Reality bites the labor movement.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: Rundles Wrap-Up

FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS IN JULY, I was lucky enough to enjoy a family vacation, and we went back to the same place in Northern Michigan where we have vacationed now for seven straight summers. It was a slice of heaven.

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But for the third year in a row I happened to notice that nurses were still on strike at the local hospital, and a handmade sign on the way into town proudly proclaimed the strike to be the longest one in the country.

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that a labor action that has gone on for three summers, more than two years' time, might be misnamed a "strike."

These people are not on strike, they have retired.

You have to wonder about the labor movement in this country.

Do they live in a time warp?

The nurses came to mind, too, when I read that the United Food and Commercial Workers chapter here, representing some 17,000 grocery workers in Colorado and Wyoming, had opened contract talks with the big three--King Soopers, Safeway and Albertson's--to replace the current contract that expires on Sept. 11. The union is, predictably, asking for an increase in wages, more expensive pension and medical benefits, and an increase of 20 percent in the number of its members holding full-time jobs.

The grocery companies, which are negotiating together as one, are offering far less.

Here, too, there is talk of a strike.

We haven't had a grocery strike around here for quite some time, and it would, in my opinion, be a bad move on the part of the grocery workers.

I mean, just a few months ago there was a 4 1/2-month grocery strike and lockout in California that ended with unions agreeing to pretty much what management offered to begin with. And the issues here are strikingly similar--at least the central issue.

The main reason management in California wanted worker concessions, and the main reason Colorado grocery management won't be in a mood to offer workers more is, in a word, Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is a non-union grocery behemoth, stealing market share by the bushel basket, and forcing traditional grocery stores to narrow their already thin profit margins more and more every day.

The sad truth is that grocery workers just aren't in the position to deal in labor negotiations from a position of power.

I am not anti-union per se. I am, on the other hand, pro reality. The reality is that our...