A revived grocery union aims at Fresh & Easy

The union locals were nearly bankrupt, members were quitting by the thousands, and the workers had just swallowed some of the biggest concessions ever in the recent Southern California labor movement. The 141-day strike and lockout that ended in 2004 turned grocery shopping into chaos, frustrated shoppers and brought the United Food and Commercial Workers union to its knees.

But today a resurgent UFCW is scoring bargaining and organizing gains throughout California. And it's aiming for a coup: It hopes to organize workers at nonunion Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market, the British operator opening hundreds of small grocery stores in California and the Southwest.

"The strike was a real wake-up call," said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.

"Prior to that there was a lot of complacency in the UFCW, but since then we have seen some large shifts in the union both in California and nationally."

Over the last 18 months, the UFCW negotiated a long-term contract that won back many of the concessions made in 2004.

It organized a group of nonunion supermarkets in Central and Northern California and gained a beachhead in a yearlong effort to bargain with Fresh & Easy.

"They have done a nice job making gains in an environment that is not as favorable to labor as it has been in the past," said Dave Smith, a labor economist at Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management.

Still bruised by the 2003-04 strike and lockout, union members got some satisfaction last month when a federal grand jury returned indictments of eight current and former managers of Ralphs Grocery Co., charging five with developing a scheme to illegally rehire hundreds of locked-out workers to prolong the work stoppage.

"Those indictments really brought morale back up," said Bobby Sabedra, a Ralphs meat cutter from Ventura and longtime union member working on the Fresh & Easy organizing campaign.

In Central and Northern California, Jacobs said, the union has consolidated locals, allowing for more-strategic bargaining and better organizing.

Nationally, the UFCW is putting more money and energy into organizing and is doing a better job coordinating collective bargaining among regions. "This is a big change for a union that has historically been very decentralized," Jacobs said.