David Zalubowski/AP Photo
Strikers walk a picket line outside a King Soopers store, January 15, 2022, in southeast Denver.
On January 22, more than 8,000 King Soopers grocery workers in Colorado with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 approved a new three-year contract, officially ending a ten-day strike at 78 stores. The walkout was triggered by concerns over pay, health benefits, and COVID safety measures.
Under the new contract, most workers will receive $2 more an hour; some positions will get more than a $5-an-hour boost. The company will pick up a larger share of health care costs, provide better protections on pension benefits, and adopt stronger safety measures to protect employees from both violence and pandemic infection. The company also agreed to add 500 full-time new employees within 90 days after contract ratification, and to create a faster path for part-time employees to get full-time jobs.
“This would not have been possible without the support of our allies throughout Colorado and across the country,” said Kim Cordova, UFCW Local 7’s feisty president. Many consumers refused to cross the strikers’ picket lines. King Soopers advertised for replacement workers, but too few people applied for jobs as strikebreakers. The company had a hard time keeping stores open because of inadequate staff.
The victory at King Soopers was a bright spot in a tough couple of years for American workers, especially those on the front lines. While supermarkets have prospered during the pandemic, that bounty has not been broadly shared. Workers have been frustrated and angry about their poor treatment, and anxious about subjecting themselves to health risks for low pay. It has led many workers to ask themselves what they want from their work and their lives.
More than three-quarters (78 percent) of frontline grocery workers, who spend their working hours surrounded by fresh and healthy food, cannot provide themselves or their families with nutritious meals. That’s seven times greater than the nationwide level of 10 percent.
This is among many disturbing findings in a new report, “Hungry at the Table,” that I co-authored with Daniel Flaming of the Economic Roundtable. It is based on the largest comprehensive survey of grocery workers’ living and working conditions. We surveyed more than 10,000 workers for Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket chain, in Southern California, Colorado, and greater Seattle.
Kroger is a perfect microcosm of corporate America, with its rising profits, skyrocketing pay for top executives, declining wages for most employees, and heavy reliance on part-time workers. The result is widening inequality and a declining standard of living for most Americans.
EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT THE COUNTRY’S three largest employers—Walmart, Amazon, and Home Depot—but few people recognize that Kroger is the fourth-largest, with 465,000 employees and almost 3,000 stores in 35 states. That’s because the company operates as Kroger but also under 19 different brands, including Ralphs, Food 4 Less, Fred Meyer, Dillons, QFC, King Soopers, and others. This is the result of Kroger gobbling up other chains over the past few decades but keeping their names intact.
Not too long ago, working at a grocery store provided employees with sufficient income to enter the middle class. That is no longer true for most frontline Kroger workers. In 1990, for example, the most experienced and highest-paid food clerks at a Kroger-owned store in Colorado earned $11.76 an hour, the equivalent of $24.40 today, adjusting for inflation. Today, the most experienced food clerks in Colorado earn $19.16 an hour. That’s a 20 percent pay cut when you adjust for inflation. The story is similar across Kroger employees we surveyed.
Moreover, only 30 percent of Kroger workers work full-time. Few of the best-paid frontline employees are scheduled enough hours to earn middle-class incomes.
One out of seven Kroger workers depend on government food stamps to put food on the table. A similar number (14 percent) are now or have been homeless in the past year. Even 9 percent of full-time employees had experienced homelessness.
Nearly two-thirds of Kroger workers say they do not earn enough money to pay for basic expenses every month. Over one-quarter have no or only slight confidence that they will be able to pay their next rent or mortgage payment on time.
More than three-quarters of frontline grocery workers, who spend their working hours surrounded by fresh and healthy food, cannot provide themselves or their families with nutritious meals.
The problems facing grocery workers have heightened during the pandemic. Over two-thirds of Kroger workers report having difficult recent experiences with customers. The most frequent problems involved customers who refused to wear masks, were verbally abusive, or refused to maintain social distance. One-quarter have been confronted by customers who threatened violence, and over one-fifth had violent incidents in their store. Employees complained that Kroger put sales over safety and failed to back them up when faced with belligerent customers.
Kroger stores and warehouses have been sites of several shootings during the pandemic. Last March 17, an employee opened fire at one of the company’s distribution centers in Wisconsin, killing two fellow employees before turning the gun on himself. Five days later, a gunman stormed into a King Soopers store in Boulder, Colorado, taking the lives of ten people (three Kroger workers, six customers, and a police officer). On September 23, another shooter, who was working for a third-party vendor at a Kroger store in Collierville, Tennessee, and had been asked to leave that morning, opened fire and killed one person and wounded 14 others, including ten employees.
Kroger regularly complains that it cannot find workers, but it provides full-time jobs for only one-third of its existing workforce, most of whom would like to work more hours. The company habitually increases the amount of work during a shift. Over three-quarters of workers say that there are not enough workers at their store to provide good customer service.
Workers are frustrated by schedule changes that make it difficult to balance work and family life. Over half of Kroger workers report that store managers change their work schedules at least every week. A quarter of workers are told about schedule changes the same day or only one day in advance. That makes it impossible to find another job. As a result, for 86 percent of employees, Kroger is their only source of earned income.
These workers say they enjoy the camaraderie of working with others and serving customers, but the frustrations of the job outweigh those positives. Now they report high rates of depression and anxiety resulting from unsafe and insecure working conditions.
