(Illustration by Rachelle Baker)
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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times.
In early February, when temperatures in Denver plunged to seven degrees below zero and snow dusted the sidewalks, Martin Bonilla, bundled in two jackets and a neck warmer, walked a picket line 1,000 miles from his home of Fillmore, Calif. Bonilla works in the produce department at Vons and had flown to Colorado in the early morning after finishing an 11-and-a-half-hour shift.
Over the next eight days, Bonilla picketed five of the 77 striking Kroger-owned King Soopers stores in Colorado, in support of 10,000 members of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7, putting in 16-hour shifts each day before going back to his hotel, exhausted. On the lines, he wore new boots he had bought the night before his flight and shoved hand warmers into his gloves to protect from a cold that was so piercing he went hours without texting or calling his wife, not wanting to remove his hand from his glove.
The main thing that stuck out to Bonilla, who is 53, were workers far older than he is, pushing walkers. He has worked in grocery stores for 30 years and says, “It hurt me to see people like that. They’re probably gonna be working until they die.”
“I asked them, ‘How come you’re here? You look like you’re ready to retire,’ ” Bonilla says. They told him: “We can’t afford it.”
Bonilla traveled to Denver because he is on one side of an intensifying battle — of union locals within the UFCW against these grocery behemoths that set standards across the industry.
Bonilla believes his fate as a lifelong grocery worker will be defined by the outcome. He is probably right.
UFCW locals that led a successful, multiyear fight to block an attempted merger between Kroger and Albertsons, concerned it would result in greater exploitation of grocery workers and customers. It would have been the biggest supermarket merger in American history, worth $25 billion, and its failure likely played a role in the recent resignations of the CEOs of both companies.
Now, four out of six of the UFCW locals that helped take down the merger Locals 7, 770, 324 and 3000 — are facing their own contract expirations in 2025, a year that will see a total of 130,000 UFCW grocery workers with contract expirations — 70,000 of them Kroger or Albertsons workers from those four locals. They are up against employers who, they say, are furious with them for disrupting their corporate plans. Local 7’s strike has been called off for now — its contract extended 100 days — which means it is in negotiations even as some of these other locals could go on strike.
As these locals gear up, their muscle memory of working together to defeat the merger is coming in handy. Leaders and workers told me that, to gain ground against such big companies, they are showing unity across geographical distances and across companies, holding exchanges among members, sharing skills and suggestions, and showing up for each other’s fights. When they come together, workers discover they face similar issues, particularly chronic under-staffing, which leads to long lines and an exhausting pace.
Workers at both companies are fighting together and trying to unite the unionized workforces of both grocery giants. Bonilla traveled all the way to Denver to walk picket lines even though he doesn’t work for Kroger. His employer, Vons, is owned by Albertsons, the other behemoth. “That was not a pleasant time … because of the weather, but I’ll go again if they need me to,” he says, “because we have to stay together. Workers, we need this.”
***
When Dylan Boyke drives to his 3:30 A.M. shift in the bakery of an Albertsons in Westminster, Calif., the city is quiet and the streets are empty. Only a few other workers are in the building when he shows up, usually night stockers and janitors, but those hushed hours are his most hectic, a race to get everything ready before the store opens at 6 a.m.
It’s his job to prepare “pretty much everything” for the day, he says, so the mid-shift can put it on the floor: the bagels, donuts, rolls, cookies and muffins for the display, the cinnamon rolls, pastries and turnovers for the sales floor.
The work is intense and nonstop, he explains, especially since his employer has been rolling back staffing levels, a complaint I heard from every grocery store worker interviewed for this article. “When I started in 2018, we had probably at least four people every day in the department working eight hours,” Boyke says, “but now, we’ll have three, or maybe have someone working multiple departments and they’ll help for a few hours.”
When Albertsons and Kroger announced plans for the merger in 2022, Boyke was part of an increasing wave of opposition. He was worried, he says, that staffing problems would get worse because “we would have less leverage” if the merger went through. His local, 324, joined with Locals 7, 400, 770, 1564 and 3000 to form the Stop the Merger coalition. About 100 community and worker organizations joined the effort, including Teamsters Local 38.
“We were the face of the opposition” to the merger, says Kim Cordova, president of UFCW Local 7. Cordova started as a grocery bagger for Safeway in high school and stayed for eight years before becoming staff for Local 7. She returned to Safeway in 2009, where she ran for president of the local UFCW on a reform platform to make UFCW, as she put it, “a more member-centered union.”
