The big supermarket chains and union officials have started talks on a new labor contract. If those early contacts have been the appetizers, the players will sit down to the main course Monday, when Southern California's biggest grocery union local meets with Ralphs Grocery Co.
Healthcare benefits will be the central issue, just as they were in late 2003, when contract talks disintegrated into a 4 1/2 -month strike and lockout. The contract hammered out at the end of that dispute covers about 65,000 workers at the Albertsons, Ralphs and VonsPavilions chains. It expires March 5.
The outcome of negotiations for a new contract will affect thousands of workers like Caine Levine, who gets paid $7.55 an hour to work the deli and meat counters at the Albertsons on Hillhurst Avenue in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles.
"I took it for granted that the grocery industry has benefits like other employers, and that I would have to wait three months and then get covered," he said.
But because of what labor scholars and healthcare analysts call an unusually long waiting period for new hires, Levine will have worked an entire year before his health insurance starts in about four months.
A study to be released today by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education has found that lengthy waiting periods -- as long as 18 months for individual health coverage and 30 months for family benefits -- have left a large segment of the grocery workforce without adequate insurance options, said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the labor center and a coauthor of the report.
"Our findings reveal a precipitous drop in health insurance coverage for Southern California grocery workers," Jacobs said.
Before the labor dispute, 94% of unionized grocery workers in Southern California had health insurance paid by their employers.
Jacobs said that plunged to 54% by September, according to a survey of United Food and Commercial Workers union members and an analysis of actuarial data from the Food Employers Benefit Fund, a trust jointly administered by management and labor representatives.
Jacobs estimated that 22,000 workers, or 50% of the 44,000 hired since the current contract took effect in March 2004, lacked health coverage.
About 29% of new hires qualified for employer-based health insurance, but only 7% had enrolled as of September. Others had opted for coverage through a family member or public health program or had decided to go without, Jacobs and coauthors Arindrajit Dube and Felix Su said.
