October 18, 2009 05:51 PM UTC

Where Will You Shop if There's a Strike?

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• by: Colorado Pols

As you’ve probably heard, negotiations between the management of grocery store chains in Colorado and their unionized workers are set to resume Tuesday. A week ago, workers overwhelmingly rejected the latest proposed contract–reportedly a little better on longtime employees, though still forcing big cuts to worker’s pension benefits and not much else to workers without a great deal of seniority. The union maintains that with grocery stores posting solid, recession-proof profits, the cuts they propose are unacceptable.

It’s tough to know where these negotiations will lead; some say that a strike should have begun after the latest contract was rejected, but putting people on strike pay in an already tough economy is a lot to ask without assurances that it won’t drag on forever. The latest results don’t indicate that the recent leadership shake-up at the UFCW has weakened their position. The biggest question hasn’t changed in all the months we’ve been talking about this: how many Colorado residents care enough to honor a strike or punish management for a lockout? How many people will really alter their shopping habits to not cross a picket line?

In 1996, the last big grocery store labor dispute in Colorado, several things were different: for one thing there were fewer alternatives for grocery shopping than there are today. And there was no ability to distribute information as rapidly as the modern internet facilitates. But it’s an open question, in our view, as to whether or not the internet can be as helpful to unionized grocery workers as it was for, say, getting Barack Obama elected President.

Apropos, liberal activist group Progress Now sent an email to a very large number of people (we don’t know how many, but we got it in several mailboxes and Progress Now claims an email blast list of hundreds of thousands) yesterday asking for help identifying alternative grocery stores to publicize if there’s a strike or lockout. They’ve built a nifty lookup tool to help people find places to shop in their area–other than King Soopers, Safeway, and Albertson’s, of course.

And if they can send this information to hundreds of thousands of Colorado consumers directly, bypassing the Dean Singleton filter…a tool Jimmy Hoffa could only have dreamed of…

A poll follows: we’d like to get your honest assessment of this, not your personal preference. What, if anything, has changed the game since 1996? People around the nation, both pro- and anti-organized labor, are most interested in your opinion.

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