in history. Millions of workers could potentially lose thousands of dollars each year as a result of the Bush Administrations actions.

Bush shoved the pay cut through over the objections of both Houses of Congress and millions of workers. The rewritten overtime rules open the door for employers to reclassify jobs so that workers who've always earned overtime would now become exempt. Lead workers in grocery store deli, dairy, produce, and meat departments could now be classified as managers and have their pay slashed under the new Department of Labor (DOL) regulations. Health care industry technicians and nurses, among millions of other workers, could also be reclassified out of overtime pay.

“American workers have received nothing but double dealing and disappointment from the Bush White House,” said United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW) President Joe Hansen. “That’s precisely the case with the DOL’s 500 pages of “clarifying” regulations on overtime—the only thing they clarify is how completely special corporate interests dominate the Bush Administration.”

Under George W. Bush’s leadership, the U.S. economy has lost more jobs than at any period since the Great Depression. Forty-four million people—the overwhelming majority of them from working families—have no health insurance. Health care costs are skyrocketing. Millions of jobs are being shipped overseas while the number of working poor in this country, struggling in low-wage, no-benefit jobs, is increasing.

“Obviously, George W. Bush surveyed the state of working America and concluded it was time for a pay cut,” Hansen added.

Seattle Rocky start to grocery talks

By PAUL NYHAN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Negotiators are off to a difficult start in their effort to agree on a new contract for 16,000 local grocery workers, as union officials attacked the companies' opening offer yesterday.

The United Food & Commercial Workers Union highlighted a series of proposed changes -- cuts in health care payments, work rule changes and lower wages for new workers -- that it claims will fundamentally alter grocery work.

It is still early in the talks, but public comments from both sides set an ominous tone for a contract that traditionally defines pay and benefits for up to 25,000 workers at supermarkets across Western Washington.

"The current proposal that we received yesterday will basically throw our people out of the middle class," Sharon McCann, president of Local 1105, said at a rally outside the Safeway store on lower Queen Anne yesterday. "It will not maintain affordable health care."

The supermarkets countered that other workers have accepted similar changes. Executives are simply seeking a fair deal that allows them to address emerging competition, according to statements released yesterday.

"You can't negotiate and close the gap anywhere but the bargaining table," said Melinda Merrill, a spokeswoman for the chains.

So far, the talks have been defined by anxiety. Supermarket officials are worried about growing pressure on multiple fronts, as non-union stores, such as Wal-Mart, move in and health care costs soar.

Union leaders, meanwhile, fret that the negotiations threaten the generous benefits and stability that have defined the industry for decades.

The fear is permeating the 259 Albertsons, Fred Meyer, QFC and Safeway stores covered by the pact. While the contract directly affects roughly 16,000 workers, in the past it established a model for 9,000 other Washington grocery employees.

As the two sides talk, workers are caught in a disconcerting limbo. They watched their peers in California endure one of the worst strikes in recent memory, one that ended in February, only to see the companies and union dodge a strike by settling another pact a month later in Washington, D.C.

Rosemary Rosas is already worried about how a strike, which would be the first in more than 10 years, would affect her two children. The grocery checker realizes that she would have to cut back on spending, including swimming, gymnastics and other extracurricular activities for her kids.

"There is not going to be much there," Rosas said.

Company executives have their own concerns. They have watched the cost of health care benefits rise 21 percent a year, on average, since March 2001.

Health care has emerged as the central issue. Both sides agree that existing benefits are good, but they can't yet agree on how to control costs, which are rising across the nation.

"That is the main issue," said Mary Ann Schroeder, a meat wrapper at the Safeway in Lower Queen Anne.

In the initial offer, companies proposed reducing the amount they contribute to health benefits from $4.60 an hour to $3.60 an hour in the first year of the contract. The change would not necessarily force employees to pay for health care, the companies said. Instead, officials could cut costs by trimming benefits.

The proposal would also essentially create two classes of workers at the chains: current employees and new hires. The idea is controversial, but workers at some other locations recently accepted similar systems.

Under the program, new workers would pay more for health care, initially earn lower wages and receive fewer holidays and smaller pension contributions, according to the union. Further complicating the talks is the recent five-month strike by grocery workers in Southern California. Safeway likely gained confidence from that fight, according to William Gould, a former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board.

"The message that came out of that dispute was that the workers were on the streets for five months and wound up with nothing more than what they would have had if they had not struck," Gould said.

Now the question is, would the companies, the unions or the workers be willing to endure another dispute only two months after California employees returned to work.

Yesterday's public complaints were not unusual. Unions and companies often reach out to the public in an effort to gain support. Negotiators have plenty of time to settle their differences because the contract doesn't expire until May 2, and 12 days is an eternity in collective bargaining.

"The mere fact there is drum beating doesn't mean there is going to be a strike or lockout. But it means ... the negotiations are going to be contentious and difficult," Gould said.

Kroger Sets Aside Funds for Rivals

It allocates $116 million to pay Safeway and Albertsons as part of a deal to share strike pain.
Kroger Sets Aside Funds for Rivals
The owner of the Ralphs grocery chain has set aside $116 million to compensate two rivals under a controversial mutual-aid pact the trio devised in anticipation of the California supermarket strike and lockout, regulatory filings show.

Kroger Co.'s payout to Safeway Inc. and Albertsons Inc. will probably be between $72 million and $75 million after taxes, analyst Andrew Wolf of BB&T Capital Markets said Monday. He said that "appears to be appropriate, in light of the losses the companies have reported and the nature of their agreement."

Kroger said in its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission last week that the $116-million pretax figure was for its fiscal year that ended Jan. 31.

The pretax total that will be owed to Safeway and Albertsons is almost sure to be more because the strike and lockout continued after the end of Kroger's fiscal year.

The Kroger filing didn't say how Safeway — the owner of Vons and Pavilions — and Albertsons would divide the money, which is to be disbursed during Kroger's current first quarter, which ends April 30.

Spokespeople for Safeway and Albertsons either declined to comment or weren't available for comment. The companies have consistently said that they wouldn't release details of the mutual-aid pact.

They came up with the pact to share the pain of labor strife and as a safeguard in case the United Food and Commercial Workers union didn't apply pressure evenly during the strike and lockout.

That's exactly what occurred.

Early in the dispute, the UFCW removed its pickets from Ralphs and focused efforts on Von, Pavilions and Albertsons stores. That provided the Ralphs stores owned by Kroger with a windfall of business from people who didn't want to cross picket lines.

Under the pact, Kroger was then obligated to share that extra cash with the other two chains.

The plan for companies that are normally heated competitors to share money triggered a lawsuit by California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, who alleges that the pact violates federal antitrust laws.

The chains have denied wrongdoing, contending that the pact is a legal, labor-related exemption from antitrust laws.

Lockyer spokesman Tom Dresslar reiterated Monday that "we don't think that exemption applies here. We think it's important the courts clarify the law."

The three chains bargain jointly with the UFCW in Central and Southern California. The strike and lockout, which affected 852 stores and idled 59,000 workers, lasted 4 1/2 months before ending Feb. 29 with a new three-year contract.

Although the chains won major reductions in their future labor expenses, the dispute cost them more than $1.5 billion in combined lost sales.

Albertsons and Safeway have said the strike and lockout reduced their fourth-quarter, after-tax profit by $90 million and $103 million, respectively. Both companies said their losses took into account the payments they expected to receive from Kroger.

Kroger had indicated last month that its payments to its competitors would top $100 million. In reporting its fiscal fourth-quarter results, Kroger said the strike and lockout, along with a small labor dispute in West Virginia, had cut its quarterly profit by $156 million and that much of the amount reflected the mutual-aid money.

Bush Takes Away Overtime Pay for Millions of U.S. Workers

April 20—The Bush administration’s yearlong drive to take away the overtime pay protections for millions of workers may become a new federal regulation after it is published in the Federal Register later this week. The Office of Management and Budget made the final version of the rule public today and employers can implement it after 120 days, approximately Aug. 20.

Bush used the federal regulatory process, which does not require congressional approval, to make it easier for employers to avoid paying overtime to their employees. Last year, the U.S. Senate voted to block any changes in the overtime eligibility regulations, and the White House move this week came as Democratic senators again prepared to vote to block Bush from taking away overtime pay. Republican leaders had rearranged the Senate schedule several times to avoid a vote on legislation to stop the overtime pay cuts.

Although the White House says the new overtime pay regulations will increase the number of workers eligible for overtime pay, pay cuts for America’s workers could be significant. Overtime pay accounts for up to one-quarter of the weekly earnings of workers eligible for overtime, an average $161 a week, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

"Over the past year, in promoting its plan to eliminate overtime rights for 8 million workers, the Bush Administration has left an appalling trail of misstatements, evasions, half-truths, and outright falsifications that destroy any credibility they might have as defenders of workers’ overtime pay," says AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney.

"The Bush Administration staunchly opposed legislation which would preserve overtime pay for all workers and instead pressed forward with eliminating overtime pay for a huge swath of middle-class workers—many who make as little as $23,600 a year."

