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."
Copyright, Dayton Daily News.
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