Huizar Urges Vons to Negotiate New Labor Contract

presented a letter to the manager of the Vons supermarket on Figueroa Street in Eagle Rock Saturday afternoon, expressing his concern over contract negotiations with grocery workers who could begin an indefinite strike on Sunday night.

“I remember the strike and lockout of 2003-2004 [and] I am hoping that you would not want to repeat the same this year,” Huizar said in his letter, which was addressed to Steven Burd, CEO and chairman of Safeway, Inc., which owns the Vons grocery chain and is based in Pleasanton, CA.

“We are concerned that the [workers’] contract expired over seven months ago and still very little progress has been made toward a new agreement,” wrote Huizar. “I strongly encourage you to act in the best interests of your company, your employees and the communities you serve by putting in the time and effort necessary to negotiate a new contract that guarantees fair wages and benefits for your employees.

A group of community activists and members of the United Food and Commercial Workers, the labor union that is representing some 62,000 employees from the Vons/Pavilions, Ralphs and Albertsons supermarket chains, accompanied the councilmember.

As television cameras rolled, Huizar stood in the Vons parking lot on the corner of Figueroa and Colorado Boulevard and gave a brief speech before walking into Vons and presenting the letter to store manager José O. Ceron.

“For me, this is personal,” Huizar said, explaining that his mother was a UFCW member who was stricken with arthritis when he was in elementary school in the early 1980s. “It was the benefits that UFCW was able to get her that allowed her to go back to work and put food on the table,” he said.

Sticking Points

The management of Vons/Pavilions, Ralphs and Albertsons is asking its workers to pay up to 50 percent of their salaries toward health care costs, Huizar said, adding: “That’s unacceptable and one of the major sticking points right now.”

“The cost-sharing is too steep for our members,” said UFCW vice president Rigo Valdez, who was present at the rally of about 30 activists and supporters of the grocery workers. “What the companies are doing is failing to fund the workers’ health care trust fund in a way that would cover the benefits they currently have.”

The money that the management is injecting—or offering to put—into the trust fund “would bankrupt the fund in months,” Valdez said. “It would not only affect co-payments, it would also create huge deductibles before any services can be even provided.”

While there is no specific proposal on the table to compensate for the shortfall in the workers’ health-care funding, according to Valdez, “the cost-sharing would mean that if I went to the doctor or if I had an emergency, I would have to use a significant portion of my annual salary.”

A lot of people who depend on the Vons store on Figueroa for their shopping would suffer if the workers went on a strike, Huizar said, adding that the city of Los Angeles as a whole would also suffer.

“It’s an absolute injustice that these corporate bosses are more interested in increasing their huge profits than in taking care of the workers who guarantee those profits,” said Dooner (he uses one name), president of the Local 871 International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. “The people we represent—there are 1,750 of us—will not shop at Vons” if the strike goes ahead and the workers create picket lines outside stores.

Vons store manager Ceron declined to make any comments for this story, including the number of workers in his store.