Expert says both sides know pain of grocery strike

http://www.pe.com/business/local/stories/PE_Biz_D_grocery23.830094.html

Expert says both sides know pain of grocery strike

10:00 PM PDT on Friday, June 22, 2007

By LOU HIRSH
The Press Enterprise

As grocery workers head for a vote Sunday and Monday on whether to authorize a strike against Albertsons, Ralphs and Vons, some labor and economic experts say neither side can afford a repeat of the 141-day labor dispute of 2003-04.

"Both sides have the ability to crunch the same numbers," said Richard Paul, a San Diego lawyer who teaches employment law at the University of San Diego.

"Both sides know that another long labor dispute would be a lose-lose situation," Paul said Friday. "It's just a question right now of who's going to blink first."


AP photo
Grocery workers march in 2003. One unanswered question is how the second-tier wage earners will react to any proposal.

According to figures from Merrill Lynch and the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., the 2003-04 strike and lockout cost grocers around $2 billion in lost sales. Workers lost an estimated $800 million in wages.

It also led thousands of shoppers to go elsewhere, and many of those have yet to return to Southern California's three biggest chains.

A key factor likely to limit the duration of a labor showdown is today's competitive grocery climate. Wal-Mart is still adding grocery-selling Supercenter stores throughout Southern California; U.K.-based Tesco plans 15 to 20 Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market stores in the Inland region; and Target will open a store that sells groceries next month in Moreno Valley.

FULL story at link.

I'd expect the ratio of executives and managers is probably in excess of 20:1 in even the smallest company. If the owners and managers can take that much of a hit, it exposes their rape of the workers that feed their families. If this shit keeps up, a bloody revolution might not be far off.