Dayton Daily News Library


FOOD WORKERS

Employees found separate scales left bitter taste

* The union has mounted a recruitment drive to find its unity in numbers.

By Wes Hills, Rob Modic and Mike Wagner
DAYTON DAILY NEWS

Published: Wednesday, December 16, 1998
Sidebar to Part 4

Steve Culter has some advice for workers stuck in tiered wage structures: Organize the competition.

That's what Culter did when Kroger Co. said it couldn't raise wages because of non-union, low-cost competitors.

Culter's United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1099 in southwest Ohio lost members for a decade as Kroger workers' wages stayed frozen.

Then, union members voted to contribute additional dues equivalent to a half-hour's pay each month. The union used the new money to organize workers at grocery stores and other food businesses that did not have unions.

Armed with $750,000 from the new contributions, unionizing efforts boosted membership from about 12,000 in 1992 to 17,200 today. That doesn't include 5,000 probationary employees who can join the union if they get through their probationary period, Culter, the local's secretary-treasurer, said.

Culter's union now represents nearly 80 percent of area grocery workers, up from about 30 percent in 1992.

By organizing workers at the businesses of previously low-wage competition, the union helped level the employers' playing field. Kroger still has a wage tier for newer workers, but a 1996 raise - the workers' first in about a decade - narrowed the gap between the upper- and lower-tiered workers, according to Culter.

Top-tier Kroger clerks got $1-an-hour wage hikes, bringing them to $12,13 an hour during the life of the new contract. Bottom-tier workers received a $1.25-an-hour raise, to $9.90 an hour. Workers still despise the pay differences, Culter said.

`We have to get rid of them,' said Culter. `It's something that should have never happened. It weakened our position. I wish we had never gotten into it, but we did it just trying to survive in the 1980s.'

Kroger dominated the local grocery business in the early 1980s, competing against unionized food chains such as A&P, Liberal and Fazio. About 90 percent of Dayton's large supermarket chains were union.

But non-union food chains began to replace the failing, unionized stores, eroding Kroger's share of the Dayton-area grocery market from 40 percent to about 33 percent. Kroger asked union leaders: How could the company compete with the newcomers if it had to pay each worker $4 more an hour, double time on Sundays and full medical benefits?

`The people currently there didn't look at the people behind them,' Culter said. `They settled for something less for ghost people (workers not yet hired).'

Top-tier clerks, he said, remained frozen at $10.58 an hour for a decade and gave up double pay on Sundays. They preserved fully paid medical benefits.

Paul Bernish, a consultant for Kroger, said that "in most markets, we're the only one or one of the few companies that is organized" and "among the highest-paying companies.

"Our message to the union has been that if Kroger is able to be more competitive, it enables us to grow and provide more jobs and members to the union. It's something I think they understand."

The understanding came with some pain.

Culter said that as the bottom-tiered workers reached majority numbers in the union, they increased pressure on union leaders to eliminate tiered wages, and to boost wages in general. But with grocery store wars keeping prices low, and competition from non-union competitors squeezing Kroger's market share, the union didn't have much of a bargaining chip.

`Our membership got slapped so hard,' Culter said. "We needed to do something. We took it to a vote."

In 1992, 98 percent of Local 1099's members voted to contribute an additional half-hour's pay each month for organizing. The money paid for picketers in front of grocery stores without unions, television commercials highlighting the union's efforts and information booths at local fairs and festivals.

The local also had determination.

`It took a 3 1/2 -year battle to organize Cub Foods,' Culter recalled.

Local 1099's experience tracks what happened to the retail and wholesale industry across the country.

By 1985, two-tier wage structures were embedded in 37 percent of the food and commercial industry's contracts, according to the Bureau of National Affairs, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that compiles information on union contracts and other business data.

The tiered pay structures created such upset and turnover among workers that the Food and Commercial Workers union in 1995 adopted a national policy that blasted tiered wage structures for "their fundamental unfairness, their undemocratic nature (and) their inherent divisiveness."

While two-tier contracts remain common in food and commercial businesses, Culter hopes they will be eliminated.

The stores and public gain from getting rid of them, he said. The workers stick around.

"Nobody wants to see a new face every week at the checkout or meat counters," he said. "They want to have people who are going to help you."

Back
to Part 4
Go
to Part 1


Series Index    Other Projects    DDN Home    ActiveDayton Home    Archive search

Copyright, Dayton Daily News.