Times Supermarket said it will begin advertising today for replacements for the 116 striking meat department workers who walked off their jobs yesterday at the company's 12 O'ahu stores.

Store officials said the stores will remain open and it should be "business as usual."

The striking employees are members of the Hawai'i Teamsters & Allied Workers Union Local 996. The workers began picketing at 9 a.m. yesterday after talks broke down Sunday night.

Other employees are filling in for the time being, and some of the meat products will be processed and packaged before they are delivered to the stores. But Bob Stout, Times store operations manager, said Times also will be advertising for replacement workers beginning today.

Both sides said the major unresolved issue involved medical coverage, not wages.

The employees represent about 10 percent of the Times workforce and the company said it did not hear of any problems with its remaining nonunion workers honoring the picket lines. Floyd Mikasa, Times district manager, said the stores also are receiving regular deliveries without too many problems.

"Obviously, it will affect our customers, but we're hoping that our customers will continue to shop with us," Mikasa said. "So far, we haven't heard anything in terms of customer service being slow."

Ron Kozuma, Local 996 president, said the company's proposal would have led to a loss of medical coverage for an employee.

"A longtime employee with a serious medical condition potentially would lose his medical coverage under the company's latest proposal," Kozuma said. "Our members feel that this issue is important enough to warrant walking off the job. This is not about money. It's about providing and maintaining a decent quality of life for our members' families."

Clifford Hayashi, Times' director of human resources and a member of the negotiating team, said the union rejected its latest offer, but did not present a counteroffer. The two sides had been meeting with a federal mediator.

"As far as having anything definitive in terms of, 'Here is our settlement offer,' we've never gotten a settlement offer from them," Hayashi said. "We've gotten some proposals traded back and forth, but the last thing that we got from them was that they weren't satisfied with our medial proposal."

The contract covering the workers expired on Oct. 23 and they had been working under a contract extension since then. The two sides began negotiating in late September and no new talks have been scheduled.

Hayashi said he's disappointed that the union chose a week before Christmas to call a strike.

"We're just disappointed because we felt like we had a good offer on the table, and I mean that," Hayashi said. "We had a generous offer on the table."

Kozuma apologized for the timing of the strike.

"We sincerely regret the inconvenience this may cause the public during this busy week before Christmas. However, we find it unfortunate and ironic that the company is in a take-away mood during this season of giving," he said.

Reach Curtis Lum at culum@honoluluadvertiser.com.

Make a difference. Donate to The Advertiser Christmas Fund.