Grocery workers seek better pay, vaccines amid pandemic
It has been an exhausting 10 months for Toni Ward Sockwell, an assistant manager at Cash Saver, a grocery chain, in Guthrie, Oklahoma. 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,” Sockwell, 45, said. “We’re around just as many sick people as we are around nonsick 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 grocery workers. The industry has boomed in the past year as Americans have avoided restaurants. But in most cases, that has not translated into extra pay for its workers. After Long Beach, California, 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 are specifically vaccinating those workers.
“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. “Employers by and large, with only a few exceptions like Trader Joe’s and Costco, ended hazard pay months and months ago.”
Brookings found that 13 of the largest retail and grocery companies in the country 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 early summer.
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, or a ratio of 789-to-1, 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,” 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 one-time awards but lasting wage increases.”