While the final regulation must be analyzed carefully to determine the precise number of workers whose overtime rights are threatened, it is clear the Bush regulation will restrict eligibility for overtime pay to fewer workers.

“The Bush administration simply is not trustworthy on this issue, and I am beyond skeptical about these so-called revisions,” says Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). “This president has gone out of his way time and again to undercut working families’ right to overtime pay for overtime work. The Senate will soon have the opportunity to stand up and be counted on this issue, and I look forward to the debate.” Read complete Sweeny letter here. Download file

To review the new rules go to www.dol.gov.

Battle looms over Chicago Wal-Mart stores

CHICAGO — A battle is looming in the Chicago City Council over two proposed Wal-Mart "supercenter" stores, just after activists went 1-for-2 in California votes against the anti-worker retail behemoth.

But there's an unusual twist in Chicago, too: The pressure on the giant anti-union retailer forced its Midwestern regional director to at least sit down and talk with two top union officials about a corporate code of conduct plan.

In both Chicago and California, labor and the community mobilized against the retail giant's supercenters, which they said would drive local firms out of business and whose rock-bottom wages and lack of benefits would drive local living standards down.

In each California case, the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer countered with million-dollar-plus publicity designed to show Wal-Mart's low prices were supposedly good and that it would create jobs.

In the most recent vote, on April 6, Wal-Mart lost in the low-income, high-unemployment Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood, after a labor-led campaign pointed out that its low-wage no-benefit jobs would actually hurt the community. Wal-Mart won, however, in a March vote in Contra Costa County near San Francisco, overturning a local anti-"big box" law.

In Chicago, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 881 mobilized community, labor, religious and civic support against the destructive impact of the superstores, local spokeswoman Elizabeth Drake says.

The city council zoning committee threw several roadblocks in front of Wal-Mart's planned West Side superstore, with another panel meeting scheduled for April 20.

Meanwhile, a South Side alderman, without the panel's knowledge, pushed through a retail plaza proposal--without telling anyone Wal-Mart would benefit through another superstore. The uproar has forced him to temporarily retreat.

Like Inglewood, both Chicago Wal-Mart "supercenters"--the so-called "big boxes"--would be in predominantly minority areas.

As a result of the pressure and publicity in Chicago, Wal-Mart's Midwestern director talked with presidents of both Local 881 and the Chicago Federation of Labor about a proposed corporate responsibility contract. That's a first, Drake adds.

"The groups have finalized a community benefits agreement" for Wal-Mart to sign, Drake explained. The pact would commit the firm "not to do things they have done elsewhere," such as rock-bottom wages with skimpy and unaffordable health benefits.

Wal-Mart's low wages and benefits have prompted a national UFCW organizing drive in its stores--and also pushed other retail grocers to compete by driving their union workers down.

"Hopefully, if Wal-Mart signs, this would make Chicago first on the map for Wal-Mart to be a responsible corporate citizen and not compete" on the basis of harming workers and communities, Drake said.

Now Can We Talk About Health Care?

By HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
New York Times April 18, 2004

I know what you're thinking. Hillary Clinton and health care? Been there. Didn't do that!

No, it's not 1994; it's 2004. And believe it or not, we have more problems today than we had back then. Issues like soaring health costs and millions of uninsured have yet to fix themselves. And now we are confronting a new set of challenges associated with the arrival of the information age, the technological revolution and modern life.

Think for a moment about recent advances in genetic testing. Knowing you are prone to cancer or heart disease or Lou Gehrig's disease may give you a fighting chance. But just try, with that information in hand, to get health insurance in a system without strong protections against discrimination for pre-existing or genetic conditions. Each vaunted scientific breakthrough brings with it new challenges to our health system. But it's not only medicine that is changing. So, too, are the economy, our personal behaviors and our environment. Unless Americans across the political spectrum come together to change our health care system, that system, already buckling under the pressures of today, will collapse with the problems of tomorrow.

Twenty-first-century problems, like genetic mapping, an aging population and globalization, are combining with old problems like skyrocketing costs and skyrocketing numbers of uninsured, to overwhelm the 20th-century system we have inherited.

The way we finance care is so seriously flawed that if we fail to fix it, we face a fiscal disaster that will not only deny quality health care to the uninsured and underinsured but also undermine the capacity of the system to care for even the well insured. For example, if a hospital's trauma center is closed or so crowded that it cannot take any more patients, your insurance card won't help much if you're the one in the freeway accident.

Let's face it -- if we were to start from scratch, none of us, from dyed-in-the-wool liberals to rock-solid conservatives, would fashion the kind of health care system America has inherited. So why should we carry the problems of this system into the future?

21st-Century Problems
At the dawn of the last century, America was coping with the effects of the industrial revolution -- crowded living conditions, dangerous workplaces, inadequate sanitation and infrastructure in cities and pollution and infectious diseases like typhoid fever and cholera that exacted a huge toll on the oldest and youngest in society.

Since then, a century's worth of advances yielded remarkable results. Antibiotics were developed. Anesthesia was improved. Public health programs like mosquito control and childhood immunizations succeeded in reducing or even eradicating diseases like malaria and polio in this country. Congress passed legislation regulating the quality of food and drugs and assuring that safety and science guided medical developments. Workplace and product-safety standards resulted in fewer deaths and injuries from accidents. Effective campaigns cut tobacco use and alcohol abuse. Employers began providing some workers with health care coverage, primarily for hospitalization costs. And to aid some of those left out, President Lyndon B. Johnson persuaded Congress to establish Medicare and Medicaid to address the poorest, sickest, oldest and highest-risk patients in our society. As a result of these accumulated gains, life expectancy grew from 47 years in 1900 to 77 years for those born in 2000.

As astounding as those changes were, we are likely to see even more revolutionary changes in the next 100 years. Advances in medicine coincide with advances in computers and communications. The American workplace is changing in response to global pressures. But even positive advances may come with a negative underside. Our affluence contributes to an increasingly sedentary lifestyle that, combined with a diet filled with sugar and fat-rich foods, undermines our ability to fend off chronic diseases like diabetes. And research is proving that the pollutants and contaminants in our environment cause disease and mortality.

It is overwhelming just thinking about the problems, never mind dealing with them. But we have to begin applying American ingenuity and resolve or watch the best health care system in the world deteriorate.

Medical Advances
The pace of scientific development in medicine is so rapid that the next hundred years is likely to be called the Century of the Life Sciences. We have mapped the human genome and seen the birth of the burgeoning field of genomics, offering the opportunity to pinpoint and modify the genes responsible for a whole host of conditions. Scientists are exploring whether nanotechnology can target drugs to diseased tissues or implant sensors to detect disease in its earliest forms. We can look forward to ''designer drugs'' tailored to individual genetic profiles. But the advances we herald carry challenges and costs.

Think about the potential for inequities in drug research. Today, pharmaceutical and biotech companies have little incentive to research and develop treatments for individuals with rare diseases. Never heard of progeria? That's the point. This fatal syndrome, also called premature-aging disease, affects one in four million newborns a year. It's rare enough that there is no profit in developing a cure. This is known as the ''orphan drug'' problem. Genetic profiles and individualized therapies have the potential to increase the problem of orphaned drugs by further fragmenting the market. Even manufacturers of drugs for conditions like high blood pressure might focus their efforts on people with common genetic profiles. Depending on your genes, you could be out of luck.

The increasing understanding and use of genomics may also undermine the insurance system. Health insurance, like other insurance, exists to protect against unpredictable, costly events. It is based on risk. As genetic information allows us to predict illness with greater certainty, it threatens to turn the most susceptible patients into the most vulnerable. Many of us will become uninsurable, like the two young sisters with a congenital disease I met in Cleveland. Their father went from insurance company to insurance company trying to get coverage, until one insurance agent looked at him and said, ''We don't insure burning houses.''

Many have worked to get laws on the books to protect people from genetic discrimination, but we have yet to pass legislation that addresses job security and health coverage. The challenges do not stop there. Health insurance will have to change fundamentally to cope with predictable, knowable risks. Will health insurance companies offer coverage tailored to a person's future health prospects? Right now, if you have asthma, or even just allergies, insurers in the individual market can exclude your respiratory system from your health insurance policy. Will all health plans stop offering benefits that relate to genetic diseases?

The ability to predict illness may overwhelm more than just the insurance system; it may overwhelm the patient and the provider. Studies in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that nearly 6 out of 10 patients at risk for breast and ovarian cancer declined a genetic test, and a similar fraction of those at risk for colon cancer also declined testing. Why? One reason is probably to avoid higher insurance premiums. But the decision to undergo genetic testing is a complex one that involves many issues. Positive test results often indicate increased risk but no certainty that a disease will occur. Negative results also come without guarantees. The development of genetic profiles and individual therapies will exponentially increase the amount of information a physician is expected to manage. Instead of remembering one or two drugs for any condition, a physician will have to analyze all the different genetic, demographic and behavioral variables to generate optimal treatment for a patient.

