Grocery Update #48: Grocery Workers Strike In Denver.

Also: Canada Claps Back.

Discontents: 1. On The Frontlines With Striking Grocery Workers In Denver: Kim Cordova, President UFCW Local 7. 2. Conor Hall, Unionized Deli Clerk and Contract Negotiator. 3. Canada Claps Back. 4. Tunes.

1. Striking Grocery Workers In Denver.

Kim Cordova is President of UFCW Local 7 and a former cashier and courtesy clerk.

All photos and charts courtesy of Local 7.

Errol Schweizer: What are you striking over?

Kim Cordova: We've been bargaining with Kroger owned King Soopers and City Market for 16 contracts across the state of Colorado since October, and the company has really refused to bargain in good faith. They have not provided information relevant to staffing. We survey the members, we do polling. They tell us what they want in their contract, and then we craft proposals around their surveys. And so staffing was the number one issue in our stores and safety. But the company has just refused to provide information. They've made it clear to us that they don't believe that they have to discuss staffing, and they're not listening to the workers who have worked in horrible working conditions through the pandemic.

We've seen significant decrease in not just hours in the store, but body count. So some of it's because they've been outsourcing our work to gig workers, contract workers, Instacart, DoorDash, they have some other companies or franchisee or gig workers that are performing the work that we've historically always done. And so what has happened is the company is just using these workers to do all jobs in the store, instead of properly staffing.

It's harassment, intimidation. Workers are doing captive audience meetings. They're disciplining workers for wearing union apparel and buttons, talking about the union. So there's a whole host of unfair labor practice, union busting type tactics, so now we're on the eve of the second strike in back to back bargaining cycles.

I believe that this goes back to the pandemic. They were making more money than they've ever made. And if you look at their financials all the way up until the merger was announced, they were on a quarterly basis giving hundreds of millions of dollars of stock buybacks to their shareholders, and then they stopped to raise money for the $24 billion merger cost and the billion dollars they spent on legal fees. But it's not just that. It's that now Kroger is being sued by Albertsons for a $600 million breakup fee, as well as billions of dollars in damages. And so, instead of investing in stores like they promised or investing in their associates, they spent their money on giving these this huge buybacks, $7.5 billion worth of stock buybacks to their already rich friends on Wall Street.

What also happened in 2022 is coming off the pandemic, workers on the front lines were getting sick. We commissioned this report, and it was really an indictment on Kroger being the largest grocer in the United States, having hungry and homeless workers, and our exposure of that, as well as the unsafe working conditions.

There was a mass shooting and mass murder up in Boulder where 10 people were murdered. And we had been calling on the company to provide more security in the stores. We're seeing, you know, a lot of aggression towards grocery workers. But because of that, my local and other locals on the West Coast and up in the Northwest, we were able to negotiate the richest contracts in our history. We did good for our members, but inflation continues to grow, and the cost of living continues to be high, and here in Colorado, workers are not able to afford to even live in the city in which they work, or shop in their own grocery stores.

Errol Schweizer: What are some of the key demands for this round of contract negotiations?

Kim Cordova: Staffing enough bodies to actually be able to perform the job. It's not just hours. A quicker path to full time, more hour guarantees, so that there's more folks that could actually have some work life balance, because when you have a part time workforce, their schedules are not stable. And there's an issue with price integrity for our consumers. There's just simply not enough bodies in the store to properly adjust the pricing, the physical tags, as well as changing the prices in the system. And we've raised these issues at the bargaining table, about how our members have to continually apologize and make excuses for their employer, about why the prices don't match what's advertised, why departments are closed early. There's filth in some of the stores. There's empty shelves, but there's product in the back room. Or their investment in self-checkout, where customers are doing the work, but while they're doing all that work for less service, they're paying higher grocery prices. And there's a lot of abuse that the grocery worker takes at no fault of their own.

Errol Schweizer: How can the community support Local 7?

Kim Cordova: One is holding King Soopers accountable, by not shopping there while this dispute is going on, while we're out protesting over the unfair labor practices. There's a lot of competition in Colorado, they risk the consumer leaving for good. And we saw that in 2022 when they lost business. They didn't fully recover after that 2022 strike. We are part of the community that these grocers serve and holding this big company accountable and demanding that instead of investing in stock buybacks, they invest in lower grocery prices as well as safer, cleaner and fully staffed stores.

Errol Schweizer: If unions had board seats at Kroger, what would be some of the changes in their business model they would like to make?

Kim Cordova: The number one thing is that they don't recognize their associates as stakeholders. Workers invest every bit of their paycheck back into those stores, whether they're buying snacks or groceries or fuel or the pharmacy whatnot. I think that's a big deal. The other thing is that they have wage inequity around the country or even within their own state, where they pay workers differently. The stores are located geographically, although they charge the same price. So if the worker, if a customer, doesn't see the difference, then a worker shouldn't see the difference in their paychecks either, and that's one thing that we battle wherever we have Kroger contracts. And the other thing is to focus on the mental health and the health of the worker. I mean, a grocery worker should be a healthy worker, and we have to constantly fight over access to affordable and quality health care. And they want to subsidize benefits with low pay, where their workers are having to receive public assistance, and that's really an indictment on Kroger. I think they need to be a leader in the industry. If you're the largest grocer, you should lead, and I don't mean the race to the bottom either. They should really set the standard for all employers.

