Safeway bosses deal striking workers blow in the face, take out huge stock options

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Huge bonuses to bosses, workers are denied affordable health insurance:
Safeway managers deal striking workers a blow in the face, Schwarzenegger cuts State health funding

U.S. supermarket giant Safeway has decided to add insult to injury as its workers in California are on strike for the fourth month. Eleven of the company's top executives have decided to give themselves juicy stock options, which can give them millions of dollars on top of their fat salaries.

Three giant corporations, Safeway, Kroger and Albertsons, are trying to eliminate health care benefits at work for 70,000 Southern California supermarket workers. With this new move, their ringleader Safeway confirms what UNI Commerce affiliate UFCW has repeatedly said: This strike and lockout has been caused by corporate greed.

- If they succeed in destroying affordable health care, every worker in America will be at risk of losing their health benefits, UFCW says. - The UFCW members on strike against Safeway/Vons and locked out by Albertsons and Kroger/Ralphs are holding the line for America's health care.

While Safeway managers are cashing in, some of the grocery workers have sacrificed their homes, others their cars. They’re putting their livelihoods and their families on the line to protect not only their health care benefits, but the health care benefits of all workers.

- If Safeway has its way, children will go without medical care, families will be forced into poverty, and people will be moved from work to welfare for their health care protection, UFCW says.

Schwarzenegger cuts children's health benefits

As if the grocers' attack against their workers would not be enough, Californians are beginning to feel what it means to have Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor. He has initiated cuts in public healthcare funding and wants to limit the number of children who receive state-financed medical coverage.

- (But) we must fix the state's business climate, Schwarzenegger said in his first 'State of the State' address on 6 January. - And we must start with workers' compensation reform. Our workers' comp costs are the highest in the nation - nearly twice the national average. California employers are bleeding red ink from the workers' comp system, the new governor added: - I call on the legislators to deliver real workers' comp reform to my desk by March 1st. Modest reform is not enough.

There is not much doubt about it, the Californian workers can be in for hard times if corporate greed and Bush - Schwarzenegger politics prevail.

In today's Sacramento Bee, a newspaper in the State capital, E. Richard Brown, director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Health Policy Research, said a dramatic reduction in Southern California supermarket benefits would accelerate the current trend in health care. He said more employers would offer fewer benefits, require their workers to pay more for their benefits and, in some smaller companies, drop coverage altogether.

President George W. Bush and his administration are also busily undermining the living standards of American workers. Doug Dority, UFCW's president, calls the government's latest overtime pay proposals the "largest, single pay cut for workers in history."

Buried in the proposed new regulations are suggestions for how companies can avoid overtime by "payroll adjustments" such as cutting base worker salaries so the additional overtime payments would bring their total pay to their old salaries, or raising salaries just to the $22,100 threshold so the workers are not overtime-eligible, as 'executives' or 'professionals'.

There is a fast deterioration of the employment conditions and living standards of large groups of American workers, and trade union rights are under attack. A walmartization of labour conditions would have widespread consequences for workers worldwide. Therefore, the UFCW and its members in California are holding the line not only for their own health care, but for employment conditions worldwide.