Familiar story, familiar results, familiar victims
California was the test case, folks.
Grocery Workers Try to Keep the Good Life
Middle Class Could Be Out of Reach Under New Safeway, Giant Contract
By Michael Barbaro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 29, 2004; Page A01
Six months after graduating from the District's Mackin High School in 1969, Glennis T. Mitchiner took a part-time job at a Safeway store in Northwest, bagging groceries to help pay his college bills.
Mitchiner realized that his full-time colleagues at Safeway were earning as much as many of the graduates at his college. So he quit school to work full time at Safeway, a job that provided the middle-class life a college degree had promised. He and his wife, who works at a Virginia computer software company, each earn about $45,000 a year, own a two-bedroom house, two Toyota sedans and send their daughter to a $3,000-a-year parochial school.
"I realized it from the get-go," Mitchiner said of his job. "This was a good deal."
But what Mitchiner, now 53 and a cashier, views as a good deal, Safeway and unionized grocery stores across the country regard as a financial burden. Tomorrow, 18,000 Washington area workers at Safeway and Giant Food are to vote on a new jointly negotiated four-year contract that is expected to call for lower wages for new workers and reductions in health benefits, which the companies say they need to remain competitive with nonunion retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. If it is rejected, employees may vote to strike, disrupting business at 350 Giant and Safeway stores in the Washington area.
