Amber Sparks

A National Grocery Workers’ Movement Gains Momentum in North Carolina

Remember just before Labor Day, when President Bush announced, "things are good for American workers?" The Orwellian statement must have sounded preposterous even to his own ears. But workers do remember a time, not too long ago, when things were good, and they're fighting to make it that way again.

Take the grocery industry. A job in a grocery store used to be considered a good, career job. Grocery store employees knew that their jobs were secure, wages high, and benefits good. There were plenty of career opportunities, whether you were a high school student working a part-time job in the summer, or a full-time meat cutter with a family to support.

But as grocery companies get bigger and bigger, and compete with non-union retailers like Wal-Mart, workers are getting left behind by the companies that they helped to make so successful. Even companies like Kroger and Safeway, who are making huge profits and competing well with Wal-Mart, use the behemoth retailer as an easy excuse to cut wages, benefits, and hours of employees. Workers suffer, their families suffer, and the community suffers as grocery jobs become low-wage, dead-end jobs.

In the next year, 400,000 United Food and Commercial Workers Union-represented grocery workers nationwide have contracts up for negotiation. And they're fighting as they're never fought before--on a unified, national scale--to make grocery jobs good, career jobs once more. Their campaign, Grocery Workers United, will leverage the power of 400,000 UFCW grocery workers speaking with one voice.

The fight is centered right now in North Carolina, where UFCW Kroger workers are receiving support from workers and community members across the country. These workers have been negotiating with Kroger management for over two months now, working without a contract. Workers recently authorized a strike, after Kroger announced plans to raid the employees' health care funds and force them to pay over $1 million out of pocket to make up the difference.

In the next few days, you'll get to meet some of these workers. You'll hear about their concerns and their struggles, and also about their hope--for their families, for their communities, and for themselves. And you'll see why it's so important to treat Bush's laughable economics line not as a joke, but as a challenge. Things will be good for American workers again--they're determined to make it so.

Tomorrow you'll meet Khadeeja Mulland, a Kroger worker in North Carolina who's fighting for affordable health care, and Nina Tilley, who's nearing retirement but is concerned about the future of her younger co-workers.

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Posted at 10:07 AM, Sep 20, 2006 in Labor
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