Shortly before her 17th birthday, Clariece Unnerstall dropped out of high school and took a full-time job at the Albertsons in her hometown of Lancaster.
To her surprise, the gregarious teenager found she loved the pace and mix of grocery store work. She had full health benefits and made enough to help her younger sister buy clothes and her mother and stepfather buy groceries.
The next year, in the early fall of 2003 -- anticipating the strike and lockout at Southern California grocery stores that ultimately lasted more than four months -- she quit to find other work.
When she decided to go back into the grocery business last year, she took a job at Vons and held the same job title, joined the same union and still enjoyed the work. But everything else was different.
She found she would have to wait 18 months for health benefits. She and most of her fellow workers were part-timers who struggled to get more than 16 hours each week. She worked two other jobs but found that instead of helping her family, her family had to help her. By this summer, she faced the choice of whether she could afford to keep working at the supermarket.
Unnerstall's situation offers a Labor Day glimpse into the lives of the young workers at the heart of Southern California's service economy. For such workers, a career is often a series of part-time jobs, and the only constant is instability.
Her experience also sheds light on how the grocery business -- which employs tens of thousands of workers in Southern California -- has changed since the strike and helps explain why supermarket workers are already preparing for a possible walkout when their contract expires in March.
"I like to work, and I've always loved working in a grocery store. It's exhilarating," Unnerstall said. "I could see myself having a career there, but it's hard to do that."
During the strike and lockout that began in October 2003, the supermarkets demanded that the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents grocery store workers, agree to concessions because competition from other nonunion competitors, particularly Wal-Mart, makes it difficult to maintain wages of up to $17.90 per hour and health benefits that were among the most generous in any retail industry.