Medical advances have the potential to overwhelm the health care system top to bottom. At the very least, the pace of technological progress is so rapid that our antiquated health care system is ill equipped to deliver the fruits of that progress. But these advances are not occurring in isolation from other factors affecting both how we finance health care and how much care we need and expect.

Globalization
The globalization of our economy has changed everything from how we work as individuals to what we produce as a nation to how quickly diseases can spread. American companies -- and workers -- compete not only with one another but all over the world. It is called competitive advantage, but it can put American businesses and workers at a disadvantage.

The United States' closest economic rivals have mandatory national health care systems rather than the voluntary employer-based model we have. Automakers in the United States and Canada pay taxes to help finance public health care. But in the United States, automakers also pay about $1,300 per midsize car produced for private employee health insurance. Automakers in Canada come out ahead, according to recent news reports, even after paying higher taxes.

At the same time, American companies are outsourcing jobs to countries where the price of labor does not include health coverage, which costs Americans jobs and puts pressure on employers who continue to cover their employees at home.

And many new jobs, especially those in the service sector and part-time jobs, don't include comprehensive health benefits. More uninsured and underinsured workers impose major strains on a health system that relies on employer-based insurance. In addition, the failure of government to help contain health costs for employers has led to a fraying of the implicit social contract in which a good job came with affordable coverage.

Gone are the days when a young person would start in the mail room and stay with the company until retirement. Employee mobility is now the rule rather than the exception. Those who pay for health care -- insurance companies and employers -- increasingly deal with employees who change jobs every few years. This has the effect of not only increasing the numbers of uninsured but also of decreasing the incentive for employers to underwrite access to preventive care.

At the same time, war, poverty, environmental degradation and increased world travel for business and pleasure mean greater migration of people across borders. And with people go diseases. The likes of SARS can travel quickly from Hong Kong to Toronto, and news of a strange flu in Asia worries us in New York. Welcome to the world without borders.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett has described it as ''payback for decades of shunning the desperate health needs of the poor world.'' No matter the blame, the need to act now to address issues of global health is no longer just a moral imperative; it is self-interest.

Lifestyle and Demographic Changes
One hundred years ago, who could have predicted that living longer would be a problem?

In three decades, the number of Medicare beneficiaries will double. By the year 2050, one in five Americans will be 65 or older. We will have to find a way to finance the growing demand not only for health care but also for long-term care, which is now largely left out of Medicare.

Our society's affluence is only half of the story. Widening disparities in wealth and in health care too often cleave along ethnic lines. Today, a Hispanic child with asthma is far less likely than a non-Hispanic white child to get needed medication. African-Americans are systematically less likely to get state-of-the-art cardiac care. As our country becomes more and more diverse, these disparities become more obvious and more intolerable.

Our changing lifestyles also contribute to behavior-induced health problems. We can shop online, order in fast food, drive to our errands. Entertainment -- movies, TV, video games and music -- is one click away. The physical activity required to get through the day has decreased, while the pace and stress of daily life has quickened, affecting mental health. Persistent poverty, risky behaviors like substance abuse and unprotected sex and pollution from cars and power plants all add to the country's health problems. As Judith Stern of the University of California at Davis so aptly put it, genetics may load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger.

Old Problems Persist
If all we had to do was face these tremendous changes, that would be daunting enough. But many of the systemic problems we have struggled with for decades -- like high costs and the uninsured -- are simply getting worse.

In 1993, the critics predicted that if the Clinton administration's universal health care coverage plan became law, costs would go through the roof. ''Hospitals will have to close,'' they said, ''Families will lose their choice of doctors. Bureaucrats will deny medically necessary care.''

They were half-right. All that has happened. They were just wrong about the reason.

In 1993, there were 37 million uninsured Americans. In the late 90's, the situation improved slightly, largely because of the improved economy and the passage of the Children's Health Insurance Program. But now some 43.6 million Americans are uninsured, and the vast majority of them are in working families.

While employer-sponsored insurance remains a major source of coverage for workers, it is becoming less accessible and affordable for spouses, dependents and retirees. In 1993, 46 percent of companies with 500 or more employees offered some type of retiree health benefit. That declined to 29 percent in 2001. When you think about the new economy and worker mobility, it's no wonder employers are dropping retiree health benefits. You can only wonder how many yet-to-retire workers are next.

Even those Americans not among the ranks of the uninsured increasingly find themselves underinsured. In 2003, two-thirds of companies with 200 or more employees dealt with increasing costs by increasing the share that their employees had to pay and dropping coverage for particular services. With rising deductibles and co-pays, even if you have insurance, you may not be able to afford the care you need, and some benefits, like mental health services, may not be covered at all.

The problem of the uninsured and underinsured affects everyone. A recent Institute of Medicine study estimates that 18,000 25- to 64-year-old adults die every year as a result of lack of coverage. But even if you are insured, if you have a heart attack, and the ambulance that picks you up has to go three hospitals away because the nearby emergency rooms are full, you will have suffered from our inadequate system of coverage.

If, as a nation, we were saving money by denying insurance to some people, you could at least say there's some logic to it -- no matter how cruel. But that's not the case. Despite the lack of universal coverage in our country, we still spend much more than countries that provide health care to all their citizens. We are No. 1 in the world in health care spending. On a per capita basis, health spending in the United States is 50 percent higher than the second-highest-spending country: Switzerland. Our health costs now constitute 14.9 percent of our gross domestic product and are growing at an alarming rate: by 2013, per capita health care spending is projected to increase to 18.4 percent of G.D.P.

What drives skyrocketing spending? The cost of prescription drugs rose almost twice as fast as spending on all health services, 40 percent in just the last few years.

Hospital costs have been rising as well, in large measure because more than one in four health care dollars go to administration. In 1999, that meant $300 billion per year went to pay for administrative bureaucracy: accountants and bookkeepers, who collect bills, negotiate with insurance companies and squeeze every possible reimbursement out of public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Asthma and other pulmonary disorders linked to pollution contribute significantly to these costs, according to the health economist Ken Thorpe. Diabetes, high blood pressure and mental illness are also among the conditions that keep these costs rising.

If we spend so much, even after administrative costs, why does the United States rank behind 47 other countries in life expectancy and 42nd in infant mortality?

A lot of the money Americans spend is wasted on care that doesn't improve health. A recent study by Dartmouth researchers argues that close to a third of the $1.6 trillion we now spend on health care goes to care that is duplicative, fails to improve patient health or may even make it worse. A study in Santa Barbara, Calif., found that one out of every five lab tests and X-rays were conducted solely because previous test results were unavailable. A recent study found that for two-thirds of the patients who received a $15,000 surgery to prevent stroke, there was no compelling evidence that the surgery worked.

In situations in which the benefits of intervention are clear, many patients are not receiving that care. For example, few hospitalized patients at risk for bacterial pneumonia get the vaccine against it during their hospital stays. A recent study in The New England Journal of Medicine by Elizabeth McGlynn found that, overall, Americans are getting the care they should only 55 percent of the time.

As a whole, our ailing health care system is plagued with underuse, overuse and misuse. In a fundamental way, we pay far more for less than citizens in other advanced economies get.

How We Deliver Care
There is no ''one size fits all'' solution to our health care problems, but there are common-sense solutions that call for aggressive, creative and effective strategies as bold in their approach as they are practical in their effect.

First, the way we deliver health care must change. For too long our model of health care delivery has been based on the provider, the payer, anyone but the patient. Think about the fact that our medical records are still owned by a physician or a hospital, in bits and pieces, with no reasonable way to connect the dots of our conditions and our care over the years.

If we as individuals are responsible for keeping our own passports, 401(k) and tax files, educational histories and virtually every other document of our lives, then surely we can be responsible for keeping, or at least sharing custody of, our medical records. Studies have shown that when patients have a greater stake in their own care, they make better choices.

We should adopt the model of a ''personal health record'' controlled by the patient, who could use it not only to access the latest reliable health information on the Internet but also to record weight and blood sugar and to receive daily reminders to take asthma or cholesterol medication. Moreover, our current system revolves around ''cases'' rather than patients. Reimbursements are based on ''episodes of treatment'' rather than on a broader consideration of a patient's well-being. Thus it rewards the treatment of discrete diseases and injuries rather than keeping the patient alive and healthy. While we assure adequate privacy protections, we need care to focus on the patient.

Our system rewards clinicians for providing more services but not for keeping patients healthier. The structure of the health care system should shift toward rewarding doctors and health plans that treat patients with their long-term health needs in mind and rewarding patients who make sensible decisions about maintaining their own health.

Harnessing Modernization
As paradoxical as it is that advances in medical technology could potentially break our antiquated system, advances in other technologies may hold the answer to saving it. Using a 20th-century health care system to deal with 21st-century problems is nowhere more true than in the failure to use information technology.

Ten years ago, the Internet was used primarily by academics and the military. Now it is possible to imagine all of a person's health files stored securely on a computer file -- test results, lab records, X-rays -- accessible from any doctor's office. It is easy to imagine, yet our medical system is not there.

The average emergency-room doctor or nurse has minutes to gather information on a patient, from past records and from interviewing the patient or relatives. In the age of P.D.A.'s, why are these professionals forced to rely on a patient's memory?

