the more i find out about safeway the more i cannot stand them. from reading comments left on the previous dominick's post to talking with people about the situation, i have not heard one positive or even neutral thing about safeway. perhaps that's because they represent everything i loathe about big corporations being so vile. let's review:

- dominick's was a respected family operation, providing quality, chicago-oriented products for many years until safeway bought it out, homogenizing the stock with it's lesser quality "safeway select" brand.

- safeway's gross mismanagement has resulted in a spiraling profit loss (stock went from fifty-two dollars a share last year to eighteen/share this week), for which they seek to compensate by tampering with pensions, sunday pay, and health coverage. safeway also wants to raise the amount of time it takes to become a journeyman within the union from two to five years, severely capping the pay of many of its workers.

- the union has voted down the new labor contract. in the process of voting, non-english speaking and mentally challenged employees were intimidated and mislead by safeway representatives.

- if the workers strike, safeway has threatened to liquidate the stores, to turn them into parking lots or to reopen them under the safeway brand next year. people who have worked there for decades will be out of their jobs.

- if safeway sells dominick's, it will be without a labor contract, eliminating older, higher-paid employees and replacing them with newer, non-union ones.

now it's become a waiting game. eighty percent of the employees voted against the proposed labor contract. either the union and safeway draw up a new contract that everyone can accept, or there will be a strike.

it's funny, i've never been emphatically pro-union; there are times they seem to have become obsolete eight hundred pound gorillas. but this is one case where i'm glad to see people united to stand up for what they believe they deserve, and am proud to be from chicago, a historically strong union town.

why is the concept of treating employees well such a difficult thing for so many corporations to implement? work happy, work better. a simple concept that becomes difficult to see from the bureaucratic anonymity of a massive corporation, where the execs making the decisions are far removed from looking into the eyes of the people affected by them.