75% of its workers are food insecure. 63% can't pay their bills. Many are on food stamps.
[@DanPriceSeattle's comment from Twitter]
Remember, the title says “Kroger-Owned Grocery Stores”, and the first paragraph mentions Fred Meyer.
Most of the 'workers' have to accept a certain lifestyle - and changing that appears hopeless; striking - to form a strike to get a few dollars raise sounds awesome in the newspapers and political rallies.. but it would not be enough money to move out on your own and live an independent lifestyle - so it'd be a risk without enough reward.
Even just the risk of being out of work for 10 days for these folks would be devastating in many cases.
Since the pay is less than half the living wage (in this neck of the woods) - you can get away with some things that would get you terminated at most 'higher brow' organizations.
Now the union was very helpful when multiple attempts to communicate and stop serious harassment from management was an issue.
The managers are like a protected class, and even with multiple documented discussions about serious hate and attempts to put a worker into physically (and mentally) dangerous situations over and over again - communicating this via other managers and corporate regional management.. taking the steps to hand that info over to the union - attitudes changed quickly, and it all stopped - and managers were assigned to new stores before too long (second part could be coincidence - they seem to rotate managers around stores often, and I think/feel they sometimes do such to put them in a position where they will quit on their own, or get into a civil lawsuit with people from the new store, giving them cause to terminate without 'firing'). - They have internal rules about how to label the rare 'firing', can't remember what they call it - and how it's all documented and blah blah.
So the union is helpful for the workers in many ways - but it's not going to be that helpful in raises wages for the average worker there, as kroger and DG have no problem shutting down a store that is under threat of raising wages, there have been a few in the past couple years.
now I'm sure the union that deals with the kroger truckers is able to negotiate good wages and insurance and all that. But the worker bees at your kroger are there because they can't make it at many other places, and they compete for these bottom feeding jobs with a lot of other dysfunctional/or and under 18 people.
just a third party observation from a few stores and a few people as I listen to their stories and watch what happens, small data points compared to nationwide I'm guessing.
