https://archive.ph/2022.03.28-073505/https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1089110574/california-grocery-workers-vote-to-authorize-strike

The possible walkout would involve grocery clerks, meat cutters, pharmacists and pharmacy technicians represented by seven locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

  • Wertheimer [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Supermarkets traditionally operate on thin profit margins of about 2%. But the pandemic turbocharged revenues as restaurants closed and more people ate at home. Kroger’s operating profit nearly doubled to $4.3 billion from 2019 to 2021.

    In 2020, the company paid out $1.3 billion to investors — money that workers say should have gone to pay them more as they faced COVID-19 risks on the job. Kroger Chief Executive Rodney McMullen was criticized for collecting a $22.4-million pay package in 2020 — his largest ever — even as the company ended a $2-an-hour hazard bonus for frontline workers after two months.

    https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-03-27/la-fi-kroger-albertsons-strike-vote-authorization-grocery-workers

    • Oso_Rojo [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.