Information technology can also be used to disseminate research. A government study recently documented that it takes 17 years from the time of a new medical discovery to the time clinicians actually incorporate that discovery into their practice at the bedside. Why not 17 seconds?

Why rely solely on the doctor's brain to store that information? Computers could crunch the variables on a particular patient's medical history, constantly update the algorithms with the latest scientific evidence and put that information at the clinician's fingertips at the point of care.

Americans may not be getting the care they should 45 percent of the time, but the tools exist to narrow that gap. Research shows that when physicians receive computerized reminders, statistics improve exponentially. Reminders can take the form of an alert in the electronic health record that the hospitalized patient has not had a pneumonia vaccine or as computerized questions to remind a doctor of the conditions that must be fulfilled before surgery is considered appropriate.

Newt Gingrich and I have disagreed on many issues, including health care, but I agree with some of the proposals he outlines in his book ''Saving Lives and Saving Money,'' which support taking advantage of technological changes to create a more modern and efficient health care system. I have introduced legislation that promotes the use of information technology to update our health care system and organize it around the best interests of patients. Improvements in technology will end the paper chase, limit errors and reduce the number of malpractice suits.

I strongly believe that savings from information technology should not just be diffused throughout the system, never to be recaptured, but should be used to make substantial progress toward real universal coverage. By better using technology, we can lower health care costs throughout the system and thereby lower the exorbitant premiums that are placing a financial squeeze on businesses, individuals and the government. At the same time, some of those savings should be used to make substantial progress toward real universal coverage. (I may have just lost Newt Gingrich.)

Taking the Broader View: Public Health And Prevention
While we focus on empowering the individual through technology, we also have to recognize the larger factors that affect our health -- from the environment to public health.

If asthma and other pulmonary disorders are the main drivers of increased health spending, that argues strongly that we should rethink how social and environmental factors impact our collective health. Consider that over the last century we have extended life expectancy by 30 years but that only 8 of those years can be credited to medical intervention. The rest of our gains stem from the construction of water and sewer systems, draining mosquito-infested swamps and addressing spoilage, quality and nutrition in our food supply. Yet we continue to underinvest in these important systematic measures -- resulting in expensive health consequences like the explosion of asthma among children living in New York City or the harmful levels of lead found among children drinking water from the District of Columbia water system.

Our neglect of public health also contributes to spiraling health costs. We tend to address health care -- as a nation and as individuals -- after the sickness has taken hold, rather than addressing the cause through public health. Public health programs can help stop preventable disease and control dangerous behaviors. Take obesity, for example. Individuals should understand that they put their lives at risk with unhealthy behavior. But let's face it -- we live in a fast-food nation, and we need to take steps, like restoring physical-education programs in schools, that support the individual's ability to master his or her own health. Studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have identified ''Programs That Work,'' which should be financed. It comes down to individual responsibility reinforced by national policy.

The public health system also needs to be brought up to date. The current public health tools were developed when the major threats to health were infectious diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. But now chronic diseases are the No. 1 killer in our country. We need to be concerned not just about pathogens but also about carcinogens.

Over the last three years, I have introduced legislation to increase investment in tracking and correlating environmental and health conditions. I have met with people from Long Island to Fallon, Nev., who want answers about cancer clusters in their communities. The data we have seen about lead and mercury contamination in our food and water suggest that the effects they have on the fetus and children may have contributed to the increasing number of children in special education with attention and learning disorders. We need more research to determine once and for all if increasing pollution in our communities and increasing rates of learning-related disabilities are cause and effect.

We should also be looking at sprawl -- talking about the way we design our neighborhoods and schools and about our shrinking supply of safe, usable outdoor space -- and how that contributes to asthma, stress and obesity. We should follow the example of the European Union and start testing the chemicals we use every day and not wait until we have a rash of birth defects or cancers on our hands before taking action. And we should look at factors in our society that lead to youth violence, substance abuse, depression and suicide and ultimately require insurance and treatment for mental health.

After Sept. 11, mental health was a significant factor in the health toll on our nation's first responders. And yet our mental health delivery system is underfinanced and unprepared.

Finally, as a society, we need greater emphasis on preventive care, an investment in people and their health that saves us money, because when families can't get preventive care, they often end up in the emergency room -- getting the most expensive care possible.

Expanding Coverage
All that we have learned in the last decade confirms that our goal should continue to be what every other industrialized nation has achieved -- health care that's always there for every citizen.

For the first time, this year a nonpartisan group dedicated to improving the nation's health, the Institute of Medicine, recommended that by 2010 everyone in the United States should have health insurance. Such a system would promote better overall health for individuals, families, communities and our nation by providing financial access for everyone to necessary, appropriate and effective health services.

It will, as I have been known to say, take the whole village to finance an affordable and accountable health system. Employers and individuals would share in its financing, and individuals would have to assume more responsibility for improving their own health and lifestyles. Private insurers and public programs would work together, playing complementary roles in ensuring that all Americans have the health care they need. Our society is already spending $35 billion a year to treat people who have no health insurance, and our economy loses $65 billion to $130 billion in productivity and other costs. We are already spending what it would cost if we reallocated those resources and required responsibility.

In the post 9/11 world, there is one more reason for universal coverage. The anthrax and ricin episodes, and the continuing threat posed by biological, chemical and radiological weapons, should make us painfully aware of the shortcomings of our fragmented system of health care. Can you imagine the aftermath of a bioterrorism attack, with thousands of people flooding emergency rooms and bureaucrats demanding proof of insurance coverage from each and every one? Those without coverage might not see a doctor until after they had infected others.

Insurance should be about sharing risk and responsibility -- pooling resources and risk to protect ourselves from the devastating cost of illness or injury. It should not be about further dividing us. Competition should reward health plans for quality and cost savings, not for how many bad risks they can exclude -- especially as we enter the genomic age, when all of us could have uninsurable risks written into our genes.

So achieving comprehensive health care reform is no simple feat, as I learned a decade ago. None of these ideas mean anything if the political will to ensure that they happen doesn't exist.

Some people believe that the only solution to our present cost explosion is to shift the cost and risk onto individuals in what is called ''consumer driven'' health care. Each consumer would have an individual health care account and would monitor his or her own spending. But instead of putting consumers in the driver's seat, it actually leaves consumers at the mercy of a broken market. This system shifts the costs, the risks and the burdens of disease onto the individuals who have the misfortune of being sick. Think about the times you have been sick or injured -- were you able under those circumstances to negotiate for the best price or shop for the best care? And instead of giving individuals, providers and payers incentives for better care, this cost-shifting approach actually causes individuals to delay or skip needed services, resulting in worse health and more expensive health needs later on.

Meanwhile, proposals like those for individual health insurance tax credits, without reforms for the individual insurance market, leave individuals in the lurch as well. We know that asthmatics can have their entire respiratory systems excluded from coverage. Individual insurance companies can increase your premium or limit coverage for factors like age, previous medical history or even flat feet. Those in the individual market cannot pool their risk with colleagues or other members of the group. The coverage you can get and the price you pay for it will reflect individual risk, and you simply don't receive many of the benefits of what we consider traditional insurance when people pool risks. So the proposal to give individuals tax credits to buy coverage in the individual market, without any rules of fair play, won't provide much help for Americans who need health care. In the same way, the recent Medicare bill, which seeks to privatize Medicare benefits, long a government guarantee, threatens to leave the ''bad risks'' without any affordable coverage. With the new genetic information at our disposal, that could mean any one of us could one day be denied health insurance.

When many of those who opposed the Health Security Act look back, they are still proud of their achievement in blocking our reform plan. The focus of that proposal was to cover everybody by enabling the healthier to pool the ''risk'' with others. The plan was to redirect what we currently pay for uninsured care into expanding health coverage.

We could make cosmetic changes to the system we currently have, but that would simply take what is already a Rube Goldberg contraption and make it larger and even more unwieldy. We could go the route many have advocated, putting the burden almost entirely on individuals, thereby creating a veritable nationwide health care casino in which you win or lose should illness strike you or someone in your family. Or we could decide to develop a new social contract for a new century premised on joint responsibility to prevent disease and provide those who need care access to it. This would not let us as individuals off the hook. In fact, joint responsibility demands accountability from patients, employers, payers and society as a whole.

What will we say about ourselves 10 years from today? If we finally act to reform what we know needs to change, we may take credit in building a health care system that covers everyone and improves the quality of all our lives. But if we continue to dither and disagree, divided by ideology and frozen into inaction by competing special interests, then we will share in the blame for the collapse of health care in America, where rising costs break the back of our economy and leave too many people without the medical attention they need.

The nexus of globalization, the revolution in medical technology and the seismic pressures imposed by the contradictions in our current health care system will force radical changes whether we choose them or not. We can do nothing, we can take incremental steps -- or we can implement wide-ranging reform.

To me, the case for action is clear. And as we work to develop long-term solutions, we can take steps now to help address the immediate problems we face. As Senator John Kerry has proposed, we should cover everyone living in poverty, and all children; allow people to buy into the federal employee health benefits program; and also help employers by reinsuring high-cost claims while assuming more of the costs from hard-pressed state and local governments.

