Strike Leader Lights, Puts Out Fires

As Jorge Cabrera greeted his striking workers at the Hamden Stop & Shop, one asked about her pay from the previous week.

Will they have the checks tomorrow? she asked.

They should, replied Cabrera. But if you run into any trouble, give me a call.

As usual since a strike broke out at the supermarket chain, Cabrera was putting out a fire — while also seeking to ignite fervor on the picket lines.

Cabrera,a business representative for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 919, has responsibility for bargaining units at eight Stop & Shops in Connecticut. Since Thursday, when 31,000 Stop & Shop workers went on strike throughout New England over stalled contract negotiations, he has spent every day traveling around his stores, boosting the morale of his workers, making sure they have everything they need, honing the union’s public message, and managing crises when they come up.

He is both a galvanizing and a calming force for his workers. A megaphone seems welded to his hand, as crowds of workers shout back ​“contracts!” with their fists in the air when he asks what they want. And he appears just as natural with his phone in hand, helping a worker figure out how he or she will pay the next rent check. Or when he stands calmly before a small group of workers and tells them that ​“we’re winning. At this point it’s about persistence and discipline. We’ve got to stick together.”

That’s most of what he does when he makes the rounds: He offers calm encouragement, ensuring the strike flames will remain lit for however long it takes before a contract rises up from the ashes.

“I just try to help them focus on the goal and remind them that they’re a part of a movement,” he said.

His rounds through the region Tuesday showed how he has learned to navigate the competing challenges of his local leadership role.

Enough With The Donuts

Cabrera started his day Tuesday with a statewide conference call. Those calls give him a sense of what’s going on around Connecticut, he said, so he can understand the big picture. Then he left the house and went to the store on Dixwell Avenue in his hometown of Hamden.

“I ordered sunshine,” he told the 30-odd workers gathered around him in the morning sun.

Tuesday’s brilliant sun was not the only reason it was a remarkable day for Cabrera. As the strike turned six days old, Cabrera turned 45 years old. He said he had asked his boss for one present for his birthday: a new union contract. Thought a Carvel Ice Cream Cake would also be nice.

But not donuts. He’s had enough donuts.

At his morning visit to the Hamden store, he poured a cup of donated Dunkin Donuts coffee and sipped that.

“There’s donuts too,” worker Clem Piscitelli told him.

“No, I don’t need any more donuts!” he replied.

At 10:15, he got in his black GMC Terrain and pulled out of the empty parking lot, blasting his horn to the cheers of strike-sign-laden workers. He turned left onto Dixwell Avenue and then left again on to the Wilbur Cross Parkway to go north.

His next stop: Local 919 headquarters in Farmington to drop off a check for the strike fund. But first, he had to make his morning phone calls.

He called headquarters to say that he needed more sign-in sheets for his picket captains, who need to keep track of which workers show up so they can pay them out of the strike fund. Next, he called all of the picket captains at his stores. It’s a way to ​“get a sense of their state of mind,” and an ​“opportunity to keep their morale up,” he said.

One of his picket captains told him a store needed more signs. ​“We went to the dollar store and everyone’s making their own signs,” the captain said. Once Cabrera had hung up, he called headquarters to order more signs. Monday’s rain destroyed a lot of them, he said.

NPR played in the background as Cabrera drove, switching off every time a phone call came in over the car’s stereo.

On one phone call, one of his workers told him that another worker was in a tough position because she works part-time for Stop & Shop as a union employee and part-time with another vendor that works within Stop & Shop buildings but is not a part of the union. She has to enter the store for her other job, but she’s not allowed to because she’s also a union employee.

Cabrera said he would talk to headquarters and figure out what to do.

A Road Through Politics

Once he had arrived in Farmington, he went in to the Local 919 headquarters, a white building with shutters, to drop off the check. When he returned, he had a large stack of fliers to distribute to his stores with information for customers about the strike.

He sat down in the driver’s seat of his car.

“Now I just have to manage our social media presence for a moment,” he said. Cabrera is in charge of the UFCW Local 919 Facebook page, which means he has to filter everything anyone posts on it, from anywhere in the state. He estimated that the page gets about 55 posts an hour. ​“It’s non-stop,” he said, which gives him a lot of work, but ​“it’s proven to be an effective tool for engagement.” Most of them he said he approves: pictures of U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal at a store, a picture of an empty parking lot, a picture of a kid holding a sign, a picture of a worker with a sign that says ​“Mark McGowan: give Jorge Cabrera a contract for his birthday.” (Mark McGowan is the president of Stop & Shop New England).

