UFCW president Joseph Hansen called off the strike vote and wants to go back to the table. Exactly why is uncertain – he doesn’t like the last, best and final offer from the stores but either he or (more likely, and much more troubling from a union democracy standpoint) his members don’t want to go on strike. The poker game that started out in California is getting much more interesting now – the stores want to earn back some of what they lost in that strike by negotiating even stronger agreements in other markets (this one includes provisions on sharing health care costs AND allows future stores to open non-union). The union is not really in a great position to call another strike – they’re not going to be able to pay for it, and the California experience showed that the contract you end up with after the strike isn’t necessarily that much better than the one on the table when you walked out.
