Grocery workers seek higher pay, shots
Near end of vaccine line, they’re denied hazard bonus in several states
It has been an exhausting 10 months for Toni Ward Sockwell, an assistant manager at Cash Saver, a grocery chain, in Guthrie, Okla. She has been helping to oversee about 40 anxious employees during a deadly pandemic, vigilantly disinfecting counters at the store and worrying about passing the coronavirus to her elderly mother while dropping off produce.
News of the vaccines initially boosted her spirits, but her optimism faded as she learned that grocery store workers in Oklahoma would not be eligible for them until spring.
“When they said we were Phase 3, I wanted to laugh,” said Sockwell, 45. “We’re around just as many sick people as we are around non-sick people, just like health care workers, because we are always going to be open to supply food to the public.
“Health care workers are heroes in my eyes,” she added. “But we are forgotten.”
The race to distribute vaccines and the emergence of more contagious variants of covid-19 have put a renewed spotlight on the plight of U.S. grocery workers. The industry has boomed in the past year as Americans have stayed home and avoided restaurants. But in most cases, that has not translated into extra pay for its workers. After Long Beach, Calif., mandated hazard pay for grocery workers, the grocery giant Kroger responded last week by saying it would close two locations.
And now, even as experts warn people to minimize time spent in grocery stores because of new coronavirus variants, The New York Times found only 13 states that had started specifically vaccinating those workers.
In Arkansas, front-line “essential workers,” including those working in grocery stores, fall under Phase 1-B, a high-priority group, but they won’t be eligible for shots until later.
“Grocers are known to have these very thin margins, which they do, but they have been very profitable during the pandemic,” said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who has researched retailers’ pay during the pandemic. “Employers by and large, with only a few exceptions like Trader Joe’s and Costco, ended hazard pay months and months ago.”
She added, “If you look at how the virus has gone since then, it’s so much more deadly now.”
Brookings found that 13 of the largest retail and grocery companies in the United States earned $17.7 billion more in the first three quarters of 2020 than they did a year earlier, but most stopped offering extra compensation to their associates in the early summer. At the same time, some opted to buy back shares and gave big sums to executives. The United Food and Commercial Workers union said that at least 28,700 grocery workers around the country had been infected with or exposed to the coronavirus, and at least 134 of the workers have died from the virus.
The tension is especially high on the West Coast, where cities like Los Angeles and Seattle have moved forward with mandates that require hazard pay for essential grocery workers — and are now facing threats of store closures and even an end to food bank donations from grocers.
Kroger, which operates about 2,750 stores, has attracted particular attention because it pursued stock buybacks last year and because its chief executive, Rodney McMullen, earned more than $20 million in 2019. The median compensation of a Kroger employee that year was $26,790, according to company filings.
“In 2020 alone, Kroger has invested well over $1.3 billion to safeguard and reward our associates and committed nearly $1 billion to secure pensions for tens of thousands of our associates across the country,” the company said in a statement. “This is in addition to the more than $800 million the company will have invested in associate wage increases from 2018 to 2020 — which are not onetime awards but lasting wage increases.”
On Friday, the company also said it would provide $100 to all workers who received a coronavirus vaccine.
Seattle recently enacted a hero pay requirement of $4 an hour, which an industry group warned could prompt smaller grocery chains to cut back on donations to food banks and charities or reduce store hours because it was eating into already thin profit margins.
“They care so much about their communities and their employees,” said Tammie Hetrick, chief executive of the Washington Food Industry Association. “Whatever they have to do is going to be such a difficult decision for them.”