Sometimes, he said, people post stories about why, say, healthcare benefits are so important. When he reads those testimonies, he said, ​“it gives me the shot in the arm I need.”

There are a few posts, however, that he has to reject. A video shows workers confronting customers can’t go up. Nor can anything with false information that feeds the rumor mill. If people hear about one manager who calls the cops, he said, they start to think it’s happening everywhere, when in reality it was just a one-off incident.

Once he finished with the Facebook page, Cabrera started the car and got back on the road to head to the Southbury store.

Cabrera said he’s been involved in politics since high school, when he volunteered for political campaigns. He grew up in Bridgeport, and went to Quinnipiac to study political science. After graduating, he moved to Hartford to work for Moira Lyons, who was speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives. There, he encountered union lobbyists and began to learn about the labor world.

After a few years, the carpenters’ union offered him a job, which he took. He stayed there until he took a job with the UFCW International in Washington, D.C. Then, in 2015, he took his job at Local 919, where, in addition to being a business representative, he’s also in charge of the organizing department.

In the 2018 election, he ran for the 17th State Senate District seat and lost by 77 votes to Republican incumbent George Logan. He said that the strike feels in some ways like GOTV (Get Out the Vote, the final push of a campaign).

Cabrera said that Martin Luther King Jr. is one of his sources of inspiration. Once, when he worked for the UFCW International, he had a long road trip to Ohio. The MLK estate had just released all of MLK’s writings, and Cabrera got the cassette of all of his speeches and listened to every single one on the drive. He said he admires MLK because he chose to give everything up ​“and get in the trenches for social justice.”

People vs. Money

As Cabrera pulled into the empty Southbury parking lot, he blared the horn again as the small crowd of workers waved and shouted. When he got out of the car and started walking towards them, one shouted: ​“the birthday boy!” They sang happy birthday.

After greeting each worker with a handshake, he offered his requisite words of encouragement. ​“This is what’s going to win it,” he said, pointing with his thumb to the empty parking lot. ​“They have a lot of money, but we have a lot of people.”

Throughout the day, Cabrera harkened back to the amount of customer support the strikers have gotten. ​“It just restores your faith in humanity,” he said at one point. ​“It’s almost funny. It’s like — is this real?”

Southbury was no exception. Support for a strike does not take the form that support usually does — it comes in empty parking lots and cash registers rather than full ones.

“We don’t need much motivating. There’s no one coming in the parking lot,” said Theresa Martell, who works at the Southbury store. She said she’s amazed that Stop & Shop is willing to take the risk. ​“I’m just afraid that the customers won’t come back,” she said. ​“A few more days, a few more customers” will stop coming back.

Not all support comes in the form of absence. Maureen Kelley said that stores in the plaza have been offering discounts and opening up their facilities to the striking workers. Pet Value started letting the workers come in the back to use the bathroom because they’re not allowed inside the Stop & Shop while on strike. Dunkin Donuts dropped off donuts and coffee. A customer baked Italian cookies and brought them by, and Hometown Pizza and the Middle Town Fire Department dropped off pizzas.

One of the striking workers had also baked a ziti and brought it in to her coworkers. Before leaving, Cabrera took a plateful. Then, he was back in the car, honking his way out of the parking lot and waving goodbye.

The ziti ​“was a nice departure from donuts,” he remarked as he drove away. ​“I’ll have to take a long fast from donuts after this I think.”

As he drove to the next store, he said that he’s been dealing with workers who are worried about how they’re going to pay rent during the strike. UFCW maintains a strike fund to pay workers while they don’t have a paycheck, but it can only go so far. He said he tries to connect those in need with whatever other services are available, such as food pantries and non-profits.

Next stop: Newtown. He arrived at around 1 p.m. to the empty parking lot, and got out to birthday wishes. ​“You keep me going, even on my birthday,” he told the workers gathered around the corner of the store.

Democracy At Stake

After about half an hour, he got back in the car and drove to a nearby parking lot to do some more social media management. He watched a video someone had posted of a man with a guitar singing a song he had written. The chorus:

Let’s stop shopping at Stop & Shop
Stop & Shop, Stop & Shop
Let’s stop shopping at Stop & Shop
Till the workers get their rights.

Next he stopped for gas. As Cabrera filled the tank, he gestured at a Stop & Shop ad in the window of the gas station. ​“Look, Stop & Shop,” he remarked. ​“It follows you everywhere.”