Under internal pressure, the international union eventually came out against the merger in May 2023. Cordova appears to take pride in the fact that the coalition moved swiftly to oppose the merger and did not hesitate to play a leadership role. When asked about the role the international union played, Cordova says: “We didn’t wait for the cavalry to come
save us. We were the cavalry.”
Some officials took notice. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and attorneys general from eight states launched lawsuits to prevent the merger, as did Colorado and Washington. Workers testified in these cases, held webinars and press conferences, staged workplace actions and even talked with customers.
Monique Hightower was one of the workers who spoke at an FTC listening session on November 1, 2023, and she warned of the disastrous consequences of the 2015 merger of Albertsons and Safeway. During that merger, Albertsons sold redundant stores to Haggen, but Haggen expanded too quickly and went bankrupt, and eventually was sold to Albertsons. Hightower was working at the time for an Albertsons store that was sold to Haggen and then abruptly closed. “I was without a job for a whole year,” she testified at the session. “It was a very uncertain and stressful time for me. I couldn’t afford to pay my rent, so I had to move in with my mother. Not many workers had that option, and some ended up losing their housing and becoming homeless.”
She did odd jobs to survive, before eventually landing work as a deli clerk at an Albertsons in South Los Angeles, Calif. “I don’t want any worker to struggle as my coworkers and I did back then,” she testified.
The Stop the Merger coalition warned that a monopoly formed by Kroger and Albertsons — the second- and fourthbiggest grocers in the country would not only drive down working conditions but hike prices. The FTC echoed the argument; unions benefit from the fact they are “separate and competing companies,” so if the companies combined (and stopped trying to poach workers from each other), UFCW and other unions would lose critical leverage.
One of the companies’ main arguments was that a merger was necessary to compete with Amazon and Walmart. But during the FTC hearings, Roundy’s Division President Michael Marx (working under the Kroger umbrella) confirmed that Mariano’s (also owned by Kroger) maintained high prices on eggs even after Walmart and Meijer lowered them, and only reduced the prices when Albertsons’ Jewel Osco did so. In other words, it was Albertsons, and not Walmart or Meijer, that created competitive pressure to drive down prices in this instance.
Late in 2024, Judge Adrienne Nelson of the Oregon District Court blocked the merger, as did a Washington state court judge, simultaneously. The Stop the Merger coalition praised the “well-reasoned decisions” and said the development would be good for workers and shoppers who deserve “better choices and lower prices.”
Kroger and Albertsons, along with Costco and Walmart, account for two-thirds of all grocery sales in United States. This consolidation trend aligns with one that extends beyond grocery: One 2018 study found that, in the past 20 years, three out of four U.S. industries have seen an increase in corporate consolidation.
Boyke is a member of UFCW Local 324’s bargaining committee and part of Essential Workers for Democracy (EWD), a rank-and-file movement within UFCW fighting for “union democracy,” “strike readiness” and “coordinated bargaining.” EWD argues that all workers stand to benefit from more coordination and solidarity across locals, and they would like to see master agreements with the grocery giants, similar to the ones the United Auto Workers have with the Big Three automakers or the Teamsters with UPS.
“These companies are huge and operate at a huge scale,” Boyke says. “To fight against them, we have to do the same.”
***
As a deli clerk for a King Soopers store in Boulder, Colo., 28 year-old Conor Hall is used to working with his hands. So when he went out on strike in February, once the initial excitement wore off, he started to get antsy. Kroger sent in replacement workers (referred to in labor movement parlance as “scabs”) to some of the stores, though managers ran the deli at Hall’s store while workers were on strike.
However difficult, the strike was transformative for Hall. “The coworkers you go out on strike with,” he says, “you come back with new relationships, with a deeper bond. You’re part of your community and bigger than yourselves.”
The strike was waged over charges of unfair labor practices — that Kroger unlawfully interrogated union members, monitored their conversations and sent them home for wearing union pins. (Most of those charges are still pending before the National Labor Relations Board.)
For Hall, staffing is the biggest issue: “People are pushing themselves to the brink, working through breaks, working through lunches, trying to meet those standards.” He’s also concerned about safety; he works in Boulder’s Table Mesa neighborhood, where a mass shooting in 2021 left 10 people dead. Hall wants the store to be notified if there is a dangerous emergency within three miles, and he wants improvements to heat and cold protections for people who work outdoors, among other demands. (The union says the company has yet to make sufficient movement on those provisions.)
