Food Union Brings Fight To Grocers Over Paltry Hazard Pay And ‘Slap In The Face’ Vaccine Incentives

The country’s largest union for food and retail workers is taking its fight for Covid relief to supermarket chains that it says are providing inadequate protection for frontline employees.

The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International Union announced today in a press call its latest Covid statistics: close to 400 deaths and 80,000 infections since the start of the pandemic, the rate of which has increased in the last 60 days. The union says that frontline food workers are still waiting for chains to fully live up to the demands it made a year ago, including hazard pay and vaccine access. 

"As Covid-19 cases skyrocket, hundreds of these essential workers have already died and thousands more are infected daily as they serve our country by keeping our food supply secure," UFCW President Marc Perrone said in a statement Feb. 5, adding that action is critical now as new cases intensify and a more lethal and contagious Covid-19 variant spreads. 

America’s food workers—the country’s largest workforce at 21.5 million people—are also among its lowest paid and have been especially hard hit by the ongoing pandemic due to long hours in elbow-to-elbow proximity, as well as a lack of access to health care and paid time-off.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that food and agricultural workers be vaccinated next, in Phase 1b of the Covid-19 vaccination program. But in the majority of states, grocery workers still aren’t eligible for the vaccine. The New York Times projects that with an average of 1.4 million doses administered per day, it won’t be until at least mid-September that 70% of the nation’s population could be at least partially vaccinated.

“Every day that goes by without frontline workers like me being vaccinated means more of us will get sick and die. And if anyone ever doubts it just remember this: The reason we earn hazard pay is that the danger is still real. We are being asked to put our lives on the line every day and to wait for a vaccine that we should be prioritized for now,” Susan Wilmont, a front-end grocery checker who has worked with Safeway for 40 years, said.

The problem is further exacerbated by patchy roll out practices that vary from state to state, as well as distribution issues in rural areas (where agricultural workers often reside) that may not have access to the necessary infrastructure, according to Nicola Civita, Sustainable Food Systems faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“The kinds of solutions that are being favored by the industry right now, whether they're agricultural employers or grocery employers, just band-aid the problem and attempt to distract from the call for structural change that are needed,” Civita says.

The UFCW, which represents 1.3 million frontline food and retail workers, has specifically targeted Kroger, the nation’s largest grocery chain, for what it says is a “ruthless attempt to deny grocery workers the hazard pay they have earned as Covid risks increase for frontline workers.” Earlier this month Kroger closed two of its Long Beach, Calif. locations in response to the passage of a Long Beach city law increasing grocery workers’ pay by $4 per hour, an action Perrone said in a Feb. 2  statement would have a “chilling effect that will discourage other cities from doing what is right.” 

Perrone cited other issues he has with the company, including a decision it made in May to cut the hourly $2 “hero pay” increase it began paying in April. He noted that the Houston Chronicle reported an infection spike among Kroger employees in that city, with over 300 Covid-19 cases reported since Dec. 28. The chain called the information misleading and issued a statement saying that its supermarkets are “as safe—if not safer” than what employees and customers experience outside of its stores.

“Our Cincinnati stores are still understaffed. Kroger used to call us heroes. But we're not treated like heroes,” says Eric Nelson, a Kroger online shopper in Cincinnati for 11 years. He has congestive heart failure and goes to work at heightened risk every day at a store that has seen business “double and even triple” since the pandemic began in March.

“We've seen and heard about grocery workers getting sick and even dying. It makes no sense that Kroger and our elected officials are not doing more to protect us. My question to them is, how many more of us need to get sick and die?” Nelson said.

Kroger announced Friday that it will provide employees a one-time, $100 payment if they receive the full manufacturer-recommended doses of the Covid-19 vaccine and provide proof of vaccination, a move that the UFCW called “a slap in the face” for workers. For Kroger workers that refuse the vaccine for health or religious reasons, the company will offer the option to take an educational health and safety course to receive the payment. Similarly, Trader Joe’s and Aldi said it will pay workers an additional two hours of pay for each dose they receive. Kroger, Trader Joe’s and Aldi did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Other chains are offering even more meager incentives, including Dollar General, which is giving employees who get the vaccine four hours of pay. Instacart, which relies heavily on independent contractors, will pay both in-store shoppers and delivery workers a $25 stipend, as long as they have completed five deliveries in the last 30 days. Dollar General did not immediately respond to request for comment.

The scrap between worker safety in the food industry has escalated as profits have soared across the grocery industry, rising an average of 39% in the first half of 2020 at supermarket chains and other food retailers, according to a report from Washington D.C.-based think-tank the Brookings Institution. In its second quarter ended Sept. 30, 2020, Kroger reported $211 million in stock buyback. Net earnings for the first two quarters jumped to $2.031 billion compared with $1.069 billion for the same time period of 2019.

A recent study from the University of California, San Francisco found that food and agriculture workers have had a higher relative death rates during the pandemic than those in other essential industriesCK, including transportation, logistics, and manufacturing. According to data collected by the Food & Environment Reporting Network almost 87,000 workers in meatpacking, food processing and farming  have tested positive for the virus since March and at least 373 of those workers have died. The UFCW says that at least 28,700 grocery workers around the country have been infected with or exposed to the coronavirus and at least 134 have died from it.

“At each stage of this pandemic, we’ve had to really focus on the immediate need, whether that’s getting plexiglas barriers and PPE, or trying to make testing available vaccines allocated to these communities of workers. The next time something like this happens, we're going to have to go through all of that again if we don't work to actually bring these workers in from the economic and social margins,” Civita said.

Update: This story was updated on February 9 at 2 p.m. ET to include information from the UFCW’s press call, including the union’s latest Covid-19 statistics.