I don't think they value their customer, they don't value their associates, and they also don't recognize that the people that work for them are their highest return customer, because they come to work and spend their money there every day. I'll tell you that they don't operate with integrity. They're trying to break our strike right now. They've hired scabs and workers to come in from staffing agencies, and one of the staffing agencies they used was just sued over wage and hour problems. And so it's almost comical that we're fighting against their outsourcing and subcontracting our jobs, they've even decided to outsource scabs, And to have two strikes within back to back bargaining cycles really tells you that there's issues with that company, because this is definitely Kroger's anti-union business model.

Errol Schweizer: I'm really curious about the perspective that the lack of the merger hurt the unions, and that there are still people who consider Kroger “pro-union”.

Kim Cordova: All that was just talking points to seek approval from labor, because there were over 720,000 workers going to be impacted by this. And you know, it's far from the truth. In my opinion, Kroger's very anti-union. I can give you an example. They want to grow their business, but they fight us at every attempt to organize, and our interests don't align around that. So we had organized a unit of a small deli department with a handful of workers, and they challenged that all the way up to the U.S. Court of Appeals. And they don't respect the collective bargaining agreements. You don't strike pro union companies, right? And this is the second strike in the second bargaining cycle. And so Kroger, in my opinion, has been on a path to be union free.

And their attempt to buy Albertsons was their attempt to knock out their biggest competitor. We needed two companies of equal size in the same market to whipsaw our leverage, right, one against the other. How else do you take on your biggest unionized competitor here where they have a footprint. And so I've been of belief, that the attempt to merge was Kroger's path to be union free. And hiring staffing agencies to break a strike, or subcontract work. Their business model is more like a flea market now, where they're just leasing space out, and they're using free or gig labor to perform the work, and it's a win-win for them, and it's a lose-lose for workers.

We've seen more and more safety issues around those stores. And you know, the company should be ashamed of themselves, that not only are we fighting for more customer service and a better shopping experience and lower prices, but they should be taking care of the consumer, but also for safety. If it's unsafe for our members to work there, it's unsafe for the consumer to shop there.

And you know, we get reports of violence all the time, and they can't even agree to the simplest proposals, like notifying workers of a dangerous emergency, and we just recently had a murder take place in the parking lot at a King Soopers store in Colorado Springs, and they had no safety protocol. They didn't lock down the store. One of our members was outside when the murder happened. They didn't tell anybody in the store. The law enforcement had not caught the suspect and workers were just out there, exposed. I mean, it shouldn't be a scary place to buy groceries, workers want to go home in the condition they came in, and the company doesn't care. But instead of investing in safer stores, they gave their rich friends, who enjoy generational wealth, who will never be able to spend that much money, these stock buybacks, right? It's pretty disgusting,

Errol Schweizer: I heard that you came up through the stores and you started out as a cashier.

Kim Cordova: I actually started as a courtesy clerk. I started my career in high school and worked my way up. I worked in the retail side of the store and ran for president as a rank and file member. And I believe in having a member-driven, member-led union, and that's how we operate. That's our belief, that's our culture at Local 7. But yeah, I started my career as a high school kid. Didn't know much about unions, and now know more than ever why they're so valuable. And safety is a big deal with me. I was robbed when I worked in the store. I just want to make sure that, again, workers go home in the condition they clock in.

2. A Deli Clerk and Contract Negotiator Speaks.

Conor Hall is a deli clerk with King Soopers in Boulder, Colorado and a member of UFCW Local 7.

Errol Schweizer: What are your day to day responsibilities?

Conor Hall: I'm a deli clerk. Ours is a full service deli, and most of the delis that we have in the company are full service. That means we're cutting sliced cold cuts to order, cheese to order, we're also doing a lot of food prep. And then, while we're doing food production, it's also a very customer focused job. And then it's also a very cleaning intensive job, particularly if you're closing,

Errol Schweizer: How was the job evolved over the last few years?

Conor Hall: The core duties of the job have really remained the same. What's mostly happened is we're just doing it with fewer people.

Errol Schweizer: Tell us a bit more about the current situation.

Conor Hall: We've been trying to bargain our contract since October. This is going on at the same time that we were waiting on the decision on their proposed merger with Albertsons, which thankfully did not go through. And I'll just say that the process of the process of bargaining with Kroger has been incredibly frustrating. I've been here for three bargaining cycles. I came in right before the bargaining in 2017-2018 and Kroger is arrogant. They don't see their workers as stakeholders at all.

In the lead up to the negotiations, the local put out a survey, and so all of our proposals that we've addressed towards the company are off of that survey. And unsurprisingly, the number one issue is staffing because we've had a drastic reduction in staffing, people are doing the work of multiple people. They're not getting trained properly anymore. As a result, it's creating safety issues.