At the start of the pandemic, Kroger offered its employees additional “hazard pay” of several dollars an hour. But the company withdrew the bonus within two months, just as the pandemic grew worse. When cities around the country proposed mandatory hazard pay laws of their own, Kroger and grocery industry lobby groups fought them. Kroger even closed a few stores in Los Angeles and Long Beach as a warning to other cities.
Despite these threats, 20 cities in California, Seattle and other cities in Washington, the state of Maryland, and other jurisdictions adopted mandatory hazard pay, over the objections of the corporate assault. Kroger has not shut down any other stores since those cities passed these laws, indicating that the company was crying wolf.
THE IDEA OF GROCERY WORKERS going hungry was irresistible for the media. Print, broadcast, and social media news outlets in the three states where we surveyed workers, as well as national business and supermarket industry publications, drew on the report, primarily focusing on the workers’ housing and food concerns. Many stories included heartbreaking interviews with Kroger workers about their day-to-day indignities.
Most news reports mentioned Kroger’s response to our survey, which was to call it “misleading” and claim that they offer better wages than other retailers in the same areas. That’s partly true, but only because Kroger is so heavily unionized, although some other chains like Costco pay more.
But Kroger did not challenge any of the report’s facts about working conditions, employee attitudes, and the housing, food, and other problems their workers endure. In fact, a few days after we released our study, someone (apparently a Kroger insider with a conscience) leaked to the news outlet More Perfect Union an internal document from 2018 based on the company’s own analysis of its employees, showing widespread poverty and food insecurity. Kroger knew, but chose to ignore, its own findings.
The growing tide of negative publicity hurt Kroger’s reputation and, according to UFCW leaders in Colorado, helped push the company to settle the strike.
But only a handful of news stories cited the report’s data revealing that Kroger can afford to do better by its workers. Kroger has prospered during the COVID pandemic. Its operating profits increased from $2.9 billion in 2019 to $4.15 billion in 2021.
Kroger regularly complains that it cannot find workers, but it provides full-time jobs for only one-third of its existing workforce, most of whom would like to work more hours.
While frontline workers have seen declines in pay, Kroger’s board of directors increased CEO Rodney McMullen’s compensation from $12 million in 2018 to $22.4 million in 2020. That’s the equivalent of $10,756 an hour, 909 times more than the typical Kroger worker. The Fortune 500 average CEO-to-worker pay ratio is 299-to-1.
Meanwhile, in 2020 Kroger funneled $1.32 billion to its shareholders in stock buybacks. Kroger continued this pace in 2021, repurchasing over $1 billion in stocks during the first three quarters.
Berkshire Hathaway, run by billionaire Warren Buffett, is one of Kroger’s largest shareholders. It has steadily increased the size of its holdings, which as of last August stood at 61.8 million shares, worth $2.8 billion.
Kroger’s 11-member board of directors (including Elaine Chao, Trump’s former transportation secretary and Sen. Mitch McConnell’s wife) is comprised of business leaders with a web of affiliations with the country’s largest corporations and other elite institutions. They have served on the boards of Wells Fargo, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Scotiabank, Staples, and clothing giants VF Corporation and PVH.
ABOUT HALF OF KROGER’S 465,000 EMPLOYEES are unionized under contracts negotiated through the UFCW in 24 states. (The Teamsters union also has members among Kroger employees.) Non-union Kroger workers have considerably lower pay and worse working conditions. The UFCW has not made much effort to organize non-union members, many of whom live in anti-union right-to-work states, but the growing anger among grocery workers and rising union efforts among workers in other industries may encourage renewed attention.
As we recommended in the report, Kroger can fix its problems if it wants. For example, the average Kroger worker currently earns $29,655 a year working about 30 hours a week. To lift the average income to $45,760—just enough for families to make ends meet—Kroger should raise the minimum income to $29 an hour for part-time workers or $22 an hour for full-time workers. And Kroger should double the share of workers with full-time jobs from 30 percent to 60 percent.
Kroger now gives employees a 10 percent discount on Kroger-branded products, but that excludes fresh produce and falls far short of enabling employees and their families to eat healthy and balanced meals. The discount should be raised to 50 percent. The company should also provide at least one week’s notice of schedule changes for part-time workers and provide overtime pay if this notice isn’t given.
To give workers a voice in company decisions, Kroger should add two positions to its board of directors for unionized employees, elected by fellow workers.
The Colorado strike was not the first job action by frustrated Kroger workers during the pandemic. In December, over 7,000 workers for Kroger-owned Fred Meyer and QFC stores in Oregon walked out to begin a five-day strike during the busiest shopping season of the year. After only one day, however, Kroger made a contract offer that members of UFCW Local 555 quickly ratified.
UFCW leaders in two of Kroger’s biggest markets, Southern California and Washington state, hope that the Oregon and Colorado strikes will make Kroger more willing to negotiate better contracts when they expire this year. But in case Kroger refuses to do so, they are prepared to mobilize members to strike.
Ultimately, any major change in Kroger’s business practices—as well as those of other giant employers—will depend not only on workers’ frustrations and unions’ willingness to invest more resources in organizing, but also on changes in federal policy, including raising the minimum wage, reforming outdated and pro-business labor laws, and strengthening laws and sanctions around workplace safety and health. But shining a bright light on Kroger’s failure to provide safety and economic security for its workers is a first step toward justice.