During the extension of the contract that emerged from the strike, the company can’t lock out workers or implement a contract, and negotiations are ongoing. Cordova says there is also a possibility that another strike could occur simultaneously with other locals. Strikes often occur after a contract has expired, in part as a result of no-strike clauses in collective bargaining agreements.
“The company has put itself in the situation where all these locals’ contracts are expired, or will expire, at the same time,” Cordova says. “If we need to consolidate our power that way, we will.”
***
Kathy Finn, president of Local 770, still remembers the big grocery strike in Southern California in 2003, the longest and largest grocery strike in U.S. history. About 70,000 workers stayed out for 141 days, into 2004 — a difficult battle that ended in disappointing two-tiered provisions that trapped many members in low pay. (Those two-tiered provisions were tossed out in a 2007 contract.)
“All of our members stayed out, and they fought their hearts out, and the companies lost billions of dollars, right?” Finn says. “It was probably the greatest supermarket strike, but the companies held out, and they would have held out forever, because while Southern California was on strike, they were earning money in Oregon and Washington and Colorado and all along the East Coast and wherever else they were— Texas and all over the country.”
Local 770 is already coordinating regionally, one of seven locals in Southern California doing joint bargaining with Kroger-owned and Albertsons-owned companies, as well as the upscale Gelson’s and Stater Brothers.
Finn says she talks “a lot” with Cordova, president of Local 7 in Colorado. “We talk about how things are goingin our negotiations, and then we talk about the strategies that we’re using, in terms of building, engaging our members, and engaging customers,” she says. Finn even went to Denver to attend bargaining. But Finn notes, “it’s also challenging” because “we have different benefit structures, trust funds, so there are differences.”
Yasmin Ashur, 55, is a cashier at an Albertsons in Port Orchard, Wash., and a member of UFCW Local 3000, which already bargains jointly with Teamsters Local 38, though their contracts are technically separate. Beyond the local, her union also coordinates with the four UFCW locals, and also sent people to walk the picket lines in Colorado.
“Last weekend, we had two guys from Local 7 come from Colorado and join us at an informational picket training in our office in Des Moines, Wash.,” Ashur says. “They told us how the picket went over there and some of the tricks Kroger used.” Those tricks included King Soopers declining to allow strikers to plug space heaters into outdoor outlets, according to a spokesperson for Local 3000, and filing a temporary restraining order against strikers, which the union denounced as an attempt to silence workers’ voices.
Ashur comes from a big local of more than 50,000 members. The president, Faye Guenther, is part of an effort to reform the international union to make it more directly democratic, more aggressive at new organizing, and more militant overall. Guenther is open about her plans to run for president of the UFCW international in 2028.
“As a whole union, we are learning from each other,” Ashur says. “It’s union power, getting together, feeding off of each other’s information.”
(Illustration by Rachelle Baker)
On Nov. 25, 2024, Local 7 members filed a lawsuit in a Denver district court. It charges that Kroger and Albertsons unlawfully colluded to undercut Local 7’s 10-day strike against King Soopers in 2022.
The lawsuit, a proposed class action in its early stages, alleges that, during the strike, Kroger “asked Albertsons to enter into an illicit agreement not to hire or poach any King Soopers workers or to solicit any of its pharmacy customers.”
The primary evidence is an email sent by Daniel Dosenbach, senior vice president at Albertsons, to his counterpart at Kroger, Jon McPherson. “We don’t intend to hire any king Soupers [sic] employees and we have already advised the Safeway division of our position and the division agrees,” according to the email (originally obtained by the FTC and Colorado attorney general, and made public during the course of the proceedings), which was sent January 9, just before the 2022 strike began.
“It’s an agreement between employers not to compete, which is the core thing our antitrust laws protect against,” says David Seligman, labor lawyer and executive director of Towards Justice, the nonprofit labor law firm that filed the suit. “Employers compete with each other for workers. That’s really important for workers, because it puts upward pressure on wages and benefits and working conditions.”
***
The collaboration between Kroger and Albertsons is ongoing. Kroger and Albertsons routinely sit at each other’s bargaining tables and participate in private caucusing. Ian Adams, senior director for labor relations at Kroger-owned King Soopers, acknowledged this in a letter to Cordova on Sept. 19, 2024: “King Soopers and City Market as an initial matter plan to engage in legally permitted coordinated bargaining with Albertsons.”
