CALI. SUPERMARKETS Plight of striking workers takes toll on union's hardship committee

The hardship committee has a tough task in doling out assistance money.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LOS ANGELES -- Erica Salas, a 26-year-old with magenta streaks in her dark brown hair, may have one of the toughest jobs in the California supermarket strike.
Every day, seven days a week, Salas sits in a tiny office in the Local 770 union hall in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles, taking applications from people facing evictions, repossessions and foreclosures, sometimes even the prospect of giving up their children, at least temporarily, to relatives or former spouses.
As a caseworker on the financial hardship committee, the onetime Vons clerk helps decide how to mete out the $1.5 million in emergency funds the local set aside to help the most down-and-out of the United Food and Commercial Workers members who went on strike or were locked out five months ago.
All too often, all she can do for them is listen. "It's hard emotionally, and it's physically draining," she said during a break last week. "You just want to cry."
About 59,000 people were suddenly without regular wages when the UFCW struck Safeway Inc.'s Vons and Pavilions stores Oct. 11 and Albertsons Inc. and Kroger Co.'s Ralphs chain locked out their union workers the next day.
Strike pay
UFCW members who pull picket line duty earn strike pay. It was slashed nearly in half in late December, so that most make about $125 for five days on the line. Company-paid health benefits expired at the end of the year.
The union and the supermarkets say they don't know how many people are still unemployed. The union says 9 percent of the 21,000 Vons and Pavilions employees who walked out have gone back; the 38,000 UFCW members locked out by Ralphs and Albertsons can't legally return to their old jobs.
If the scene every morning at Local 770's headquarters in Los Angeles is any indication, many of the 14,500 members affected by the strike and lockout haven't been able to find part-time work to supplement their strike pay.
By 10 a.m., dozens of people are queued up. Armed with sheaves of unpaid bills, bank statements, rental and lending agreements and angry letters from creditors, they fill the hall decorated with murals depicting the union's history and spill out into an adjacent waiting room.
There is little conversation.
"They are people leaving the middle class on an express train to who knows where," said Harley Shaiken, a professor of social and cultural studies for the University of California at Berkeley.
Local 770 has written more than 4,000 checks to members' creditors.
Difficult job
Salas and the 21 other volunteers on the hardship committee are getting the same $25 a day as their colleagues on the picket line. They sometimes find themselves thinking that no pay would be enough.
"The reality is the devastation. I almost didn't come back" to work on the committee after the first day, said Dora Cano, locked out of her job as a bookkeeper at a Ralphs store. "You see grown men with tears in their eyes."
Salas said she didn't know how much emergency money remained in the committee's account and that in some ways, she would rather not know what was left to dole out.
She ticked off a few of the hardship cases: the checker with an unemployed husband, two months behind in her rent; another checker who had been evicted from her apartment and was living in her car; a clerk whose car had been repossessed and bank account closed for insufficient funds and who, with his wife out of work, owed more than $3,700 in back mortgage payments; and the clerk who said his wife had attempted suicide.
Most every story can seem as hard to listen to as to live. "You don't really sleep at night," said Janellie Arana, who had worked as a checker at a Vons store. "You lie awake thinking about everybody's hardships."
Individual stories
In the Local 770 union hall recently, Lydia Galvez, waiting to submit her application for assistance, talked about how she had gone from the cusp of financial security to the brink of financial ruin. As a Vons produce manager and checker, Galvez had earned $17.80 an hour, far more than her strike pay. She asked the committee for $1,130, plus a $30 late fee, to pay the February rent on the San Fernando Valley apartment where she lives with her four children.
"I have gone through all of my savings, about $8,000. I don't have the money for the rent this month," she said. She left the union hall after learning she would get an answer Wednesday.
At the union hall, there have been happy moments. One came when Salas handed a check for $2,200 to Felix Vigil, 46, who looked like he had just stepped off of the set of the Discovery Channel's "American Chopper" reality show.
Vigil wore black boots, black jeans, a black Harley Davidson anniversary T-shirt and tattoos on a pair of thick forearms. Until October a member of the night crew at an Albertsons store, he showed up with an eviction notice and the prospect of having to ship two of his children to Georgia to live with his first wife. Vigil and his current wife were prepared to live with local relatives, or in their truck.
The hardship check would cover more than two months of rent. His family would, for the time being, remain intact.
"This is a big weight off my chest," Vigil said, a smile visible beneath his thick mustache. "I can tell my kids they are not going to have to move."