We can pass real privacy legislation that will ensure that Americans continue to feel secure in the trust they place in others for their most intimate medical information. And we can realize the promise of savings through information technology and disease management by passing quality health legislation now.

If we do not fix the problems of the present, we are doomed to live with the consequences in the future. As someone who tried to promote comprehensive health care reform a decade ago and decided to push for incremental changes in the years since, I still believe America needs sensible, wide-ranging reform that leads to quality health care coverage available to all Americans at an affordable cost.

The present system is unsustainable. The only question is whether we will master the change or it will master us.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a Democratic senator from New York.

Kroger, UFCW 700 Reach Accord

Tentative deal would increase wages while preserving insurance benefits.

By Chris O'Malley chris.omalley@indystar.com
April 15, 2004

The union representing 4,000 Kroger workers in the Indianapolis area said Wednesday it has reached a tentative contract agreement with the company that preserves health and pension benefits and boosts wages.

If approved Friday by members of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 700, the pact would spare the area from strikes that disrupted grocery operations in California, Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia over the past several months.

The proposal would end more than five months of labor negotiations in the Indianapolis area, where more than 63 percent of residents shop at Kroger. Union leaders recommend that the agreement be ratified.
Hoosier workers had authorized a strike after rejecting Kroger's initial contract offer last fall by a 3-to-1 margin. But a federal mediator in November persuaded both sides to indefinitely extend the expired contract.

"Everything in the negotiations revolved around the rising costs of health insurance," said Rian Wathen, director of collective bargaining for Local 700 in Indianapolis.

Lisa Holsclaw, president of Kroger's Central Indiana marketing region, issued a statement saying the contract would reward employees "for their contributions and hard work through an exceptional wage and benefits package."

Meanwhile, Kroger will be positioned to "compete against tough, lower-cost competition," Holsclaw said.

Cincinnati-based Kroger has said it needed concessions to fight strong competition from nonunion grocers -- chiefly Wal-Mart.

The proposed contract would cover clerks and meat cutters at 58 stores in the Indianapolis area, which includes Brownsburg, Franklin, Greenwood, Lebanon, Martinsville, Plainfield and Shelbyville.

Local 700 members in Richmond and New Castle also will vote on a proposal to merge their contract into the broader Indianapolis pact.

The union will have a series of meetings to inform workers about the four-year contract proposal before they vote Friday.

About two dozen workers were on hand Wednesday night just before the initial informational meeting at United Auto Workers Local 933, 2320 S. Tibbs Ave.

Avon Kroger worker Jeff White, who said he wanted to hear how the agreement would protect his retirement, took the small crowd at the union hall to be a good sign. In November, when workers voted to authorize a strike, "this lot would be packed."

Kroger meat cutter Eric Gillingham came to the meeting to hear about insurance benefits. "I'm looking long-term. I want to start a family pretty soon."

Under the tentative contract, Kroger workers would continue not to pay health premiums, although those in a premium health insurance plan would make "slight" co-pays, the union said.

Kroger spokesman Jeff Golc said the company would not discuss any contract details before the union vote. The union provided a few specifics, saying the contract would require:

• Kroger to contribute additional money to the health insurance plan. "We believe that's going to ensure the long-term stability of the fund," Wathen said.

• An immediate wage increase of 25 cents to 40 cents an hour. Over the term of the contract, that could amount to increases ranging from $1.25 an hour to $4.95 an hour.

• Improvements in health benefits for workers hired after November 1998, such as higher short-term disability pay and added prescription drug benefits.

Wathen predicted members would approve the contract after getting details on the terms.

In December, 3,300 striking workers in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia approved a similar contract.

In California, 70,000 striking clerks represented by the UFCW agreed to a new contract in February. Those workers had been on strike against Albertson's, Safeway-owned Von's and Kroger subsidiary Ralph's.

Health costs key as talks begin with local grocers

The Puget Sound region's four largest supermarket chains and union officials begin talks today for a new labor contract, the first of five bargaining sessions scheduled in the next two weeks.

The grocers hope to avoid a repeat of the recent Southern California strike, which lasted 18 weeks, but union officials have vowed to do whatever they can to protect workers' health-care benefits. Grocers now pay the full cost for workers' coverage.

"They (health benefits) are the main topic of conversation," said Sharon McCann, president of United Food and Commercial Workers local 1105 in Seattle, one of five locals representing some 25,000 grocery workers in Western Washington.

The California dispute lasted from mid-October to late February, costing the chains hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, and stretching many picketing workers beyond their financial limits.
Albertsons, Safeway and Kroger-owned chains QFC and Fred Meyer say they're optimistic that such acrimony can be avoided here. The companies have reached deals in recent weeks with workers in other parts of the country. The current contract expires May 2.

Other grocers will negotiate separately with their unions. For example, contracts for workers at Haggen and Top Food and Drug stores also expire May 2, but no talks have been scheduled. Both sides are waiting for cues from the larger chains' talks.

Workers' health-care costs have shot up more than 73 percent since the last contract was negotiated in 2001, grocers' figures show. The companies are expected to ask workers to begin sharing some of those expenses.

After today's initial session, talks are scheduled to resume Monday with specific contract proposals and will continue intermittently through April 30.

By the end of the month, negotiations could take one of several directions:

• The current contract could be extended while the talks continue (Kroger's Houston-area workers took this route earlier this month);

• A new contract could be ratified (Safeway workers in the Washington, D.C., area approved a new deal last month);

• A proposed contract could be rejected, setting the stage for a strike or lockout like the one in California; or

• Negotiations could continue without an extension.

In a letter sent last week to Western Washington business and political leaders, executives from the four chains said they had settled similar contracts with the UFCW in the past two years in Oregon and Eastern Washington.

"We recognize that it will take hard work at the negotiating table, but we remain optimistic that an agreement can be reached without a work stoppage," the companies wrote.

But UFCW officials have warned that they won't accept a carbon copy of the California settlement. That deal set up a two-tier system in which new employees receive considerably lower wages and health benefits than veterans.

Soon after the California deal was announced, local unions said it went too far and that unions here "are prepared to do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to protect affordable health care."

Wal-Mart Loses a Battle, But Why Was It Allowed to Fight?

Pacific News Service, Commentary,
Jeff Milchen, Apr 08, 2004

Editor's Note: Getting to the bottom of a rare citizen victory over the world's largest corporation.

Wal-Mart Inc. executives aren't used to losing, but the world's largest corporation took a beating from citizens in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. The company's ballot initiative, which would have negated Inglewood City Council's rejection of Wal-Mart's proposed "Supercenter," was crushed by voters last Tuesday despite Wal-Mart spending a mind-boggling $220 for each "yes" vote it received in the working-class city. Unknown additional funds were spent on a barrage of image ads in the region featuring black and Latino actors, reflecting Inglewood's population.

Regardless of one's opinion of Wal-Mart, all of us who value democracy should be pleased that citizens rejected the company's blatant attempt to simply buy its way out of an unfavorable decision by local officials. The Inglewood result was the exception to the rule, however. So we might question why we allow any corporation to employ ballot initiatives -- theoretically democracy in its purest form -- as weapons to overturn decisions of our democratically elected representatives.

Corporations were forbidden from spending any money to influence government or elections in the early days of our nation, for good reason. When American colonists declared independence from England in 1776, they also freed themselves from control by English corporations that extracted their wealth and dominated trade. After fighting a revolution to end this exploitation, our country's founders retained a healthy fear of corporate power and wisely limited corporations exclusively to a business role while setting up barriers to prevent them from corrupting politics. In most states, corporations could not make any political or charitable contributions nor spend money to influence law-making.

In the 1800s, corporations gradually dismantled those barriers, and by the end of the century were arguing to the U.S. Supreme Court that they were legally persons entitled to constitutional rights. In 1886, a Supreme Court bench heavy on railroad industry lawyers ignored the fact that corporations never are mentioned in our Constitution and granted them "corporate personhood." Soon, corporations had perverted the Bill of Rights itself to gain its protections --- even before women and minorities had full personhood rights -- and have since used this power to deny political rights to real human beings.

Yet, as recently as the 1970s, corporations faced meaningful limits to their political power -- limits that a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell wanted to remove. Powell wrote a memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that big business should seek greater power "aggressively and with determination, without embarrassment." Powell specified, "The judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change."

A month later Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court, where he went on to write the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that created a First Amendment "right" for corporations to influence ballot initiatives and other political campaigns. The Bellotti decision is one major reason why corporations now dominate national politics and why companies like Wal-Mart frequently impose the will of corporate executives on communities around the country.

Until recently, Wal-Mart stuck to exerting its political power at the local and state levels, but this year the world's largest corporation is predicted to become the nation's largest corporate investor in candidates for federal offices as well. With the additional power to pressure any number of its one million non-unionized employees to "voluntarily" support campaigns, Wal-Mart's power soon could rival even the clout of railroad corporations in the "robber baron" era of the late 1800s.

