“Executives should not be rewarded for losing money,” said Rick Icaza, president of UFCW Local 770 in Los Angeles. “It is obscene to reward executives with fat bonuses when more than 20,000 employees have given up their own paychecks.”
Keep in mind, please, that he’s not discussing workers who were laid off or fired. He’s discussing workers who voted to go on strike. In other words, it’s not as if they were forced at gunpoint to give up their paychecks, except maybe by UFCW Local 770 in Los Angeles. While it may jot be a good idea for businesses to increase compensation while losing money, it’s also not advisable to base compensation on guilt or politics…
I know a little bit about retail and about the grocery industry, and I’ll admit that I’m having a really hard time mustering much support for this particular strike. It’s not just that the strikers are voting down a health insurance package I — and millions of Americans — would be tickled pink to be offered. It’s the fact that the strikers refuse to see that ALL union supermarket jobs are in grave danger right now…
Like it or not, the Wal-marts of the world WILL enter the California grocery market, and blatantly unconstitutional legislation at the municipal level will only slow down the inevitable — and waste a lot of taxpayer money. Safeway has offered its current employees a realistic, and even generous package. And it has recognized the future of the industry by warning that new hires may not have the same level of compensation. Current employees are protected. New ones, who have some choice in the careers they pursue, are not. Sounds fair, no?
Supermarkets operate on about a one per cent profit margin. They have two major ways of making a profit: by increasing volume and by decreasing expenses. Raising prices is not an option, especially when the competition is a major discounter like Wal-Mart. Union demands for continuing inflated wages will eventually drive the big chains below the required profitability threshold. The result will be bankruptcy or, more likely, their exit from the California marketplace, eliminating both competition AND union jobs. And benefiting no one…
So don’t give me this sob story about workers “giving up their own paychecks”. It’s more likely they’re cutting their own throats by listening to their bloated, increasingly irrelevant union…
