Grocery Companies Behaving Badly: Workers on Responsibility to Communities

Amber Sparks

Grocery Companies Behaving Badly: Workers on Responsibility to Communities

If the divide between CEOs and working people seems to be growing all the time, that's because it is. Just yesterday Forbes announced that for the first time, everyone on their list of America's 400 richest people is a billionaire. Meanwhile, working people are on the front lines every day, fighting for basic things like a living wage, and affordable health care. You see it in every industry--and one of the starkest contrasts is in the retail food industry.

Grocery workers are a vital part of the community. They are our neighbors, our friends, and our families. They put dinner on the table, in every community across the country. They've made their companies some of the most successful in the country with their hard work--and their CEOs some of the richest--and those workers deserve respect.

But as I mentioned in my post yesterday, workers aren't getting the respect that they've worked so hard for. A Fortune 50 company like Kroger, a company that did $60 billion in sales last year, should be able to provide health insurance coverage for its employees. But Kroger, like many companies today, seems reluctant to give back to communities and workers.

United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) members George Smith and Monique Wilkerson, of Local 204 in North Carolina, had a few words to say about the subject of corporate responsibility.

Do you think Kroger has any responsibility to their workers or to the community?

George: I absolutely do. I mean, when your company is making billions in sales, how are you going to live with depriving your workers' families of basic necessities? I think grocery companies like Kroger owe their workers affordable health care, at the very least. These are not high-paying jobs, so the health care is a big part of why we work here.

Monique: Kroger is such a big company, and they have so much. How can they deny us something so little? It's just pennies to them, but affordable health care means so much to me and my family.

George: Kroger and other companies got big because the community shops there. And the community also works there. If workers aren't able to make ends meet, then the community isn't going to thrive.

Do you see a general trend in the grocery industry of less corporate responsibility?

Monique: It's happening all over. More part-time jobs that pay less, with terrible hours. I have a little boy at home, and I have to work these overnight shifts, and I don't make much. And it's not just me--it's everywhere. More jobs now, they just pay you as little as they can get away with. They don't care about the community anymore.

George: The way I see it, this is the United States of America, right? That means we're all in this together. But it seems lately, big companies like Kroger don't believe that. They think they're above everybody else, that they can get rich while everybody else gets nothing. I'm glad the unions still believe we're all in this together, all Americans. That's what this fight is all about, here in North Carolina and all across the country.

Comments

You write: "A Fortune 50 company like Kroger, a company that did $60 billion in sales last year, should be able to provide health insurance coverage for its employees"

And I agree, but...

Many corporations find health care insurance is a major cost item. In NY, that cost puts unionized supermarkets at a competitive disadvantage when compared to non-union shops.

The more effective the union is at getting Kroger to pay reasonable wages and benefits, the more likely it is to fall to Walmart.

Thanks so much to everyone for supporting UFCW Local 204 grocery workers in North Carolina--thanks in part to your support, we've reached a tentative agreement with Kroger. It looks like it's going to be a good settlement. For more news and updates, please check out our website at http://www.groceryworkersunited.org.

And thanks again for all of your help!

In regard to Daniel's comment that:

"The more effective the union is at getting Kroger to pay reasonable wages and benefits, the more likely it is to fall to Walmart."

Two things are wrong with this outlook. One, of course, is that it's not really true. Kroger and other large grocery companies can afford to pay workers "reasonable wages and benefits" without putting themselves at any real competetive disadvantage. Kroger and other large grocery companies ARE competing well with Wal-Mart, often ranking #1 in their market. And in a recent study by Jared Bernstein and L. Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, the authors find that major retailers, even Wal?Mart, don't have to make the choice: decent wages and health care coverage vs. solid profits.

Number two: taking the attitude that companies just can't afford to pay workers a decent wage isn't going to do any good for workers or for the country in general. Policy experts E. Richard Brown and Richard Kronick state it best in their article on supermarkets and health care:

"We are sympathetic to the grocers' concerns about their ability to compete with nonunion competitors such as Wal?Mart. However, making health care unaffordable for workers at unionized grocers is the wrong answer to the problem. The right answer is to make health care affordable for workers in all workplaces by requiring reasonable contributions toward health insurance from all employers and their employees."

And that includes Wal-Mart. For more on these studies and competition with Wal-Mart, check out Grocery Workers United at: http://www.groceryworkersunited.org/walmarts_impact.html, and to see how you can help change Wal-Mart into a responsible company, check out http://www.WakeUpWalmart.com.

Amber -- the link to your Grocery workers united site is broken.

I have been told, at a DMI event no less, about competitive pressures on unionized employers in the supermarket category.

Personally, I think that the characterization by Brown and Kronick is a straw man (an arguement that no one, at least here, is actually advancing). Further, I think the solution they offer is wrong. (Do you have a cite to the Paragraph you quoted by the way?)

If we tie health insurance to jobs, we ensure that it won't be affordable or portable from job to job. How will unemployed workers keep coverage under their scenario? How will non union workers get it? (Yes, union organizing would be a good way, but the private-sector union shops are shrinking as a proportion of the private sector workforce -- in part because of the costs of health insurance.)

As I see it, we need single payer national health insurance -- which would control health care costs better, cover the uninsured and help save the unionized sector from the extinction which it appears to be headed.

Daniel- you and I agree (and I suspect Amber does as well) that unions are good and that national healthcare is good.

While we do need singlepayer national healthcare in the meantime the burdon of providing it is on employers. If employers don't like being price-gouged by insurance companies they should complain to insurance companies and the government and demand insurance reform (see Rosenfield event) and demand the government cover everyone.

In the meantime unions members can and must demand that employers cover their healthcare. I think that forcing employers to pay their fair share may be the only way to force corporations to get involved in the fight for universal healthcare.

Fighting for workers healthcare in the immediate sense does not contradict the larger fight for universal healthcare, it actually supports it.