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Labor Day: The Ruth Shaver Story

Jim Hightower Sep 2 ∙ Preview

Just before Labor Day, FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan kicked off a momentous antitrust lawsuit, challenging the $24 billion monopolistic plan by grocery giant Kroger to take over the Albertson supermarket chain. The mega-merger would drastically shrivel competition, raise our grocery prices, eliminate thousands of jobs, and reduce bargaining power for unionized workers.

Top executives of the two chains would make a killing, as would the Wall Street bankers and elite law firms engineering the merger. It’s a textbook case of how inequality is intentionally created.

Media coverage of such cases focuses almost entirely on legal tactics and on which side is winning the ballgame. But for the 700,000 employees caught up in this merger, it’s not a game. Instead of economic statistics and arcane corporate law, the merger is about lives, family, equality, cold betrayal, and personal loss.

Years ago, I wrote about the human cost and social rupture that are inherent (though mostly ignored) in these high-flying money deals. In my 1997 book, There’s Nothing in the Middle of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, I told the story of Ruth Shaver. A proud and valuable frontline worker in a Safeway supermarket for 22 years, her future was suddenly slammed from out of nowhere by a group of profiteering Wall Street raiders. They used a junk-bond scam to take over the Safeway chain… and Ruth’s life.

Here's her story, which, all these years later, is directly relevant to Kroger’s current takeover scheme—and a vivid reminder that Labor Day is not a holiday, but a call to action...