After the union announced Friday that they had reached a tentative agreement, Colorado’s grocery giant Kroger, the strike by over 8,000 Colorado grocery workers has been ended.
Union members will vote on the three-year agreement starting in January on Monday. Local 7 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). told workersThey will be returning to work in a week.
Although the terms of the agreement are not yet public, workers will be provided with more information in the coming days. The deal was praised by Kim Cordova, president of UFCW Local 7.
“After months of negotiations and after our members walked out on strike, we have reached a tentative agreement with King Soopers/City Market that addresses the company’s unfair labor practices and ensures that our members will receive the respect, pay and protection they warrant,” Cordova said in a statement.
“This fight will always be about the workers. I could not be prouder of our members who put it all on the line to have their voices heard,” she continued.
The strike was originally slated to last three weeks after the company claimed its offer from early January was its “last, best and final” one.
According to the company, the agreement will increase wages, health care, and pension plans for its employees. The company denies this. also claimed that the offer workers rejected last week would have raised wages – even though The union statedFor some workers, the raise would have been negligible.
The union, which was at the negotiating table for months, who previously stated that the company wasn’t negotiating in good faithCordova stated that the company had made numerous proposals in negotiations that were worse than what was offered at the start of the strike. Last Friday, Cordova said that workers’ demands were being ignored by the company.
“King Soopers’ latest proposal contains numerous poison pill provisions, one of which would make wage rates proposed by the Company worth less than the paper they are printed on,” Cordova said in a statement on January 14. “Under this proposal, workers could forfeit daily overtime pay and some are looking at wage cuts of up to $3.34 per hour.”
As a result of the strike, the company has been under greater scrutiny. In a survey last week of nearly 37,000 Kroger workers – including those in Colorado – researchers found that thousands of the company’s employees don’t make enough money to get by. In a portion of the survey that included workers who were members of UFCW Local 7, 63 percent of respondents said that they don’t earn enough to pay for basic expenses like food and rent.
Seventy-eight% of respondents to the same survey stated that they had low or very low levels of food security. Similarly, 14% of workers indicated that they are currently experiencing homelessness or have been homeless at some point in the past year.
The company is very aware of the financial hardships that its employees are experiencing. More Perfect Union found. In 2018, an internal “State of the Associate” presentation informed Kroger executives that a large swath of the company’s workers were in poverty and relying on food stamps to survive.
The presentation stated that at least 1 in 5 associates received government assistance. Kroger’s Ohio headquarters is located, and a $15 per hour wage is required in order to afford rent for a two-bedroom house. “On average, 2.9 full-time jobs paying minimum wage are needed to rent a two-bedroom unit,” the presentation said.
Kroger also paid Rodney McMullen, its CEO, in 2020 $20.6 million in compensation, including an over 45 percent raise in the same year that the company cut employees’ $2 an hour “hero pay” after giving it to them for mere weeks at the beginning of the pandemic.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), wrote a Thursday letter to McMullen condemning the company. demanding that the company give workers a fair agreement after presenting an “unacceptable offer” in the latest negotiations.
“Your company is making record breaking profits that are expected to exceed $4 billion last year alone. Kroger has provided over $1.5 billion in stock buybacks and dividends to enrich wealthy shareholders,” Sanders wrote. “This is precisely the type of corporate greed that the American people are sick and tired of.”