While Wal-Mart has used ballot initiatives elsewhere to trump decisions by local governments (including one in California last month), the Inglewood initiative went far beyond any previous attempt. The corporation literally attempted to exempt itself from all local zoning, planning and environmental regulations. The power grab was too extreme to pass this time, but as corporations continue to mold the culture and law to fit corporate agendas rather than citizens' interests, what was an outrage one year becomes the law soon after.

Citizens still win a few skirmishes, but the larger struggle -- one to determine whether citizens or corporations will control the future of our communities and country -- will depend on changing the rules of engagement. The reasons that drove our country's founders to keep business creations subordinate to democracy are even more compelling today. Until we return corporations to exclusively business activities and revoke their ill-gotten political "rights," democracy will be an unfulfilled, fading ideal.

PNS contributor Jeff Milchen directs ReclaimDemocracy.org, a grassroots organization devoted to restoring citizen authority over corporations.

Wal-Mart Likened to Businesses of 100 Years Ago

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (April 13, 2004) - Speakers at an academic conference here yesterday on Wal-Mart Stores, Bentonville, Ark., said the company has a ruthless approach to business that requires it to keep employees’ compensation low. Simon Head of the Century Foundation, a New York research organization, likened Wal-Mart’s approach to the business paradigm at the beginning of the 20th century, given its obsession with speeding up work processes and using authoritarian management techniques and its extreme anti-union position. “It’s capitalism that resembles the capitalism of 100 years ago,” Head said. One solution, he proposed, would be for the government to utilize the National Labor Relations Act to protect union organizers “so Wal-Mart can’t compete by conducting a war at the bottom [of the American wage scale].” The conference was sponsored by the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University’s Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy.

Yet Another Challenge to Wal-Mart

Published on Monday, April 12, 2004 by the San Diego Union-Tribune by James Goldsborough

Wal-Mart, the muscle-bound superstore that likes to bully its way into places it's not wanted, took a big hit last week. Its high-profile attempt to bribe its way into Inglewood, a working class, minority city in suburban Los Angeles, failed badly.

As democratic politics go, Wal-Mart's Inglewood bid was about as sleazy as it gets. Rejected by the City Council, Wal-Mart spent $1 million for a referendum that would have allowed it to build a "supercenter" – a combination retail and grocery outlet covering 17 football fields – by skirting normal hearing, planning and environmental procedures.

The company spent $100 per Inglewood voter in a blitz to persuade citizens to defy city government. As in other California cities where it has won admission through litigation or referendum, Wal-Mart expected an easy win in Inglewood.

Wal-Mart, the muscle-bound superstore that likes to bully its way into places it's not wanted, took a big hit last week. Its high-profile attempt to bribe its way into Inglewood, a working class, minority city in suburban Los Angeles, failed badly.

As democratic politics go, Wal-Mart's Inglewood bid was about as sleazy as it gets. Rejected by the City Council, Wal-Mart spent $1 million for a referendum that would have allowed it to build a "supercenter" – a combination retail and grocery outlet covering 17 football fields – by skirting normal hearing, planning and environmental procedures.

The company spent $100 per Inglewood voter in a blitz to persuade citizens to defy city government. As in other California cities where it has won admission through litigation or referendum, Wal-Mart expected an easy win in Inglewood.

Instead, for a campaign in which it outspent the opposition 10-1, Wal-Mart won less than 40 percent of the vote.

People are catching on to this company, to its tactics, business philosophy and impact on communities. As in Inglewood, most community reaction is directed at Wal-Mart's giant combination retail and grocery supercenters, with their potential to raze neighborhood businesses as thoroughly as a fire-bombing raid.

Since the recent grocery strike, Californians are paying more attention to Wal-Mart. That strike, which since has resulted in the closing of 15 Ralphs stores across Southern California, was the result of Wal-Mart's plans to open 40 supercenters in California (if communities let them in). Only one has been opened so far, in La Quinta. Nationwide, Wal-Mart plans 1,000 supercenters over the next five years.

But what works for Wal-Mart in rural or desert communities, where more space for big-box stores is available and fewer local businesses are affected, has found resistance in urban and suburban California.

With its deep pockets, Wal-Mart often defeats local government, but its methods and philosophy are making enemies. That was the case when San Marcos turned down a Wal-Mart store in a referendum last month, and that's the case in Inglewood, where citizens clearly objected to having local government bamboozled.

In Los Angeles, which surrounds Inglewood, the City Council is drafting an ordinance effectively prohibiting supercenters in the city. San Diego, where Wal-Mart as yet plans no supercenters, is considering a similar ordinance. Oakland already has banned them. In numerous other cities, litigation is under way.

Despite its low prices, something there is that doesn't love a Wal-Mart. The feeling of distaste grows as Wal-Mart's arrogance and strong-arm tactics build community opposition. Inglewood is Wal-Mart's biggest defeat because it was a naked attempt to show that a low-wage, high unemployment community could be bought at the right price; that, for enough coin, citizens would turn their backs on government and planners. Wal-Mart's win was supposed to be a slam-dunk.

If low prices were all that mattered, communities would be rolling out red carpets for this company. But many communities don't like the trade-off of community-centered and home-grown businesses for low prices. Some communities like their downtowns, Main Streets within walking distance, merchants whom they know and who pay employees enough not just to live on, but to live in communities where they work.

Wal-Mart, whose five Walton owners are among the world's richest people, pays low wages and offers minimum health coverage to employees. Its business philosophy is based on enriching its founding family rather than achieving an equitable sharing of profits among founders, shareholders and workers, the goal of most publicly held companies. The store's bullying ways are seen in its numerous lawsuits, with communities, employees, with the federal government over the use of illegal immigrant labor.

Last month, The Wall Street Journal compared Wal-Mart with Costco, another large retailer and grocer. It pointed out that Costco, in contrast to Wal-Mart, "is held up as a retailer that does it right, paying well and offering generous benefits" to employees.

Costco draws criticism from Wall Street for sharing its success with its employees, reported the Journal. "Public companies need to care for shareholders first," said a Wall Street analyst critical of Costco, noting that Costco stock traded at only 20 times earnings compared with Wal-Mart's 24 times. "Costco runs its business like it is a private company," sniffed this critic.

To that, Costco President and CEO Jim Sinegal replied, "I happen to believe that in order to reward the shareholder in the long term, you have to please your customers and workers."

Two different philosophies: One leads to the Waltons, the sheiks of Arkansas, by holding workers' salaries and benefits to bare minimums. The other allows workers to share in the profits of their company. Costco pays its workers about $5 an hour more compared to Wal-Mart and has about twice as many workers covered by company health care.

Oh, yes, and Costco has a store in Inglewood.

Bunning talks tough — with foot in mouth

Bob Hill - Courier-Journal April 8, 2004

I had hoped by now U.S. Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky would be man enough to admit his comments made about his likely Democratic opponent, Dan Mongiardo, were wrong, offensive, bigoted and not in keeping with the (presumed) dignity of the United States Senate.

On the other hand, they were made by Jim Bunning.

Bunning, speaking at the Republicans' annual 4th Congressional District Lincoln/Reagan Day Dinner in Florence on March 20, said Mongiardo "looks like one of Saddam Hussein's sons ... and even dresses like them, too."

Bunning has a reputation as a real tough guy, a sometimes surly Hall of Fame baseball pitcher who would stick a fastball in your left ear if that's what it took to win. Yeah, Bunning is so tough and forthright — a regular John Wayne kind of guy — that he let his media flack, David Young, do his talking for him.

AT FIRST Young denied Bunning had said anything of the kind about Mongiardo, and then he fessed up and tried to waffle at the same time by admitting Bunning had made the comments as a joke.

"We're sorry if this joke, which got a lot of laughs, offended anyway," he said.

Bunning is so tough that his wife had more to say on the subject than he did. She explained that her husband's comments might have been related to the fact that he had just been in Iraq and had flown over the site where Saddam's two sons had been killed.

"It just came out," Mary Bunning said. "He doesn't feel that way about him at all. It was something, I think, that was on his mind."

So let's all hope Bunning never flies over New York, Chicago or Los Angeles — cities of immense diversity that also happen to be part of the United States. Who knows what ethnic groups Bunning could go after? Who knows what he might say about the wife of fellow Sen. Mitch McConnell, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, who came to the United States from Taiwan?

MONGIARDO, for the record, is of Italian heritage. His grandfather landed on Ellis Island in 1902 and worked in Eastern Kentucky coal mines. His father fought in the Korean War. Mongiardo was the first in his family to graduate from college. He went on to medical school, opened a practice in Hazard, started a free health clinic in Eastern Kentucky, and was elected as a state senator in 2000. What's any of that got to do with how someone looks?

This latest mistake only adds to Bunning's record of saying stupid things, ducking the truth, refusing to accept personal responsibility — or knowing much about Louisville.

In 1997 he mistakenly told a Cincinnati radio audience that downtown Louisville was devastated by flooding because the city hadn't closed its floodgates in time. In February he stood before a Greater Louisville Inc. luncheon and announced that Louisville would have to decide which of two proposed Ohio River bridges it really wanted because the second would have to be delayed so his Northern Kentucky constituency could have a new bridge. He repeated it in a television interview — and then denied saying it, as John Wayne guys often do.

