A disillusioned ending

JOSEPH N. BELL

My wife came home from shopping the other day full of her first visit

to our neighborhood Ralphs since the end of the supermarket workers’

strike. Sherry chose a longer check-out line to pay her respects to a

checker she remembered fondly from the old days.

When she reported their conversation, it occurred to me that I

hadn’t seen any reflections from workers through the prism of

distance from the events of the strike, itself.

So I stopped by Ralphs.

I recognized the checker instantly from pre-strike shopping trips.

She was, just as I remembered, bright, cheerful, animated and

remarkably efficient -- a lift at the end of a tiresome chore.

We had talked briefly by phone, so I identified myself and said I

hoped we might continue our conversation on her lunch break. She was

a little wary, but said “Sure.”

When she found out what I was up to, she was still dubious but

agreeable, providing I didn’t use her name -- not because she was

going to say anything inflammatory but because she was uneasy about

making any waves so quickly after the sea had calmed.

So Sally -- that’s what we’ll call her -- and I talked on an

uncommonly warm day about the aftermath of a long, painful episode in

the lives of many thousands of supermarket workers.

If she could capsulize her post-strike feelings in a single word,

I asked her, what would it be?

“Disillusioned,” she said firmly. “I see three years of

soul-searching ahead. That’s when our contract will come up again.

And the direction we are going is pretty clear.

“This is satisfying work, with good benefits, good pay, and good

customers. A lot of people with families have made a career of this

business. We settled into work that we liked. When that happens, you

think something can last forever -- and a lot of us were caught

thinking that way when the strike happened.”

Sally was less affected by the strike than a lot of her

co-workers. She is married to a working husband, so picket pay hadn’t

yet become a necessity for her when the strike ended.

“But the budget was getting tight,” she said, “and I was pretty

close to looking for another job.”

She hasn’t done much of that in the past. Except for several years

of commission selling, Sally’s entire working life, beginning in

1988, had been devoted to the food business. She started in a

family-owned market that was taken over by Hughes, which, she pointed

out, “was also family-owned. All of us who worked there felt we were

part of the family. But when Ralphs bought out Hughes, we went from

many years of family operation to corporate management. That’s when I

understood for the first time my parents’ concerns when I was growing

up about the disappearance of the small businesses they liked to

patronize. The atmosphere is totally different when everything comes

down from a corporate headquarters with a lot less concern about what

the people who work for them are feeling. We were really spoiled by

all those years of family operation.”

When the strike was called, Sally felt a lot of “fear of the

unknown. But I’ve always believed in the union. I know it helped a

lot of people through these bad months with picket pay and financial

support. It made me feel that somebody was looking out for us. But

now that we’re back, that feeling is a lot less secure. Now

everything goes through corporate or union machinery, and I feel I

have very little control of my own work life at any level. So I guess

the strike left a bad taste in my mouth. I know it isn’t likely to

happen, but I’d like to feel in control again.”

It might be more likely than Sally thinks. A piece in last

Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Opinion Section headlined “The Big

Supermarket Squeeze” said that a trend toward “smaller is better” is

picking up a lot of steam in the merchandising of food products.

As evidence, the article pointed to the ease with which consumers

turned to a wide range of smaller stores rather than cross picket

lines during the strike. (A Times survey found that 59% of regular

customers didn’t shop at picketed stores.)

The article went on to point out that the demand for ethnic foods

not easily available in supermarkets is growing in quantum leaps,

attracting the patronage of Southern California’s expanding immigrant

population.

So the threat to supermarkets may well be coming less from such

cost-cutting competitors as Wal-Mart and Costco than the family-owned

stores in which Sally got her start.

Meanwhile, Sally is enjoying connecting once again with her old

customers, who delight in telling her the problems they had with the

people who hired on to replace the strikers. She holds no anger

toward those people.

“I never took it personally,” she said. “If people need work,

they’re going to take it wherever they can find it.”

She’s pleased that the store managers “looked each one of us in

the eye and shook our hands and welcomed us back.”

Maybe that doesn’t quite add up to family, but she says that “this

is a very good job, and I’m grateful to be back.”

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.