Springs grocery workers awaiting results
Unionized workers at King Soopers in Colorado Springs awaited voting results on whether to accept the company's latest offer or continue negotiations, as rhetoric between the two sides heated up.
United Food and Commercial Workers union Local 7 said results are expected to be released today.
On Monday, Local 7 workers in the Denver area overwhelmingly rejected the company's offer and voted to continue talks. Union members working at King Soopers in Longmont, Loveland and Pueblo vote today.
"If they have a better offer, we are ready to come back to the table," Local 7 President Ernest Duran Jr. said Tuesday. "The company has told the workers to keep negotiating. If they want us to keep negotiating, they should have accepted our offer to extend the contract for 10 weeks. King Soopers is the most profitable division of Kroger (Co.). The CEO last year got $13.4 million in stock options, salary and bonuses, while the workers got zero."
Diane Mulligan, a King Soopers spokeswoman in Denver, said Tuesday that the company was disappointed by the vote.
"We look to get back to the negotiating table. We haven't put our last, best and final offer on the table yet, but with this contract being voted down, everything goes off the table.
The next proposal could be stronger or weaker. We still hope to come to a resolution as quickly as possible."
Local 7 members have been working without a contract with King Soopers since May 30, and their contract with Albertsons expired May 9. Wages, benefits and other terms of their previous contracts remain in place. The union's pact with Safeway expires June 26.
In the Springs area, about 1,000 union members work at 10 King Soopers stores, 780 work at 13 Safeway stores and an undisclosed number work at an Albertsons store at 455 E. Cheyenne Mountain Blvd.
King Soopers and Safeway have agreed to lock out their unionized workers if Local 7 goes on strike against either company, but the pact doesn't stop either from reaching a settlement with the union independent of the other.
In a flier available to employees on a company Web site, King Soopers says "a vote for the company's proposal means no strike and no lockout." The site also includes a letter from Russ Dispense, the company's president, saying that Local 7's leadership "has moved only slightly from its original proposal submitted many weeks ago. If we did everything the union asks, it would put King Soopers in an uncompetitive position."
Meanwhile, according to The Associated Press, King Soopers has accused the union of disrupting business by sending representatives to stores to talk to workers on the sales floor, hand out union fliers and buttons and talk to customers. The company asked a federal judge to block the union's actions, but a hearing isn't scheduled until Thursday, after voting wraps up.
The latest offer from King Soopers includes 25-cent-an-hour raises for the highest-paid workers and 10-cent-an-hour raises for the lowest-paid workers in each year of the agreement. Other workers would get no raises, except those who amass seniority or get promoted. The offer also includes a nearly $35 million increase in the company's contributions to an underfunded pension plan, new preventive health care benefits and a reduction in the waiting period for coverage.
The proposal would raise the minimum retirement age for Local 7 members from 50 to 55 and would end a $200-a-month supplemental payment for retirees age 60 to 62. Local 7 says an analysis by its consultant found that the offer would cost the average Local 7 member more than $100,000 in future pension benefits by cutting the monthly payment by nearly 60 percent for each year a union member has worked for the company.
The company said the cuts are needed because stock-market losses have eroded the plan's assets, but Duran said the plan would be adequately funded if King Soopers hadn't reduced its pension contributions in its 2005 contract with the union. He also said the $35 million would come from a surplus in a fund that pays for health benefits, and he contended that could lead to higher health-insurance premiums for Local 7 members.
Roxanne Heeney, a pharmacy technician at the King Soopers store at 6030 Stetson Hills Blvd. and an employee for more than 20 years, said the offer "really bums me out, that they are trying to decrease our benefits and not give us any wage increase. I can't make ends meet now. I want to avoid a strike, but if we have to strike, we will. I would like to see something that would help us maintain our retirement fund so we won't have to work until we're 95."
Steven Weegens, a meat clerk at the King Soopers store at 2910 S. Academy Blvd. and a company employee for a year, called the offer "a very bad contract."
"I don't like the fact that I won't be able to retire," he said.
"I don't like that I won't get a wage increase and I don't like the two-tier wage system where I get paid less, even though I am doing the same work as someone else who gets paid more simply because I was hired later."
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