The Nation: ‘Want a Better Grocery Store? Support Union Workers.’
Originally published in The Nation
By Ella Fanger
Workers are on the front lines of an increasingly bleak shopping experience, and they bear the costs of understaffing, underinvestment in facilities, and feeble safety measures.
via UFCW Local 7 on Facebook
At the King Soopers store in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, pallets of still-wrapped goods crowd the floor with their corresponding shelves left empty. On a typical day, just one or two registers are open, leaving customers waiting in a line stretching to the store’s back wall. The skeleton crew of store clerks hustle to pack an ever-growing queue of online orders for pickup, rushing against a 23-second countdown to collect each item. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mavis Austin, who normally works as a cheesemonger, was the only person loading pickup orders, because everyone else in her department had gotten sick or quit. “This corporation will grind you down to a pulp,” she told me.
Austin’s store in the Denver suburbs is not an anomaly among grocery stores in Colorado, or even across the country. Grocery workers are on the front lines of the bleak shopping experience in stores owned by just a few industry giants, and they bear the physical and mental costs of chronic understaffing, underinvestment in facilities, and often feeble safety measures. When the contract for 10,000 members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 7 who work at King Soopers, which is owned by Kroger, expired in mid-January, 96 percent of workers voted to authorize an unfair labor practice strike. Local 7’s unfair labor practice charges allege that Kroger has refused to provide the union with sales data that would allow it to formulate a proposal on staffing levels and has disciplined workers for union activity. The union also says the company illegally insisted on pulling $8 million from workers’ retiree benefit fund to pay for raises in its last offer.
For two weeks, workers braved temperatures reaching 16 degrees below zero during the busy Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day weekends, calling on the company to meet their demands to increase staffing, raise wages, and enhance safety measures. “All of us were unanimously in agreement that this needed to happen because the company was never going to be held accountable,” said Kay Lyska, who has worked at a King Soopers store near Denver for five years.
Grocery workers nationwide are watching Local 7’s fight, which will set the standard for their own negotiations in the coming months. The Colorado strike marked the first of a cascade of contract expirations for more than 130,000 grocery workers between now and June in California, Washington, Georgia, and beyond. While UFCW locals across the country negotiate their contracts separately, Local 7 is part of a coalition trying to build industry-wide leverage by discussing proposals and attending each other’s bargaining sessions.
“Eric Marcuz, a 15-year employee of Safeway (which is owned by Albertsons) in Northern California, came to Denver with Essential Workers for Democracy, a reform caucus within the UFCW. He’d never heard of King Soopers before. ‘But I know they’re owned by Kroger, and I hope somebody that works for them can afford their bills, can afford their rent,’ he said. ‘And if I have to stand here next to them until they do, I will.’”
Last year that coalition worked with other union locals and community groups to successfully halt the $25 billion mega-merger between Kroger and Albertsons. Since Albertsons announced that it was killing the merger in December, workers say Kroger’s bargaining proposals have felt retaliatory. “There was big money for them in this,” said Kim Cordova, the president of Local 7. “They’re going to take it out on whoever they can so that they can repay their shareholders’ money.”
Local 7 workers are bargaining with Kroger for a living wage as the company hits astronomical earnings. In September 2024, Kroger reported year-to-date earnings of $1.4 billion, nearly doubling since 2023. During testimony before the Federal Trade Commission over the merger, Andy Groff, Kroger’s senior director for pricing, admitted that the company was raising prices on eggs and milk above inflation levels. “While the company continued to raise prices, they continued to reduce staff,” said Cordova. “They were not investing in safety, in new equipment, in adding bodies or hours to the stores.”
The union is also asking Kroger to notify workers of dangerous incidents within a certain distance of stores. Some of the workers who went on strike in February survived the 2021 mass shooting at a King Soopers store in Boulder in which 10 people were killed. During negotiations, there was a shooting in a King Soopers parking lot in Colorado Springs, which the union says King Soopers did not alert employees of.
This year Local 7 will make contract proposals around staffing for the first time—as stores increasingly rely on self-checkout and e-commerce. While stores used to have dedicated clerks for different departments, now most positions are “all-purpose,” and workers are routinely pulled to different parts of the store. “Most of us are fried,” said Chris Lacey, who works at a King Soopers store in Littleton, a Denver suburb. “No reasonable human being can sustain what they want us to sustain.”
Grocery Workers Rising, a coalition of seven Southern California locals, including 770 that bargain together and have the same contract, say their stores are just as understaffed as those in Colorado. A report by John Marshall, the capital strategies director for UFCW Local 3000 in the Pacific Northwest, found that over 76 percent of Local 770 members said their stores were understaffed. According to OSHA data, annual labor hours per Kroger store in California decreased 13.5 percent from 2019 to 2023. “These companies are making a choice for the very short term to get as much profit as possible,” said Kathy Finn, president of Local 770. “They’re taking that profit and just giving it back to shareholders.”
Fournier says she currently makes $2,400 a month, while the median rent in Los Angeles is more than $2,000. Paszion Horner-Smith, a 28-year UFCW member who works at a Vons store, owned by Albertsons, in Granada Hills, told me, “We can barely afford to buy the groceries in the places we work.”
