Photo: Olympia Safeway manager (right) and assistant (left), by Britt Pierro
By Brittanyana Pierro
Union representatives from popular chain grocery stores, including Safeway, Albertsons, and Fred Meyer, have recently finished negotiations with their shared company owners Kroger and Cerberus Capital for an improved workers contract. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) represents grocery store workers all over the nation, including right here is Olympia, in our local 367 chapter.
The formal contract negotiations lasted over seven months beginning April 28 of this year, and ending recently around Oct. 30. Though employees’ contracts are updated triennially, oftentimes there is little change in the guidelines of them. When contracts expired earlier this year, UFCW employee members banned together in order to bargain for an improved contract. Each grocery store chain has a different contract with their workers, but many of the regulations regarding pay, safety, and healthcare in each contract are similar, if not exactly the same. Cerberus Capital (C.C.), an investor company that owns Safeway, Albertsons and many other smaller chain grocery stores, is notorious for being tight pocketed when it comes to workers pay and benefits.
During negotiations, UFCW representatives pushed back against the parent company C.C., standing up for workers’ rights and demanding that the Tentative Agreements (TA), made in the contracts, put workers’ needs first. The updated contracts include major revisions to workers’ scheduling options and wages, as well as the implementation of the company’s once promised pension plan and updated safety regulations. With the end of the negotiations coming just last week, workers at each individual store were required to vote to either ratify the contract agreements made by union representatives, or to go on strike in order to get their needs met. After seven months of uncertainty, employees as a whole were satisfied with the contract offered to them on Nov. 1, and voted to ratify it.
The other major T.A.’s that the union has been in negotiations for are: seniority-based scheduling, a ‘fair and livable’ wage, and the re-implementation of workers’ pensions. In addition to this, there is a general concern for workers’ safety, especially during heavy rainfall and winter conditions.
One of the more time consuming issues workers were adamant about fighting for was their rapidly disappearing pension plans. When beginning their time with individual companies owned by Kroger & C.C., workers are promised a fully paid pension plan that they automatically have access to after their fifth year of working with each company. This pension gets paid into monthly by each store’s parent company and is based upon each individual worker’s hours per month.
However, since the 2008 market crash, the pension plan for both Kroger and C.C. employees was essentially being completely overlooked, leaving many long-term employees with little to no pension plan for their retirement.
Tumwater Fred Meyer employee Linda Mullen has been working her job for over 30 years, and, before the latest negotiation, was in fear of not receiving any retirement benefits.
“Our pension was going in the hole. It was in the red. It wasn’t being run. We had more people pulling out of it than what money was going in it. So that was a huge thing for those of us that are getting up there in years with our service, to know that we had a retirement [plan]. I opened at Lacey Fred Meyer’s and then I went to Tumwater… I just finished my 30th year in September,” Mullen said. “They’ve been fighting day and night for this contract. Fred Meyer’s jumped on board with the pension [issue] and cornered Safeway and Albertsons into accepting it.”
The second biggest TA that was ratified in district 367’s new contracts was a new company wide policy of seniority scheduling. “The new policy of scheduling by seniority is gonna be huge and it’s gonna upset a lot of people in the stores that have been getting favoritism,” said Mullen.
At UFCW grocery stores currently, and in the past, scheduling has been in the hands of branch managers. This is a common practice among retail stores, but it is increasingly understood to be very problematic for long-term employees. “Some of the managers are really shallow, you know? They’ll just give favoritism to the prettiest girl that they see. [Some] managers will favorite employees who work harder, or whoever’s younger and gets more done,” said Bill Keyes, a shift manager at Safeway on Martin Way in Olympia.
He went on to discuss the corruption of scheduling by general managers trying to save money in the store at the expense of workers’ hours. Keyes stated that managers will often give more hours to employees with the lowest hourly wage.
“If you get paid less, than they want you to work more. So someone else who’s paid more and works less [saves the store] money. That’s illegal according to the contract and they still do it,” Keyes said.
Shifting the control of scheduling out of managers’ hands offers long-term employees the right to create their own work schedule, leaving vacation days and weekly hours to be dictated by the workers themselves rather than potentially corrupted branch managers.
Keyes has been working at the Martin Way Safeway for about seven years, and he as well as Mullen are considered “stewards,” or representatives, of the UFCW at their individual stores. Both Keyes and Mullen have dedicated many hours to working with both the international union representatives and their individual store’s employees during these last several months of contract negotiations.
At Olympia’s local Safeway, one of the biggest dissatisfactions among employees was their lack of adequate hourly pay. “At my store, the most important concern for everybody is always dollars. Since the minimum wage has gone up, at Safeway especially, we’ve seen a great deal of price increase….they’ve done their best to pass the cost of the minimum wage increase onto the customers,” said Keyes. “Our contract pay scales are very old. They were decided years and years and years ago, and they agreed way back when that 10 cents would be a minimum amount for a raise. So our contract only pays 10 cents above minimum wage, and then for every 1040 hours [we get] an additional 10 cents.”
Unfortunately, the increase of wages and raises was one of the major TAs left behind in the recent negotiations. The 10 cent raise increase will stay the same among most employees at the store, changing only for employees whose salaries already rest at higher rates. Senior employees will now be getting pay raises of about 55 cents every three months, which is about double what they have received up until this point. Though the pay raise of any kind is a win for workers who are already grossly underpaid, the lack of consistency in raise reciprocity throughout the stores is an issue left to be questioned.
The process of union bargaining can be quite complicated, according to Tarra Reppert, an international representative of UFCW. “We sit down at the negotiation table: We present what we want, and they present what they’re willing to give. And then we go back and forth, trying to find that happy middle ground that we both are okay with. With that being said, that can be a very long process,” said Reppert. Originally from the Philadelphia, Reppert was brought to the South Sound about six months ago at the beginning of negotiations, and after a lengthy battle at the negotiation table, will only now be able to return to her home on the East Coast.
As a closing statement, Reppert urged Olympians to become more involved in the ever-increasing union battles taking place among local service industries and their company owners. “[Community support] is extremely important. Because otherwise we wouldn’t be months into this, we would have been done and over with. Without that community support it really makes it easier for the employer to push us around. But no employer wants to have a bad public reputation… it’s really instrumental to our process,” said Reppert.
As consumers, the rights of workers directly affect our access to industry. Without public community support, union workers will less often be given the rights they demand, forcing them into strike. UFCW as a union not only represents commercial grocery store workers, but all commercial workers in a range of different job fields, including nurses employed by Providence Health & Services. Recently, nurses at St. Peter Hospital in Olympia went on strike for better wages and more regulated hours. The strike process for these nurses is still ongoing, and the workers claim that their parent company Providence Health & Services does not take workers’
needs into consideration, as has repeatedly represented itself as anti-union.