U.S. REP. Anne Northup, a longtime supporter of the two proposed Louisville bridges, then gave us the obvious: Bunning was "confused." So tough guy changed his mind, saying, yeah, he actually was a supporter of two Louisville bridges.

The tough guy is facing re-election. So maybe you're Italian, or maybe your grandparents came to this country via Ellis Island. Maybe you don't believe people should be judged by physical appearance, but by accomplishment.

Maybe you believe that it's totally inappropriate for a U.S. senator to be using someone's looks for cheap laughs. Maybe you believe the ideals and promises of this great country — for which our troops of all ethnic backgrounds, religions and cultures are now dying daily — should stand for more than that.

Maybe you should vote that way.

Meatpackers’ union protests firing of

BY DAVID ROSENFELD
DAKOTA CITY, Nebraska—United Food and Commercial Workers Local 222 has condemned Tyson for firing 350 immigrant workers from its giant beef slaughterhouse and processing plant here. The firings took place over the month of March.
Workers interviewed March 27 scoffed at the company’s claim that a routine internal audit had “discovered” that workers lacked proper documentation entitling them to work in the United States. Several pointed to a recent decline in production and the upcoming union contract expiration as real reasons for the mass firing.

“The company hired them with these documents, so why are they challenging them now?” said Marvin Harrington, president of UFCW Local 222, which organizes the 4,000 workers at the plant.

Tyson, based in Arkansas, is the world’s largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork. The Dakota City plant was IBP’s flagship beef slaughterhouse before it was taken over by Tyson in 2001. The majority of workers in the plant are originally from Mexico, Central America, or Asia.

“Our contract expires in a few months. The company is anticipating a strike and wants to weaken us and our union. Tyson is planning to lower our wages,” said a worker with five years in the plant, who asked not to be quoted by name.

“They continue to fire people every week. Many people are afraid. Many have left for their countries because there is nowhere else to get a job and they can’t make their house payments.”

She added, “My husband and I know they’ll probably call us into the office on our papers. But I tell my co-workers not to be afraid. They can’t kill us.”

Both this worker and her husband were hoping that a meeting for those who were fired or might face dismissal would be called to discuss how to respond to the company action.

“It’s an injustice. It’s not fair. The company knows who they are hiring,” said a Mexican-born worker who has worked at the plant for more than 10 years. “I think they are trying to get rid of a lot of people and hire new ones and pay them less. We had been working only 32 hours a week in recent months. Only in the last three or four weeks have we been getting 40 hours.”

Tyson, Excel, Swift, and other large meatpacking companies have all laid off workers in the wake of the discovery of a cow in Washington state with mad cow disease in December. The governments of Japan, Mexico, and other countries banned U.S. beef imports at that time. Beef slaughterhouses have been hit especially hard because, in addition to an overall decline in beef exports, items such as tongues, intestines and livers have been rendered virtually worthless because they are primarily purchased by overseas buyers. Tyson claims to have lost $61 million in three months due to the fallout from mad cow disease.

UFCW Local 222 president Harrington said he has filed several grievances because the company did not tell the union officials or the workers how it determined they did not have proper documentation.

Immigrant rights advocates organized a press conference to question Tyson’s explanation for the mass firings and highlight the human toll of the company’s callousness. Alma Luna, vice-president of the Siouxland Unidad Latina, told the Sioux City Journal, “We believe this action is due to a time when profits were down due to the mad cow scare.”

Tyson brought company spokesman Gary Mickelson to town in order to answer the critics. Cynically referring to the fired workers at “team members,” the Tyson mouthpiece said they misrepresented themselves to the company at the time they were hired. “In other words, they lied to us.”

Tyson reaps gigantic profits from its beef, pork, and poultry operations. Tyson exceeded $24 billion in sales revenues in 2003. The company employs tens of thousands of immigrant workers knowing they can pay them substandard wages. Mickelson claims that the company will eventually replace the fired workers.

After wrecking the livelihood of hundreds of working-class families in the area, Tyson announced in a statement that it would be donating a truckload of food items to a local food bank and making a financial contribution to an agency that works in the Latino community.

Workers throughout the region have been following this development. In Storm Lake, Iowa, 80 miles to the east, a worker at a large nonunion slaughterhouse owned by Tyson told the Militant, “We have heard about what is happening in Dakota City and that is why we want a union here.”

In 1969 workers at the Dakota City plant gained their first contract after a bitter nine-month strike. Workers struck the plant in 1972, 1977, and 1982.

Fletcher's fast one

Courier Journal Editoral April 7, 2004
Gov. Ernie Fletcher is trying to pull a fast one on the people of Kentucky. Before anybody really figures out what's going on, he's trying to flummox Kentucky's House into accepting the flawed tax plan that Senate Republicans, without any of the normal debate or review, grafted onto the state budget at the 11th hour last week.

As their actions suggested, that plan is an embarrassing excuse for the "tax modernization" that the Governor originally promised and that the state desperately needs.

It would, of course, answer several of the business community's prayers and also lighten the overall load on the state's most well-heeled families.

But to do that, its net effect would also be to raise the burden on lower-income and middle-class families as a whole.

The real problem, though, is that so little would be gained in return.

The plan would accomplish little of real importance for the state, either by making the tax system markedly more modern and competitive or by ensuring that revenues keep pace with the costs of the schools, roads and services Kentucky needs.

The inadequacy of the state's outmoded tax system is now on painful display, for all to see and suffer. But instead of seizing this moment to secure Kentucky's future for years to come, the Governor's plan would squander that moment and shortchange that future.

His actions this week give away just how paltry the vision behind this package is. He's traveling the state telling communities that the sky's going to fall on the construction projects they want if the House doesn't agree to his plan right now.

This claim is logically ludicrous, of course. For one thing, it's coming out of the same mouth that insists his plan won't produce any more revenue in the short term, for those projects or anything else.

For another, the Governor intends to make sure that the long term won't be much better by proposing a "trigger" that would cut income tax rates even more in the future.

The fact is that the real, abiding interests of Kentucky communities won't be well-served by quick passage of this plan.

The progress their schools have started to make is in jeopardy because of inadequate funding.

The availability and quality of their children's postsecondary education are in jeopardy because of inadequate funding.

The ability of their poor, elderly and disabled to get the health and nursing home care they need is in jeopardy because of inadequate funding.

The repair of their existing roads and the prospects for new ones are in jeopardy because of inadequate funding.

Kentuckians must not accept a tax reform plan that fails to address those fundamental realities — that simply shifts the burdens around while condemning the state's public institutions and infrastructure to remain uncompetitive with those of other states.

Kentucky needs a full and vigorous debate over how to achieve that competitiveness, not the short-sighted package and short-circuited process the Governor is pushing.

Voters in California Reject Wal-Mart

NGLEWOOD, Calif. (AP) -- Voters in this Los Angeles suburb rejected a ballot measure Tuesday that would have allowed Wal-Mart to build a warehouse-sized store while skirting zoning, traffic and environmental reviews.

With all 29 precincts reporting and absentee ballots counted, Inglewood voters opposed the initiative, with 60.6 percent voting 'no' and 39.3 percent voting 'yes,' said Gabby Contreras of the city clerk's office.

That amounts to 7,049 votes against the initiative and 4,575 in favor. Contreras said there are about 40,000 registered voters in the city.

"This is very, very positive for those folks who want to stand up and ... hold this corporate giant responsible," said Daniel Tabor, a former City Council member who had campaigned against the initiative.
Inglewood's City Council last year blocked the proposed shopping center, which would include both a Wal-Mart Supercenter and other stores, prompting the company to collect more than 10,000 signatures to force the vote in the working-class community.

But Tuesday's vote is not likely to settle the debate, which has pitted religious leaders, community activists and unions against the world's largest retailer. Opponents have vowed to take legal action if the measure passes.

Wal-Mart has argued in Inglewood and elsewhere in California that its stores create jobs and said residents should be able to decide for themselves if they want the stores in their community.

But opponents say the Supercenters amount to low-wage, low-benefit job mills that displace better-paying jobs as independent retailers are driven out of business. They also fear the stores will contribute to suburban sprawl and jammed roadways.

Alversia Carmouche, a beauty shop owner who voted against the measure Tuesday, said she was convinced the behemoth discount store would ultimately hurt the community.

"Maybe the store would possibly be a good thing in the beginning, but it will drive out the smaller businesses," said Carmouche, 66. "I really feel it will absolutely close this town out."

Others argued the city southwest of Los Angeles is in need of the kind of jobs Wal-Mart has to offer.

"It's going to bring jobs in the community for young people," said Magda Monroe, 65, who voted for the measure. "I see nothing wrong with that, even if it's minimum wage (jobs), it's better than nothing."

Objections to the Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart have surfaced elsewhere around the country, including Chicago, where the City Council recently stalled a measure to approve the first Wal-Mart inside city limits because of concerns about the company's labor practices.

