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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samothdm" data-source="post: 1865128" data-attributes="member: 5473">Certainly my favorite site.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Not to my knowledge.  I have a Von's Club Card but I don't recall getting any literature to that effect.  Then again, I tend to throw out about 99% of the mail I get so it's possible that I tossed it without reading it.  Regular advertising certainly slowed down (from my perception) but they did continue to advertise and put a lot of stuff on huge discounts to increase store traffic.  I don't know about during because, as I mentioned, I avoided all of the chains involved in the dispute like the plague (Von's/Safeway/Pavillions, Ralph's, and Alberton's).  I don't recall seeing any signs when we started going back after the disputes ended.  No, he really didn't.  These things are usually handled at a much higher level.  The way he explained it to me, all of the "regular" employees like checkers, baggers, etc. are required to join the Union to work at the store, but the Store Manager and the Grocery Manager are management and therefore not part of the Union.  The dispute wasn't really between individual people like my friend and his Store and Grocery Managers.  It was less personal - "employees versus corporation (management)."  I hope that makes sense.  He does have extremely interesting stories to tell about being called as a witness during hearings held by the California Attorney General and some other government and labor parties regarding actions taking by individual store managers during the dispute which were illegal or at least very much against the spirit of the dispute.  For example, several store owners allowed certain key employees to continue working during the lockouts/strike by letting the employees works as "scabs" and use false Social Security Cards.  My friend has pictures and documented several conversations with his managers about this, so he has proof that employees that should not have been working were still working.  Other managers allowed specialists, like Pharmacists, to continue coming to work while still locking out the other employees.  That's all illegal.  Since returning to work, however, people have been shifted around and he was actually promoted from "4th Key" to "3rd Key", so I don't think they hold any ill-will towards him.  This I don't know.  I will try to get ahold of him and see what he has to say.  He's at work right now, though.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Not sure if out there you understand how everything went down, but basically the Union only went on strike against one store (I believe it was Von's - but it may have been Ralph's).  As soon as they did that, the other two stores involved in the dispute immediately locked out all Union employees.  So, my friend was not on "strike" - he was locked out and not allowed to come to work.  That was the biggest PR nightmare of the whole thing.  The average person in California did not realize that the majority of the employees were actually just not allowed to work.  My friend did not vote for the strike, and he certainly needs the money that he would have been making while working.  But, Albertson's locked him out.  I know that's standard procedure, but I think the Union did a horrible PR job of explaining this.  My friend said that people who drive into the parking lot all the time and yell at him and the other picketers - "Get back to work, you lazy SOB!" and my friend would say, "I'm not allowed to go to work, Sir.  Albertson's has locked me out."  The other huge issue was what I heard from people I know who continue to shop at the stores.  The quality of help that the stores hired while the real employees were on strike was horrible.  There was little, if any, training, so nobody knew where anything was, didn't know how to handle special requests, and had difficult doing simple cash-register transactions.  Of course - I hope the information was helpful, and I wish your wife luck on her paper.  Does she plan to go into PR when she's out of school, or is this just a class she's taking for the units?</blockquote>

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