January 21, 2004

By David Bacon

The health care war

LOS ANGELES – Today Mark Norton is one of 70,000 grocery workers on strike, or locked out, in southern California. Soon he may be one of hundreds of thousands facing another difficult predicament: across the country, the system for financing health care benefits for union workers is breaking down, as managed care drives the cost of medical insurance through the roof.

Some employers, like Safeway, which owns the Von's store where Norton works, can afford to pay the increases – but they won't. Whether from greed or economic pressure, the growing crisis of this system threatens to make 2004 a year of massive strikes and labor wars.

Norton went to work for Von's 18 years ago. By last fall, when the strike started, he'd become a grocery manager. That gave him a full-time job, earning wages capable of supporting a family in an industry where that's become a rarity.

When Norton walked out of Von's Oct. 11, it was over Safeway's demand that employees begin paying for their health insurance. "They said they were just asking for $5 a week, or $15 for family coverage. When we did the numbers, it turns out it could cost as much as $95 a week by the end of the contract," he explains. The average weekly wage for a Los Angeles supermarket worker is $312.

An even bigger threat was Safeway's proposal to begin hiring new workers at lower wages, with an insurance plan most wouldn't be able to afford. If new hires don't go into the existing plan, they will become more expensive to insure as they grow older, and their premiums will rise.

"They want a two-tier system, where they can bring in new employees at several dollars less an hour with little to no benefits at all," Norton says. "A lot of us believe they'll weed out the rest of us once they hire these new employees."

Once Norton and his coworkers struck, the two other large grocery chains in southern California, Albertsons and Ralph's (a division of Kroger Co.), locked out their own workers in a common front with Safeway. The three chains say they need concessions in order to compete with the world's largest corporation, Wal-Mart. Not only does Wal-Mart pay close to minimum wage, but its health plan is also so expensive that most employees can't purchase coverage.

Norton and other strikers extended their picket lines to other areas of the state, including San Francisco, where they say they've found a sympathetic public. Supermarket workers – mostly young and often people of color – meet and talk with store customers all the time. Their predicament bears a familiar human face. But solidarity also has another source. This year workers in other unions, from hotel-room cleaners to hospital nurses and dietitians, are going to face similar demands from their employers. "We're expecting a major confrontation with hotel chains over health care costs when our contract comes up this summer," says Mike Casey, president of San Francisco's Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, Local 2.

Northern California's 50,000 supermarket workers are watching with the most concern – their contract is up in September. "We certainly expect this fight to be on our doorstep then," says Rich Benson, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Union, Local 870. "That's why our local unions fully support the efforts of unions in southern California."

California corporations are making it impossible for unions and workers simply to maintain the status quo. Instead, employers are gearing up for an interminable war to dump onto them the system's rising costs or force them to do without health care entirely.