The company succeeded in lobbying residents of Contra Costa County in suburban San Francisco. Residents there voted last month to allow a Supercenter. But Wal-Mart also lost a vote that day to allow it to open another store near San Diego.

But organizing a ballot initiative in Inglewood was a rare move by Wal-Mart, said Ken Walker, regional director at Kurt Salmon Associates, a retail consulting company.

Previously, Wal-Mart has battled zoning boards, but Walker said this is the first time he's seen the discounter taking the issue to a public referendum.

Wal-Mart officials have said they have not decided what they would do if the initiative failed. The company spent more than $1 million on its Inglewood campaign, according to campaign-finance records, while opponents have spent a fraction of that amount.

Tax Cuts For Wealthy - Stick It To Workers

WHO WILL be the winners and who will be the losers if legislators negotiating behind closed doors on the state budget keep Gov. Fletcher's tax plan largely intact?

It's clear that the wealthy and corporations will benefit. Everyone else loses. And the state will be limited in its ability to move forward, build on the progress we've made in health care and education, and promise a bright future for our children and grandchildren.
All Kentuckians need to understand what is at stake.

Fletcher based his tax plan and the promise of future benefits on a faulty premise — that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will lead to economic growth. It simply doesn't work that way. In a new study, economist Robert Lynch finds that smart investments in public services are much more effective than mindless tax cuts as a way to create jobs.

"The real lesson here for legislators and local policy makers is that what makes a community a good place to do business looks a lot like what makes a community a good place to live," says Lynch. "That means good schools, good police and fire protection, a modern and well-maintained transportation infrastructure and good all-around public services. Instead of creating jobs, tax cutting strategies that undermine government's ability to provide quality services can end up destroying jobs."

There is no question that our tax system is broken and in need of a complete overhaul. But the proposal offered by the Governor and passed by Senate Republicans fails to fix those problems. In fact, it ignores the most pressing problem we have — the desperate need for additional revenue now. It increases the unfairness of Kentucky's tax system. And it will endanger Kentucky's ability to pay for important services and investments in the future with a clever "trigger" designed to shrink the size of government services.

So let's stop calling it tax modernization. There is nothing modern about shifting taxes to the poor and giving our public treasure to corporations and the wealthy. This plan fails the basic tests of good tax reform on at least three counts:

The Governor's plan makes our system less fair. Already, Kentucky families at the poverty line face the highest income tax bill of any state. The poorest 20 percent of Kentuckians pay 13 percent of their income in state and local taxes while the wealthiest 20 percent pay only a 10 percent share. But according to analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, on average only the wealthiest 20 percent will see their taxes decline under the Governor's proposal. While those making less than $12,600 will pay $27 more on average, the wealthiest 1 percent (those with incomes of at least $246,700) will get an average state tax cut of $1,397. The Governor's plan is being sold to legislators and to the public as a way to help low-income folks. The facts don't support this claim.

The Governor's plan fails to raise adequate revenue to meet Kentucky's urgent needs. Our state is in a serious budget crisis that no amount of clever accounting can hide. Our schools are cutting staff and slashing programs. Cuts in Medicaid and social programs are leaving many Kentuckians without essential services. Colleges are raising tuition every year, putting the dream of education beyond reach for more and more people. The Governor's plan does not address Kentucky's needs. In this time of financial crisis, a "revenue neutral" tax plan is not neutral at all.

The Governor's plan fails to build a tax system that will grow with Kentucky's economy. In the final version of his plan, Fletcher backed off expanding the sales tax to services, an essential part of any "modernization." The biggest single source of revenue is a cigarette tax increase, which while needed for public health reasons is not a long-term revenue solution. Even more troubling is the powerful "trigger mechanism" buried in the fine print. This formula will mandate further tax cuts in the future and erode Kentucky's income tax base.
The bottom line is clear: the Governor's plan is not a good choice for Kentucky.

We urge the leaders and members of the General Assembly to act wisely and do tax reform right. We are a state with large needs and big dreams. We should not accept Fletcher's plan to shrink public investments, reduce public services, and shift taxes away from corporations and the wealthy. There are better options.

Courageous leaders are called upon to stop this plan in its tracks and chart a better course for Kentucky.

Kim Wolf of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, Jason Bailey of the Democracy Resource Center and Debra Miller of Kentucky Youth Advocates are partners in an alliance advocating for economic justice in Kentucky. Special to The Courier-Journal

Shaving time off payrolls widespread practice

Falsifying workers' hours held to be common management trick to pare down expenses

By Steven Greenhouse, New York Times

As a former member of the Air Force military police, as a play-by-the-rules guy, Drew Pooters said he was stunned by what he found his manager doing in the Toys "R" Us store in Albuquerque, N.M.

Inside a cramped office, he said, his manager was sitting at a computer and altering workers' time records -- secretly deleting hours to cut their paychecks and fatten his store's bottom line.

"I told him, 'That's not exactly legal,'" said Pooters, who ran the store's electronics department. "Then he out and out threatened me not to talk about what I saw."

Pooters quit, landing a job in 2002 managing a Family Dollar store, one of 5,100 in that discount chain. Top managers there ordered him not to let employees' total hours exceed a certain amount each week, and one day, he said, his district manager told him to use a trick to cut payroll: delete some employee hours electronically.

"I told her, 'I'm not going to get involved in this,'" Pooters recalled, saying that when he refused, the district manager erased the hours herself.

Experts on compensation say that the illegal doctoring of hourly employees' time records is far more prevalent than most Americans believe. The practice, commonly called shaving time, is easily done and hard to detect -- a simple matter of computer keystrokes -- and has spurred a growing number of lawsuits and settlements against a wide range of businesses.

Workers have sued Family Dollar and Pep Boys, the auto parts and repair chain, accusing managers of de-leting hours. A jury found that Taco Bell managers in Oregon had routinely erased workers' time. More than a dozen former Wal-Mart employees said in interviews and depositions that managers had altered time records to shortchange employees. The Department of Labor recently reached two back-pay settlements with Kinko's, totaling $56,600, after finding that managers in Ithaca, N.Y., and Hyannis, Mass., had erased time for 13 employees.

"There are a lot of incentives for store managers to cut costs in illegal ways," said David Lewin, a professor of management who teaches a course on compensation at the University of California, Los Angeles. "You hope that would be contrary to company practices, but sometimes these practices become so ingrained that they become the dominant practice."

Officials at Toys "R" Us, Family Dollar, Pep Boys, Wal-Mart and Taco Bell say they prohibit manipulation of time records, but many acknowledge that it sometimes happens.

"Our policy is to pay hourly associates for every minute they work," said Mona Williams, vice president for communications at Wal-Mart. "With a company this large, there will inevitably be instances of managers doing the wrong thing. Our policy is if a manager deliberately deletes time, they're dismissed."

Compensation experts say that many managers, whether at discount stores or fast-food restaurants, fear losing their jobs if they fail to keep costs down.

"A lot of this is that district managers might fire you as soon as look at you," said William Rutzick, a lawyer who reached a $1.5 million settlement with Taco Bell last year after a jury found the chain's managers guilty of erasing time and requiring off-the-clock work. "The store managers have a toehold in the lower middle class. They're being paid $20,000, $30,000. They're in management. They get medical. They have no job security at all, and they want to keep their toehold in the lower middle class, and they'll often do whatever is necessary to do it."

Another reason managers shave time, experts say, is that an increasing part of their compensation comes in bonuses based on minimizing costs or maximizing profits.

"The pressures are just unbelievable to control costs and improve productivity," said George Milkovich, a longtime Cornell University professor of industrial relations and co-author of the leading textbook on compensation.

Beth Terrell, a Seattle lawyer who has sued Wal-Mart, accusing its managers of doctoring time records, said: "Many of these employees are making $8 an hour. These employees can scarcely afford to have time deleted. They're barely paying their bills already."

In the punch-card era, managers would have had to conspire with payroll clerks or accountants to manipulate records. But now it is far easier for individual managers to accomplish this secretly with computers, payroll experts say.

Pooters, a father of five who left the Air Force in 1997 for a career in retailing, talks with disgust about photocopied Toys "R" Us records that he said showed how his manager made it appear that he had clocked out much earlier than he had.

"Unless you keep track of your time and keep records of when you punch in and punch out, there's no way to stop this," he said.

After leaving Toys "R" Us and Family Dollar, Pooters moved to Indiana and took a job as an account manager with Rentway. There, he and a co-worker, William Coombs, said, the workload was so intense that they typically missed four lunch breaks a week. Nonetheless, they said, their manager inserted a half-hour for lunch into their time records every day, reducing their pay accordingly.

"They told us to sign the payroll printouts to confirm it was right," Pooters said, describing a confrontation last November. "When we protested about what happened with our lunch hours, the manager said, 'If you don't sign, you're not going to get paid.'"

Coombs said: "They removed our lunch hours all the time. We were told if we didn't sign the payroll sheets, we'd be terminated."

Larry Gorski, Rentway's vice president for human resources, said his company strictly prohibited erasing time. "As soon as we hear this is going on, we jump all over