This weekend is do-or-die time for Stop & Shop and its employees to hash out a new contract—or see its workers hit the picket line.
Last weekend, the supermarket’s union employees (about 45,000 in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut) authorized a strike, but also agreed to go back to the bargaining table, with a Feb. 28 deadline for a resolution. Reps from United Food and Commercial Workers (including, in the Valley, UFCW Local 1459) are pushing for better wages and health care benefits. “Stop & Shop made record profits and is not willing to share their prosperity with the workers that make it the biggest supermarket chain in New England,” said a message to supporters from Western Mass. Jobs With Justice. Particularly galling, the union says, was the company’s decision to advertise for “replacement workers”—a.k.a. scabs—in case there is a strike.
The union is asking sympathetic shoppers to show their support by joining a Facebook page where they can publicly pledge that they won’t cross a picket line if the workers do end up striking. In addition, UFCW has designed clever “coupons” that customers can hand to store management signaling their support of the workers. “This coupon entitles the bearer to STOP SHOPPING at this Stop & Shop in the event of a strike or lockout!” they read. The union is asking supporters to print out the coupons and bring them to the store this week to hand to managers after they’ve done their shopping.
“It’s hoped that the additional pressure on corporate executives to avoid a strike will move the negotiation process forward,” the union says on its website.
The Advocate contacted a Shop & Shop spokesperson for comment Wednesday morning but has yet to hear a response.
Meanwhile, if Stop & Shop workers do go on strike, where is a justice-minded consumer to take her business? “Certainly not Big Y,” Jon Weissman, coordinator of Western Mass. Jobs With Justice, told the Advocate; that company has a long and troubled history with organized labor, marked by its fight to keep its stores union-free and its refusal to meet with union and community members concerned about its selling of products from a controversial meat-processing plant in North Carolina. Meanwhile, healthcare activists and others have called for a boycott of Whole Foods, in response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year by CEO John Mackey, in which he argued against the concept of health care as a right. “[T]he last thing our country needs is a massive health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficit and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system,” the libertarian Mackey wrote.
Weissman suggested Northampton’s River Valley Market co-op as a good alternative spot for groceries. In the Easthampton area, meanwhile, shoppers might want to check out the independent Big E’s market, which perhaps would appreciate signs of consumer support as it braces for a new Stop & Shop that looks to be heading to that town.
