A Giant labor pain

I was out doing my shopping yesterday when I spied a note in our local Giant store. Apparently the store will be closed for a portion of Tuesday (10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. sticks out in my mind) for a meeting of all the union employees to ratify their new contract. While I’m not aware of any labor strife between the union and the grocery chain or how many other stores this particular contract would affect, it does make for some inconvenience for certain daytime shoppers.

But what if the union did turn thumbs-down on a new deal? Would the Giant employees go out on strike and threaten their market share?

Having lived in a heavily union city most of my life, let me tell you that there are some who are really, really militant about not crossing picket lines. (And don’t even go there with them about shopping in a non-union store like Wal-Mart.) Certainly one option for Giant if a strike were to come to pass would be to hire temporary “scab” workers who could keep the business running while the regular employees stood around outside by the street with their picket signs. (Did you know that in many cases they are paid for the task?)

Then that brings up the question of what Giant’s corporate owners (a Dutch firm called Ahold) would do to attract shoppers. In my experience, having a local grocery chain on strike was a great time for consumers like me who didn’t mind crossing picket lines because man, did they put up the loss leaders. It would certainly skew my upcoming market basket report next month.

However, as I said at the top, this is all idle speculation because they may already have a done deal that’s deemed fair for both union and corporation. Let’s hope so for both their sakes – with all the other passionate discourse between locals on a number of subjects, a grocery strike would not be welcomed.

Author: Michael

It's me from my laptop computer.

3 thoughts on “A Giant labor pain”

  1. Michael,

    It’s actually GIANT (the Maryland division) and SAFEWAY. The union and the companies have been at odds, because in the case of GIANT, Royal Dutch Ahold has done a disastrous job at merging their new company with Stop N’ Save from Massachusetts.

    By closing all the Maryland (and PA) distribution centers, they have exponentially increased their costs, while at the same time dramatically cutting back on the brands and selection.

    They have lost dramatic market share (about 4 points in 4 years) in Maryland, as they have been strapped by increasing competition (Wal-mart, Whole Foods, The Fresh Market, Trader Joe’s, and Wegmans) and are facing increasing competition from southern chains now making their way into Maryland.

    Despite closing a number of stores, and implementing self-checkout, they continue to lose dramatic amounts of money. Most of their stores are old, and in desperate need of renovation. The company is, quite frankly, failing.

    The union is upset because the company wants to cut back further on salaries, health care benefits, etc. as a way to recover costs of losses.

    I am VERY RARELY a pro-union guy, but Royal Dutch Ahold has been a textbook case of mismanagement, and in this case, they are trying to make up for their incompetence on the back of their employees.

    Not unlike Bank of America giving the Countrywide CEO $10 million in “performance pay” as part of their buyout.

  2. I just came from giant, and in the course of checking out, the 22-year union cashier expressed her anxiety over the vote.. she said she was never worried over contract votes before, but this one has her VERY nervous.
    Sounds like the old guard has decided to vote no.
    It’s my guess that Royal Ahold has gotten all the senior employee buyouts they could, and now they’re going to play hardball to get rid of the others.
    So I guess it will be those automated checkout lines as far as the eye can see (assisted by mexican staffers who will work for much less than union scale… doing those jobs that the Americans just don’t want) 🙂

  3. Pure outside observation, but Acme used to have a load of stores in the area (in fact I think two in Salisbury, but I’m not sure). It would seem that the wages they had to pay out managed to make them unable to compete with Food Lion and caused all of them south of Dover to close their doors. They sank some cash into the Millsboro store giving it an overdue remodel, then they closed it a year later saying it wasn’t profitable.

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