Strike Leader: Shoppers Came Through

As Stop & Shop workers prepare to vote on a new contract, their local strike leader credited customers and others in the community for helping produce a ringing labor victory.

“They got it,” the leader, local United Food and Commercial Workers organizer Jorge Cabrera said of the customers who stayed away from Stop & Shop en masse during an 11-day strike that ended Monday.

Some 31,000 Stop & Shop workers overall struck in four New England states. New Haven area members are scheduled to gather Thursday night at the Omni to vote on a new contract that would preserve health and pension benefits and Sunday time-and-a-half pay as well as raise salaries. (The union has declined to detail the provisions until after the strike vote.)

Before deciding to strike, union leaders weren’t sure how much public support they could count on, Cabrera said Thursday during an appearance on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline” program. And public support could make or break the strike.

“It’s not an easy call to bring your members out on strike,” he noted.

To the strikers’ ​“pleasant surprise,” shoppers went elsewhere rather than cross the line. Some stores, like the one on Whalley Avenue, were closed altogether for days (except for the bank). Elected officials walked the picket lines; other unions donated food and cash. A New Haven rabbi issued a legal opinion that food purchased for Passover by crossing the line would not be considered kosher.

Analysts estimated that the chain lost millions of dollars in sales while endangering long-term customer loyalty. Cabrera estimated that sales dropped 75 – 90 percent overall during the strike.

Cabrera, business representative for the UFCW Local 919, said the public sympathized with the desire of workers paid $12 to $15 an hour to earn a living wage and afford health care and retirement.

“The labor movement has been invigorated by the strike,” he said, linking it to recent victories by striking teachers in other states. He attributed a growing support for strikers — after decades of dramatic declines in union power and membership — to the growing ​“radical income inequality. in our country.”

Cabrera said the new contract does deal with moves by the company to automate more functions. (He didn’t specify the provisions.) Much of the talk on the strike line, and on Cabrera’s ​“Dateline” appearance, concerned ​“Marty,” the new in-store Stop & Shop robot. For now, Marty’s job is to identify spills and notify humans about them, according to the company.

Cabrera argued that Marty ends up costing the company more money — by, for instance, mistaking a dropped business card as a ​“spill,” announcing it on the public-address system, and pulling a worker away from a more important task to ​“clean” it up.

He was asked how the union will address automation long-term, for instance once the company upgrades Marty to distinguish between dropped business cards and shattered salad bottles and replaces more cashiers with computerized self-check-out. The recent strike showed, Cabrera argued, that customers deeply value their relationships with supermarket workers, that those human interactions are integral to the bottom line.

Click on the video for the full interview with Jorge Cabrera on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline” program.