Grocery Unions Join with Community to Build Better Supermarkets
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
http://labornotes.org/node/2461
Grocery Unions Join with Community To Build Better Supermarkets
by Tiffany Ten Eyck
In New York City 11,600 retailers sell food, but fewer than 5 percent of
them are grocery stores.
In Detroit, more than half the city�s population�550,000 people�live in
a �food desert� where residents are closer to a fast food joint or a
convenience store than to a supermarket.
Only 8 percent of the stores that sell food are supermarkets. Studies of
food availability have found low-income and people of color communities
have poor access to healthy, affordable food.
Grocery stores in these neighborhoods have poor selection and high
prices, and low-income residents have less means to get to better stores
farther away. Moriah Kinberg, a staffer with Food and Commercial Workers
Local 1500 in New York, said it was natural for the grocery workers
union, UFCW, to take notice.
In Detroit and New York, UFCW locals are working with community
coalitions to create more and better grocery stores�which they hope, one
day, will be union.
OASIS IN DETROIT
The Detroit Community Grocery Store Coalition was created by UFCW Locals
876 and 951, along with MOSES, an organization of churches in the city.
The group set out to find out where and how they could build a new
grocery store inside Detroit�s city limits.
At the moment, the UFCW doesn�t represent any stores in the city. Many
members live in Detroit and drive to the suburbs to work. The closest
chain store to most city residents is a UFCW-organized Kroger on Eight
Mile Road, Detroit�s northern border.
The chains that have relationships with UFCW have balked at the idea of
putting a new store in Detroit. They claim there isn�t enough money to
be made, and that it�s too dangerous.
The coalition spent nearly a year soliciting input on where a new
grocery is needed, weeding through hundreds of locations nominated by
Detroiters. The coalition ranked locations by degree of need and ease of
public transportation options, and came up with seven, which were
narrowed to two by a vote at one of the mass meetings held periodically
by the coalition.
The final location chosen was an empty former Farmer Jack�s supermarket
on the east side of the city�now smack-dab in a food desert.
The store is one of many left empty in Michigan after Farmer Jack�s
consolidated in 2007, closing or selling 67 stores. UFCW Local 876 had
5,000 members at the company, only a third of whom were able to get jobs
at other union stores, according to President Roger Robinson. Many of
the former members came out to a public meeting held at the east-side
location.
The union is paying for a market study and a business plan, and the
coalition is fundraising to purchase the building and find an operator.
In the meantime, coalition members are surveying area groceries, using a
quality assessment checklist. The effort, organizers say, will allow
them to find and promote good sources of food in the city, while
pressuring the bad apples to clean up their act.
NOT ANOTHER CHAIN STORE
Organizer Brad Wilson said the new store will be different from the
chain stores that fled the city. It will hire from the neighborhood, get
food from local farms, and establish a decision-making structure that
allows local residents, employees, and investors to have a say in how it
runs.
Members of the coalition are also looking to establish nutrition and
gardening education programs and to find ways to transport Detroiters to
the store. �If there�s a shuttle leaving downtown Detroit taking people
out of the city to Ikea,� said an organizer at a recent coalition
meeting, �then we should be able to shuttle people to get food, too.�
The coalition is investigating different organizational forms, such as
worker cooperatives, that would allow for local control. Wilson said a
shop run just by employees would fall short of the coalition�s vision to
involve local residents and churches.
Coalition partners are trying to find a model for input that doesn�t get
bogged down in long discussions about all the nitty-gritty details, such
as what meat to stock.
If the pilot store works, the coalition will consider creating another.
An organized grocery in Detroit would keep low-wage, non-union operators
at bay, taking pressure off unionized shops in the suburbs.
While UFCW organizers hope workers in the stores will form a union, they
don�t seem to be pushing it on coalition partners. With all the
resources it�s throwing into the project, the union is clearly looking
for more than just an organizing drive�it�s helping to fill a need for
city residents.
�We can spend thousands of dollars trying to organize something and all
we�re doing is fighting the system,� said Robinson. �Why don�t we try to
start from the ground and build something?�
APPLES IN THE BIG APPLE
New York City city responded to its food crisis this year by creating
the FRESH Program, cash and zoning incentives for new and renovated
supermarkets in food deserts.
Activists at UFCW Local 1500 grew concerned that without restrictions on
the incentives, unscrupulous employers would enter the market and drive
wages down further in impoverished communities and in existing union shops.
Wal-Mart, for instance, is again making noise about opening a store in
New York, despite its previous failures. Pressure from a loud
anti-Wal-Mart effort, including Local 1500, has kept the company out of
the city thus far.
The local joined forces with FUREE (a multiracial poor people�s
community organization in Brooklyn) and a Harlem environmental group to
demand standards for the incentive program. Activists are putting
pressure on city council members to include their demands in the program
this fall. Union members recently met with council members to explain
the difference the union has made in their lives.
If the coalition wins, new grocery stores will have to pay prevailing
wages and benefits and stock �healthy food,� though the coalition is
still trying to find ways to quantify what qualifies. To keep pricey
gourmet outlets from opening in gentrifying neighborhoods, new stores
won�t be allowed to charge membership fees, and they will have to accept
food stamps.
It�s likely that the final language the coalition pushes at city council
will include workers� right to organize. If all goes well, new stores
opening in the city will provide good food from employees carrying a
union card.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
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"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
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the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_