United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 has announced the ratification of contracts at Safeway and King Soopers in Colorado. The agreements ended a three-week strike at Safeway that began on June 15. The contract at King Soopers follows a two-week strike at King Soopers in February that ended with a 100 day “labor peace agreement.”
The UFCW has declared the contracts a great victory for grocery workers but the details show they are sellouts that sabotaged the struggle of nearly 20,000 workers.
Both contracts are largely similar to each other. Both will primarily increase wages for top rate employees while making barely any increases for those below top rate for the life of the contract, locking in poverty wages for years to come.
At Safeway the top rate in the Denver metro area will increase from $23.11 to $24.61, eventually rising to $26.11 an hour in 2027 (or $26.11 for “grandfathered” employees from previous contracts). These are by far the largest pay increases, but are still well below what workers should have received.
Adjusted for inflation, the rate of $24.61 is just barely over the top rate workers made in 2019. The MIT Living Wage Calculator estimates that the living wage for a family of four with two working parents is $35.21 per adult. Even with average wage increases of around five percent a year, the rising cost of living in one of America’s most expensive states will quickly erode these modest gains.
Wage rates for the most senior employees are the same at King Soopers, with both companies having small variations in pay for different parts of the state.
For non-top rate employees, the outlook is significantly worse. Starting employees will see their base pay rate increase from only $17 an hour pre-contract to $17.75 in 2027. For stores in Denver the rates are higher due to local minimum wage laws, but increase only from $19.21 to $19.90 in 2027. Pay increases at intermediate levels of seniority are even worse, with pay increases as little as four cents an hour between years.
Wage increases are nearly identical at King Soopers and are almost exactly what the company had originally proposed, with rates well below the top rate of $30 an hour the union had called for in its own wage proposal.
The wages structure in the contracts are designed to split the workforce between new and experienced workers and plays into management’s hands. They have utilized chronic understaffing to overwork employees and force high turnover, extracting as much profit from employees as possible and keeping wages low by churning through new workers.
Instead of fixing the understaffing problem the union has agreed to no new language on staffing with Safeway and a “test and learn” program with King Soopers over which the company has ultimate control. The program will “investigate” issues of understaffing and almost certainly conclude that stores are operating as they should.
On top of this, pension contributions will remain almost identical to what they were in the last contract, and worker healthcare costs will increase by nearly 12 percent for single plans and 7.4 percent for family plans.
In addition, neither set of workers will receive retroactive pay increases, despite waiting nearly six months for new agreements and going through two multi-week strikes. Instead, they will receive measly $200 bonuses (minus taxes).
The contracts are a major concession to the companies, prepared by deliberate sabotage of workers by the UFCW bureaucracy. In effect, the union has gifted the companies real wage cuts after isolating and shutting down two strikes. The union officials did everything possible to keep workers at the two chains isolated from each other, breaking up what would have been a powerful movement with enormous support from workers all over the state and the country.
These terms make it clear why the UFCW tried to hide the contents of the contract from the membership by refusing to give workers adequate time to study the full language.
This is part of a nationwide strike-breaking campaign by UFCW bureaucrats, preventing what would have been a nationwide strike of 100,000 grocery workers.
In Indiana, UFCW 700 have twice unsuccessfully sought to ratify a tentative contract that would have given just 90 cents in wage increase over three years and a $200 Kroger giftcard. In 2022, Indiana Kroger workers also rejected a sellout contract three times, with the union forcing them to re-vote until they “got it right.”
UFCW 324, which covers 45,000 grocery workers at Albertsons, Vons and Ralphs in Southern California, loudly claimed to be preparing for a strike, holding “practice pickets” and other demonstrations. But they refused to call the real thing, blowing past their own deadline to announce a new contract. They boasted of “significant wage increases,” but in truth it only increased wages moderately for top-rate employees and will keep wages completely stagnant for most others.
Lessons must be drawn by the entire working class: the more powerful the position of workers, the more shamelessly the bureaucracy works deliberately to squander it. Indeed, the grocery contracts were passed as the AFSCME public workers union betrayed a powerful strike by 9,000 city workers in Philadelphia.
Power must be taken out of the hands of this parasitic caste and returned to the membership through the formation of rank-and-file committees, democratic organizations built by and for the working class. Such committees must break free of the division imposed on workers.
They must set up lines of communication, organizing workers in every workplace against the plans of management to destroy jobs and working conditions and to expose the class collaborationist program of the union bureaucrats, who sit on their six figure salaries while workers struggle to afford food and rent.
Only a mobilization of the rank-and-file, independent of the pro-corporate program of the union bureaucracy, can organize a fight of grocery workers and all working class people against corporate austerity and for what workers deserve.