Matt Shechter, general counsel for Local 7, notes that companies merely sitting at each other’s tables “is not per se unlawful, but it could be evidence of unlawful coordination between two companies to drive down wages in violation of antitrust law. You’d need to have more facts to establish that than them just sitting together.”
But separate from legal questions, the coordination does shed light on the companies’ own perceptions of shared self interest. They are working together even after Albertsons sued Kroger on Dec. 11, 2024, over the collapse of the merger deal, charging breach of contract.
Meanwhile, Kroger is using a lawsuit to try to hit back at Local 7. On February 7, King Soopers filed a federal lawsuit accusing Local 7 of trying to force the company “to bargain collectively, not solely with Local 7, but with different labor unions representing non-King Soopers employees outside of Colorado.”
Seligman says the allegations are “absurd,” especially “because we have evidence Kroger engaged in illegal collusion with Albertsons during the 2022 Colorado strike, to break the strike and rig the market against workers.”
A statement from the Local 7 press department says the union “vigorously denies” the allegations and “will zealously defend against any attempt to prevent the workers from securing a fair contract.”
As Cordova tells me: “They’re trying to set up the case that we’re not bargaining in good faith, but that’s not true. We are just bargaining hard.”
Kroger and Albertsons did not respond to a request to comment on the allegations and criticisms in this piece.
***
The stakes are high for grocery store workers. A 2020 Government Accountability Office report found grocery is one of the top industries in which workers are enrolled in programs like Medicaid and SNAP to meet basic needs. In a 2022 survey of 37,000 Kroger grocery workers in four states, researchers at the Economic Roundtable and Occidental College found 14% are homeless and 78% are food insecure.
Boyke is a shop steward, so he knows a lot of his coworkers have trouble paying their bills and several can’t afford to eat where they work. “It’s unfortunate, but I know a lot of people who don’t take breaks,” he says. “I’ve seen people working through lunches.”
Boyke is able to pay his bills only because he still lives with his mom. After six years, he makes $18.45 an hour after starting at $11.20. He does get decent benefits, he says, but “you need to work a certain amount of hours each month to keep your health insurance, so part-timers are left in a precarious position.” He consistently puts in 40 hours a week, but he’s not officially full-time, which means instability.
“I’m not locked in,” he says, “as they would call it.”
If workers aren’t getting good hours, their pay suffers, and so do working conditions. When Rachel Fournier rings up customers, she tries not to look at the line that stretches behind them. If she does, she’ll see “a never-ending sea of angry faces” in queues so long, sometimes she has to stand on her toes to glimpse the end. Since the pandemic, she says, the Los Angeles Ralphs, owned by Kroger, where she has worked for 20 years, has continued to cut staff.
“I’m overwhelmed, working 100% of the time, trying to put on a good face, trying not to take it personal,” says Fournier, a member of Local 770. She says she has conditions that create pain in her feet and ankles from a lifetime of standing at the cash register.
“My feet get really stiff and hard to walk on at night. I have to use a cane at home,” she says. “The tendons that have been stretched out all day stiffen up.”
***
Kroger has built its image on keeping prices low. “Our focus remains on reaching a fair agreement that honors their hard work while ensuring we continue to provide fresh, affordable groceries for the families who rely on us,” the company said in a press release after the strike.
But the company’s own statements might contradict that image. During the FTC’s challenge to the merger, details emerged about price gouging. On Aug. 27, 2024, in Oregon District Court, the FTC questioned Andy Groff, Kroger’s senior director for pricing, about an internal email he sent March 5, 2024, in which he acknowledged that prices on staples like milk and eggs rose faster than inflation.
This year’s contract fights are raging amid mounting concerns about rising prices. According to the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, food prices increased 23.6% from 2020 to 2024, far outpacing wage increases.
Grocery companies, of course, are not the sole party responsible. Egg prices, for example, have increased in part because of avian flu, as well as consolidation in food production. Prices rose during the pandemic in part because of supply chain issues. But workers and customers are concerned about profiteering. And trust has been broken.
At the cash register, customers frequently express shock at the prices, Ashur says. Senior shoppers sometimes tell her they are unable to afford food. Some grocery workers take their own families to food pantries. “We have an older gentleman who retired, who had to come out of retirement because he couldn’t afford to live,” she says. “He is now working as a courtesy clerk.”
“I am seeing humanity dying, and seeing corporations not caring, and it is beyond me,” Ashur adds. “Unions — if they have solidarity for each other — it shows the companies that, as a working people, it’s our right to have the ability to survive.”