The New England Stop & Shop strike entered its eighth day Friday as the grocery store’s parent company continued to refuse to honor the union’s demand for a fair contract.
At the heart of the dispute is an inability for Ahold Delhaize, a Dutch grocery conglomerate that owns Stop & Shop, and the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UCFW) to reach an agreement on a new contract. The sticking point is Ahold Delhaize’s refusal to back down from its demand that the grocery store’s workers take a cut in benefits—even as the parent company is reporting billions in profits.
“We want our pension to be left the way it is, our healthcare not to be taken away from us, to keep our time and a half,” Watertown, Mass., striker Chris Pacitto told Hell World‘s Luke O’Neil. “Everything that we fight for every day.”
It’s the largest strike in at least three years for a private company and comes on the heels of two years of public school teacher strikes that have transfixed the country from West Virginia to Oakland, California.
The strike, which affects 240 stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, has closed “several dozen” stores—and the ones that are open, according to The Boston Globe, are struggling to keep fresh products in place.
The strikers can claim support from progressives, local community members, and Democrats in the region and across the country.
Dan Raferty, the co-chair of western Massachusetts-based Berkshire County Democratic Socialists of America, wrote in a letter to a local paper Friday that the blame for the strike was squarely on the parent company.
“Ahold Delhaize claims that Stop & Shop employees are better paid than direct competitors and that they are the only unionized food retailer in the region,” wrote Raferty. “Be that as it may, that is no excuse to take what their workers have labored for.”
The Berkshire community has been supportive of the strike in general. UCFW rep Melissa May told local NPR affiliate WAMC that “the support from customers has been unbelievable.”
“They have supported us in many ways, first and foremost by not crossing our picket line, which we are asking everybody not to do,” said the union rep. “But they have also continued every day to come out with coffee and donuts, with pizza, with personal donations, with gift cards to other stores, just with well wishes too—keeping our spirits up and making sure they won’t come back [inside the store] until we get a fair contract.”
Customer solidarity is helpful, but some workers are nonetheless worried about their income as the strike continues.
“I’ve been working paycheck-to-paycheck my entire life,” striker Shaunna Beck told Rhode Island news channel WPRI. “I depend on this job.”
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