Strike Deadline Passes as Lucky Talks Continue : Labor: Employees report for work. Grocery chain and Teamsters negotiate job security.

About 1,700 union warehouse employees and drivers for Lucky Stores reported for work Monday without a contract after all-night negotiations averted a strike at the supermarket chain’s 235 Southern California stores but failed to produce an agreement.

Letting a 12:01 a.m. strike deadline pass, negotiators for the Teamsters and Lucky talked through the night and returned to the bargaining table later Monday to meet with a federal mediator over contentious issues of job security and flexible workweeks.

“There’s no extension of the contract. We’re just going day to day,” said Ed Mireles, head of Teamsters Local 952 in Orange, shortly before heading into a 5 p.m. session.

Mireles said workers can call a special strike hot line after 1 a.m. today to find out if the two sides have struck a deal or if workers have gone on strike.

“We’re hopeful we’re going to be able to work this out,” said Judy Decker, a spokeswoman for Lucky. If there is a strike, she said, the company will continue its operations with non-union help under a contingency plan.

The union reached agreement on a new contract Sunday with the Albertson’s grocery store chain and has previously reached agreement with the other major supermarkets, including Vons and Ralphs. All the contracts, Mireles said, contain job security clauses, which is the biggest stumbling block in the negotiations with Lucky.

Lucky has long had three Orange County warehouses--in Buena Park, Fullerton and Irvine--that supply its Southern California stores and 20 more in Nevada.

But Lucky’s parent company, American Stores Inc. in Salt Lake City, opened a warehouse in Fontana, which also serves the parent company’s Sav-On Drugs subsidiary. The Fontana plant operates under a separate contract with a different union local and a wage schedule that pays warehouse workers $4.60 an hour less than the $16.60 an hour paid at the other warehouses. In addition, drivers are not included in that contract.

Lucky transferred its liquor and wine unit from its Buena Park facility to the Fontana operation where the same products are handled for Sav-On. The Teamsters union figured it had lost 22 jobs because the drivers there weren’t union members.

Though no Buena Park jobs were lost, the union fears the company will continue to shift work to other non-union employees and cause a loss of union jobs.

Decker said the company needs the flexibility to move work among its Southern California warehouses to operate efficiently.

So far, work at the Fullerton and Irvine warehouses has not been affected.

Lucky also wants to change the workweek schedule, which has required the company to schedule employees on five consecutive days a week and to let them have off at least one day of the weekend. Mireles said Lucky now wants a flexible schedule that would allow it to give workers days off during the week and not consecutively.

Mireles said that a possible strike has “100% support” from other unions, including the one covering butchers and grocery clerks. It was unclear Monday, however, how many members of other unions would honor Teamsters picket lines.