Hardships Mount on Picket Line

Erica Salas, a 26-year-old with magenta streaks in her dark brown hair, may have one of the toughest jobs in the supermarket strike.

Seven days a week, Salas sits in a tiny office in the Local 770 union hall in Koreatown, taking applications from people facing evictions, repossessions and foreclosures, sometimes even the prospect of giving up their children, at least temporarily, to relatives or former spouses.

As a caseworker on the financial hardship committee, the onetime Vons clerk helps decide how to mete out the $1.5 million in emergency funds the local set aside to help the most down-and-out members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union who went on strike or were locked out four months ago.

Too often, all she can do for them is listen. “It’s hard emotionally, and it’s physically draining,” Salas said during a break last week. “You just want to cry.”

About 59,000 people were suddenly without regular wages after the UFCW struck Safeway Inc.’s Vons and Pavilions stores Oct. 11 and Albertsons Inc. and Kroger Co.’s Ralphs chain locked out their union workers the next day.

UFCW members who pull picket line duty earn strike pay. It was slashed nearly in half in late December, so that most make about $125 for five days on the line. Company-paid health benefits expired at the end of the year.

The union and the supermarkets say they don’t know how many people are still unemployed. The union says 9% of the 21,000 Vons and Pavilions employees who walked out have gone back; the 38,000 UFCW members locked out by Ralphs and Albertsons can’t legally return to their old jobs.

If the scene every morning at Local 770’s headquarters on Shatto Place is any indication, many of the 14,500 members affected by the strike and lockout haven’t been able to find part-time work to supplement their strike pay.

By 10 a.m., dozens of people are queued up. Armed with sheaves of unpaid bills, bank statements, rental and lending agreements and stern letters from creditors, they fill the hall decorated with murals depicting the union’s history and spill out into an adjacent waiting room.

There is little conversation. Some of those waiting have the look of refugees from a disaster who got out with just the clothes on their backs.

“They are people leaving the middle class on an express train to who knows where,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor of social and cultural studies at UC Berkeley.

As of Thursday, Local 770 said it had written 4,000 checks to members’ creditors, once running out of the paper and then the ink to print them. Only someone facing eviction or foreclosure has received more than $1,000.

Local 770 officials say they have $1.5 million in their hardship fund, part of a much larger pot of money -- the union won’t disclose how big or how much is left -- donated to all seven locals in the strike and lockout in Central and Southern California.

Salas and the 21 other volunteers on the hardship committee are getting the same $25 a day as their colleagues on the picket line. They sometimes find themselves thinking that no pay would be enough.

“The reality is the devastation. I almost didn’t come back” to work on the committee after the first day, said Dora Cano, locked out of her job as a bookkeeper at a Ralphs in Studio City. “You see grown men with tears in their eyes.”

Salas said she didn’t know how much emergency money remained in the committee’s account, and that in some ways, she would rather not know what was left to dole out.

She ticked off a few of the hardship cases: the checker with an unemployed husband, two months behind in her rent; another checker who had been evicted from her apartment and was living in her car; a clerk whose car had been repossessed and bank account closed for insufficient funds and who, with his wife out of work, owed more than $3,700 in back mortgage payments; and the clerk who said his wife had attempted suicide.

Most every story can seem as hard to listen to as to live. “You don’t really sleep at night,” said Janellie Arana, who had worked as a checker at a Vons in Palmdale. “You lie awake thinking about everybody’s hardships.”

In the Local 770 union hall recently, Lydia Galvez, who was waiting to submit her application for assistance, talked about how she had gone from the cusp of financial security to the brink of financial ruin.

As a Vons produce manager and checker in Mission Hills, Galvez had earned $17.80 an hour, far more than her strike pay. She asked the committee for $1,130, plus a $30 late fee, to pay the February rent on the Panorama City apartment where she lives with her four children.

“I have gone through all of my savings, about $8,000. I don’t have the money for the rent this month,” she said. She left the union hall after learning she would get an answer Wednesday.

In the line ahead of Galvez was Ralph Fernandez, 44, a general merchandise manager at an Albertsons in Woodland Hills. Strike pay and the $350 a week his wife brings home from part-time work has left the family in a hole. After his interview with the committee, Fernandez said it was painful.

“I have never gone through this. In a way, it’s kind of humiliating,” said Fernandez, who has a 16-year-old daughter. Before the strike, he worked an average of 48 hours a week to pay more than he owed on car notes and on the $1,015-a-month mortgage on a townhouse in Santa Clarita. He was told that the union probably would cover his February mortgage and his outstanding utility bills.

“You’re the head of a household and you haven’t had a real paycheck in four months,” Fernandez said. “You begin to wonder about your worth.”

Another man in line, 46-year-old Bruce Blackstone, had been a dairy manager for an Albertsons in Newhall. He had worked his way up to $17.90 an hour after 25 years in the supermarket business. Blackstone said he had run through $4,000 in savings and wanted help paying $715 in rent due in early March.

“I’m tapped out,” he said.

At the union hall, there have been happy moments. One came when Salas handed a check for $2,200 to Felix Vigil, 46, who looked like he had just stepped off the set of the Discovery Channel’s “American Chopper” reality show.

Vigil wore black boots, black jeans, a black Harley-Davidson anniversary T-shirt and tattoos on a pair of thick forearms.

Until October a member of the night crew at an Albertsons in South Gate, he showed up with an eviction notice and the prospect of having to ship two of his children to Georgia to live with his first wife. Vigil and his current wife were prepared to live with local relatives, or in their truck.

The hardship check would cover more than two months of rent. His family would, for the time being, remain intact.

“This is a big weight off my chest,” Vigil said, a smile visible beneath his thick mustache. “I can tell my kids they are not going to have to move.”

Like Vigil, Salas five months ago couldn’t have imagined deal ing with what she does now. Before Oct. 11, the most difficult moments in her working day were when she had to tell customers that they wouldn’t get a refund for badly focused snapshots at the Vons in Torrance where she worked, earning $12.17 an hour as a manager of the one-hour photo lab.

A UCLA film student, she was playful enough to have recorded the lyrics to Tim Burton’s “This Is Halloween” for the outgoing message on her answering machine. The faux horror of the Hollywood soundtrack has been replaced by a nightmare that she said really does keep her awake at night.

To cope, she says, she has spent as much time as she could with her boyfriend and her family, and has taken full advantage of the Disneyland pass she received as a birthday present.

“After all of this,” she said, “you really want to go to the Happiest Place on Earth.”