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UFCW supermarket
workers' strike: Wall Street analyst says employers overestimate
Wal-Mart threat
A leading stock market analyst says that Wal-Mart's threat to the large supermarket competitors is "being greatly overestimated in big cities". In his report on Wal-Mart, Merrill Lynch analyst Mark Husson says that Safeway, Kroger and Albertsons are competing successfully in these areas and actually gaining market share, at the expense of weaker retailers. According to Husson, Wal-Mart is competing on different markets than Safeway, Kroger, Albertson and others. Safeway has only a 15 per cent market overlap with Wal-Mart, he says in his research note. The Bentonville, Arkansas based retail giant is more focused on smaller localities and blue collar customers, the analyst says: "If it does have any white-collar customer loyalty at all, it’s in the young married couples who have kids and are financially stressed, whereas Safeway is very much a white-collar retailer. It’s very strong with young singles." World's largest retailer Wal-Mart pays its workers wages which are far below U.S. industry standards and largely denies them the health insurance, which has been a normal part of collective agreements in retailing. To protect this social dumping approach, the company goes to great lengths to stop any attempts by its workers to join their trade union, UFCW. Frequently in court for workers' rights violations, Wal-Mart has gained a reputation of being a particularly brutal anti-union employer. The supermarket trio involved in the California strike, lead by Safeway's CEO Steve Burd, have made no secret of their ambitions to try to copy the Wal-Mart model. This is not dictated by competition needs, as the Merrill Lynch report confirms, but by a quest for even greater profits. This is corporate greed, say the workers, unions, and their supporters, which is now being taken too far.
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