Grocery workers, other essential workers push for COVID-19 hazard pay in California
LOS ANGELES — California grocery workers have spent the last year stocking shelves with toilet paper, dealing with those who refuse to wear masks indoors and watching coworkers fall ill with COVID-19.
Now, those workers want their employers to pay up for their labor.
Grocery employees in dozens of cities from San Francisco to Santa Ana have successfully lobbied their council members to pass ordinances requiring employers to temporarily give hazard or “hero” pay, typically $3 to $5 an hour. Both proponents and opponents of the hazard pay movement expect more cities to adopt the policy. Similar ordinances may soon come up to a vote in cities from Fresno to Pasadena.
The movement is growing, labor leaders said, covering more workers affected by the pandemic.
Coachella has already passed an ordinance giving hazard pay to farmworkers, the first in the nation to do so.
“We think this is an important, needed and principled idea and concept to bring to the healthcare industry,” said Dave Regan, president of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, at a recent press conference rolling out a bill that would require hospitals to provide up to $10,000 in extra pay for their workers.
Labor leaders are also hoping the movement will lead to higher wages for those workers beyond the pandemic.
“This pandemic has demonstrated the need to increase compensation all the time for grocery store workers,” said Andrea Zinder, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers local 324 in Southern California. “This is one pandemic, but there are other natural emergencies or civil unrest where grocery workers continue to go to work while others don’t necessarily have to leave their house.”
Companies boosted grocery workers’ pay at the peak of the pandemic last year. But most — with the exception of companies such as Save Mart and Trader Joe’s — had ended the practice by June, according to a report from the Brookings Institution.
The end to hazard pay came even as top retail companies, such as Walmart and Albertsons, earned an extra $16.7 billion in profit for much of 2020 compared to 2019, according to the report.
Grocery workers pushed companies to restore hazard pay especially as California went through a surge of coronavirus cases late last year, but Zinder said employers didn’t budge.
“Workers, who felt this was something appropriate and needed, wanted another avenue, and city councils came forward,” she said.
Long Beach was the first to pass an ordinance, giving workers at large grocery stores an extra $4 per hour for at least 120 days.