But you know that it's not just limited to that. We submitted 84 proposals. There's very serious things that we want improved in the stores.

We have a number of proposals regarding improvements to safety in the stores, outside of just addressing staffing. There’s issues like heat and cold protection. So we've gotten into some pretty cold months. The weather's pretty awful, and usually only one cart fetcher working throughout the day, in the parking lot. They're working in really inclement weather. There is no consideration of reducing the amount of time that a person is working outside until the wind chill hits negative 18 degrees, and at that point to still work up to the minute that you start getting frostbite.

We have a proposal about trying to have joint lobbying to get on a priority Response List for police response. Recently, there was a call for a shelter in place, because there was a man walking around with an AR-15 in the neighborhood and it wasn't until Kim Cordova, our union president, called the store that anything happened. And similarly, just a couple of weeks ago, there was a shooting and someone was murdered at King Soopers gas station in Colorado Springs.

And we're asking questions where's time for training, where's time for cleaning, where's this, if it's in there, why aren't we able to do it every time we're told that's not a problem. And you know, that slow roll of giving us that information, that is one of the things that we have a ULP over.

I would just point out that what their proposal does is take money from our pension fund and from our health fund in various ways that'll create a substantial funding shortfall. Wage increases of $1.00, $1.50 a year for select people who are working right now. That's only top rated workers, journeyman workers, and only in certain states and certain job classifications. Courtesy clerks were cut out entirely.

And I think this really speaks to the arrogance that Kroger has. So they think that they can get away with anything, they think they're above the law. When we were going out last time they were asked directly over the table whether or not Safeway and Kroger had any sort of agreement, and they said no, and that same day, there were emails and this came out in the lawsuit against the merger here in Colorado, that in fact, they had a codified agreement to back each other, to not hire any striking workers, to help to try and undermine our strike.

If you're wearing union apparel, you're told to go home, you're told to change while you're allowed to wear anything else. You can wear your jerseys, you can wear Nike logos. But if you've got something like this, you got your Local 7 symbol, that's not allowed. They pull in bargaining members for individual meetings, trying to intimidate them, trying to directly deal with them, to get them to come to a deal, or get them to support what the company's offering.

(In terms of levels of food insecurity and homelessness among Kroger workers) I'll just say it's like those kind of issues have not changed. We're still talking about one of the most vulnerable populations. I think that it's criminal that a corporation that has been made fabulously wealthy, unimaginably wealthy, generated generational wealth for its shareholders and its top executives by selling food to a community, has people that can't afford to feed themselves.

It doesn't matter how much you make an hour if your hours are zero. It doesn't matter what your wage rate is, then you can't live off of that. And in fact, their first proposal to us included reducing the minimum hours down from 20 to 12 hours a week, which you don't even meet the minimum hour requirement to even qualify for any benefit.

Errol Schweizer: What can folks do to support what you guys are going through?

Conor Hall: Even in the lead up to the strike, do not give them any of your business, even if you're not in Colorado, it's still the same. We're negotiating with Kroger, no matter where you are. This is a national chain, and they have national money.

We can deny our labor. We are the number one stakeholder. If we don't show up, it's an empty warehouse. But we need community buy in. This is a community effort. Come, if you're willing to stand out in the cold with us, grab a picket sign, stand with us. But even just driving by and telling us that you're there, you support what we're doing. That'll be good for morale, and if you're really up to it, contact Kroger, contact the CEO and tell them that you want them to come back and engage us seriously.

Kroger's maintenance policy is that when you have a piece of equipment, you use it until it breaks, and then, if you're lucky, maybe it gets replaced. And that's exactly how they're treating the workers. That's why they churn through them, they use them and they break them down, and they throw them into these impossible situations that are either dangerous or just so stressful that they can't last. And I think that that also shows in how they treat us at the bargaining table.

Well, I'll say something I'm really proud about in being a member of Local 7, is that we're a 100% member led union. Our executive board is all members, our bargaining committee is all members, and our permanent staff almost to a person came from the stores.

Joe Kelley, president of King Soopers, said in a statement: “We urge Local 7 to reconsider their approach and prioritize the best interests of our associates, their members, and the communities they serve... We want to make a fair investment in our union associates and this work stoppage only further delays adding more money to their paychecks.”

3. Canada Claps Back.

Canada is not taking President Trump’s threats of tariffs lightly. Canadians are pushing back hard and are supporting more of their own local and domestic products. Lots of cool stuff from Canada! Besides poutine, cool sweaters, and Trailer Park Boys. (Hat tip to my IPES homies Raj Patel and Jennifer Clapp for the below).

4. Tunes.

Canadian musicians are a diverse bunch. Joni Mitchell. Rush. Steppenwolf. Nickelback. Neil Young and that dude Kendrick Lamar dissed. Also, K’naan.

peace.

(Perspectives are 100% our own and do not reflect those of our sponsors).