With a full tank, he continued on to Trumbull. He explained why he has come to believe the company’s resistance is about more than just money. It’s about ideology, he said. It’s not that they can’t afford the benefits that the union is trying to keep. It’s that the company wants its workers to work hard and cost next to nothing. 

“Why would you want your grocery workers to make less money and have less benefits just because other people do?” he said, referring to the fact that the company has invoked the lower pay and benefits its rivals give their workers to justify the contract it wants. Stop & Shop’s attitude, he said, is symptomatic of a current trend in the U.S. that places less value on labor. He said he sees evidence of it in the country’s massive inequality, and in the fact that the government taxes income more than it does assets.

“It’s a threat to our democracy, is really what it is,” he said.

He blared his horns as he drove into the Trumbull parking lot, past the group of striking workers handing out flyers for Big Y.

Once he was out of the car, a worker told him that she had seen the managers rolling cartloads of food out of the store earlier to donate to the food bank.

When the workers asked him if there were any updates, he reassured them: ​“They’re shell shocked because they really didn’t understand your power.”

He made the rounds of the different groups of workers, walking out to the street and then back to the other store entrance, where he greeted Rob Turner, Mark Lewis, and Linda Picarazzi. As he walked away, he turned to Picarazzi, who works in the pharmacy: ​“Linda, I think you’ve been working almost as long as I’ve been alive.”

Indeed, she has. She started working at Stop & Shop 40 years ago, when Cabrera was 5.

As he pulled out of the Trumbull parking lot at around 2:55 p.m., he said that what the corporation misses is the relationships that workers like Picarazzi form with their customers. ​“She knows all the customers and they know her,” he said.

Cabrera’s next stop was Monroe. As he approached the store, he got a call from another union representative. She told Cabrera that a bus would be leaving on Thursday to bring a select group of workers to a rally in Boston. The guest speaker, she said, will be Joe Biden.

On To The Valley

At 3:09, he got out of the car, shook every hand and listened as worker Josh Schultz voiced his frustrations. At 3:28, he got back in the car.

Before heading to the Shelton store, he stopped at Dunkin Donuts for a 3:56 p.m. lunch — not a donut, but a sausage, egg, and cheese sandwich. As he walked into the store, he mentioned that he reads a lot of political biographies. He said he recently read the Ron Chernow biography of Ulysses S. Grant, which he said he loved. Before the strike started, he said he had begun David McCullough’s John Adams biography. But then the strike happened, and he had to stop.

In Shelton, he greeted each worker as he did at every store. He talked briefly to John Kamlowsky, a UFCW International representative who had come all the way from Texas to help out with the strike.

He left the empty Shelton parking lot at 4:46. As he drove past the Big Y on his way to Ansonia, he remarked on how full the parking lot was.

He got to Ansonia at 5 p.m. The workers were gathered on the sidewalk that divides the street from the parking lot holding hand-written signs and listening to the chorus of honks that streamed past. At a certain point, worker Chanel Rivas put down her megaphone and sign to kneel on the concrete and draw another poster with the markers and poster-board the workers had bought from the dollar store in the plaza.

Cabrera got a few posters out of his trunk to supplement the handmade signs. Then he peaked through the store window to see what was going on inside.

As he drove out of the empty Ansonia parking lot at 5:32, he said that ​“we’re all going hoarse little by little on staff.” He said he hears it in the voices of his colleagues when he calls them.

At 6:10, he arrived back in Hamden, blasting the horn as he approached one of the largest Stop & Shops in New England. Some of the workers who had been there in the morning were still there.

One said that he had seen a lot of Jorge in the last few days. More than the 371 representative.

Another asked Cabrera what the good news was. Cabrera looked puzzled, and then responded that he had no updates on negotiations. ​“The good news,” he said, ​“is you’re causing $20 million in losses” every day.

After Hamden, his last stop was Seymour. When he was done there, he had another statewide conference call and then called around again to all of his picket captains. Then he made another pass through social media. He said he would get home around 10 p.m., where his wife would have dinner waiting for him.

Also waiting for him at the end of the day was disappointing, if expected, news: no progress on negotiations. So, he’ll get up again on Wednesday and do it all again, and he will continue to work 12 – 15 hour days until the strike is over. At least none should be as bad as Sunday, when he estimated he had worked 18 hours.

But the long days won’t stop him. As he told his workers in Hamden: ​“They want you to get tired. They want you to get frustrated. And you’re not going to do it.”