Picket Lines Mean Do Not Cross!

At 2:00pm there was a rally held at the South Bay Shopping Center in front of the Stop & Shop grocery store whose labor union workers are on strike. Various Labor Union members attended as well as leftist groups that support the strike. Over three hundred people joined the rally to hear union leaders and members speak in support of the striking workers.

Building Trades Workers Marched in With a ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ Banner

Several Democratic Party leaders were scheduled to speak including ex-vice president Joseph Biden. The event had the feel of an organized Biden rally. The stage was set up far from the store that was on strike. Workers were taken away from the store picket line to be ‘extras’ to back up Biden’s crowd. The actual picket line was left with a handful of workers and the leftists. At one point organizers of the Biden rally came over and asked the strikers to quiet down because they were interrupting the Democratic Party speeches from the platform 40 yards away. In the video below the union workers were not even allowed to be on stage with and ‘On Strike’ picket sign. Joseph Biden hardly mentioned the strikers in front of him; the video below does not even scan the crowd to show the strikers. Just a generic, vaguely progressive, appeal for people to support Biden as a ‘regular Joe worker.’ Biden has never had a working class job in his life – he is a career politician.



A number of Socialist groups distributed newspapers and leaflets in support of the strike including the Spartacist Workers Vanguard, the Internationalist Group, and Socialist Alternative. The rally had the feel of an organized Biden

Members of the UNITE HERE Local 26 hotel workers came to help the strikers win a fair contract. Local 26 recently won a strike against the Marriot Hotel company after a strong strike with strong picket lines.

This man has worked at Stop & Shop for 48 years.

The strike by 31,000 Stop & Shop workers at more than 240 supermarkets in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island is in its seventh day. The workers walked off the job a week ago after negotiations with management broke down over proposals from the company attacking workers’ wages, health insurance and pension benefits.

Stop & Shop workers have not been on strike in 30 years, and their strike is the largest in the retail industry since 2003.

The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) was forced to call the strike after Stop & Shop management refused to budge on demands that would make deep inroads into workers’ pay and benefits for both present and future full- and part-time workers. The five UFCW locals had voted overwhelmingly to authorize strike action after their contract expired February 23. Negotiations are continuing between the UFCW and Shop & Shop with a federal mediator.

Stop & Shop is owned by billion-dollar Dutch-owned company Royal Ahold Delhaize NV, which also owns Food Lion, Hannaford and other grocery chains and is the third largest supermarket owner in the US. Despite reporting profits of more than $2 billion last year and spending $4 billion in stock buybacks since 2017, the multinational company is seeking to drive down the wages and benefits of Stop & Shop workers to those at nonunion grocers such as Market Basket, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and big-box stores such as BJ’s, Walmart and Costco.

The company is seeking to drive a wedge between full- and part-time workers, and workers with higher seniority, by offering smaller wage increases for part-time workers and capping wage increases for full-time workers with less than three years on the job.

When the strike began last week, some stores were forced to close, while others reopened Friday with reduced hours, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., while keeping all in-store pharmacies and banks open. Stores are operating with skeleton staffs comprised of managers and strikebreakers brought in from other locations in vans, according to pickets.

The strike has won the support of many customers, who have chosen not to cross strikers’ picket lines. With the Easter and Passover holidays beginning this weekend, many customers are choosing to shop elsewhere, with perishable meats, seafood and produce and other food fast approaching their expiration dates in the deserted aisles of many Stop & Shop locations.

The supermarket has called in police and additional security officers across the chain’s 241 locations. When Stop & Shop owns the parking lot, as it does at the McGrath Highway location in Somerville, Mass., strikers have been forced to stand at the entrances to the parking lot, away from the front of the store. Pickets say that they were not even allowed to park their cars in the lot, with management citing private property rights.

“In nearly 30 years, we haven’t seen a strike as effective and devastating as this one,” said Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of Strategic Resource Group, a retail consulting firm that has evaluated grocery store strikes for three decades.

Victory to the Stop & Shop Workers!