You're heroes, hang in there, you're going to win this thing, Gephardt tells striking supermarket workers

UNI Commerce UFCW supermarket strike page

Send support message to UFCW and its members who fight for healthcare and decent wages

Striking supermarket workers get political support:
"You're heroes. Hang in there, you're going to win this thing".

Dick Gephardt on his campaign trail, in Iowa

Dick Gephardt, a leading member of the United States Congress, has come out strongly in support of the 80,000 striking UFCW members in Southern California and other parts of the country. The well known Missouri congressman, who is competing for the democratic presidential nomination later this year, visited the picket lines yesterday (Wednesday 3 December). Together with his wife, Gephardt briefly joined the picketing workers in California, carrying signs and chanting "scabs out, union in", the San Francisco Chronicle (4.12.) reports. "You're heroes. Hang in there, you're going to win this thing", congressman Gephardt told the workers, some of whom had their children with them on the picket line.

In Los Angeles Times (4.12.), Harley Shaiken, University of California Berkeley economics professor, says that the kind of union solidarity which the UFCW strike has generated has not been seen for quite a while. He attaches particular importance to the decision of the Teamsters union to pull out 8,000 workers from distribution centres and transport services:

- The choice was to join the grocery clerks in support of the picket line today or join the clerks with less health coverage in two years, professor Shaiken says.

- Should the rest of us care? Absolutely. If unionized workers are stripped of effective health coverage today, union and non-union employers alike will have a powerful incentive to cut costs in the same way tomorrow, leaving many more workers uninsured and vulnerable. In effect, the low road to competitiveness could become a superhighway.

- The threat here is not one of the store moving to Mexico or China but rather of a Wal-Mart moving in down the block. The danger, although hardly insurmountable, is real. If the unions lose, it unravels the American dream, he concludes.

Nightmares for low-paid workers

In New York Times (4.12.), Carol Joffe, sociology professor at University of California Davies warns about the consequences of shopping at Wal-Mart and increasing the pressure on affordable health care insurance throughout the American supermarket industry:

- Wal-Mart has raised health care premiums 50 percent in the last two years, and only 60 percent of eligible workers are able to afford the plan.

- Beyond the nightmares that this situation poses for those low-wage workers who can't afford health care for themselves and their children, such policies of non-affordable health insurance at the workplace also mean that American taxpayers have to pick up the costs, in emergency room services and so on, that should rightly be paid by profitable companies, she writes.

All the support that the striking supermarket workers and their trade union UFCW gets is very important San Francisco Chronicle quotes UFCW member Tony Lepe, a Ralphs (Kroger) stock clerk:

"Right now, we need all the help we can get," said Lepe, 31. "We've been out here too long."

UNI Commerce as well as the whole of UNI stands strongly behind UFCW and its members. What has been said about the dangers in this situation for all workers in the United States is equally valid on a worldwide level. If social dumping becomes the norm on the world's largest retail market, it will surely reflect on the situation in the whole world.