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Grocery store workers are critical infrastructure
63 Plays4 years ago
The pandemic has only just begun but the folks working overnight to stock shelves and spending exhausting days on their feet dealing with panicky, frazzled customers are absolutely essential workers. They are keeping our society together. And yet the workers at your local Safeway in Alberta have been fighting for a fair contract for months with an employer that wants to roll back wages and cut benefits for these heroes.
To discuss the issues facing unionized grocery store workers in Alberta during this emergency health crisis we talk with Tom Hesse, president of UFCW 401.
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Transcript
Introduction and Quarantine Life
00:00:00
Speaker
Okay, hello. I'm talking. I'm talking into the mic. Rosalind, how are you? How are you doing this fine quarantine morning? This. What do you want to tell the world? No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... Do you want to tell the world how you say... Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do you want to tell the world how you say... No. Do
Pandemic's Impact on Grocery Workers
00:00:30
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiskochiwa, Skigan, otherwise known as Edmonton here in Treaty 6 territory. We're also recording from my bedroom because we are doing our social distancing and we are not going into the office. So that's a new recording experience today. And yes, we are in the midst of a global pandemic. And for all the nervous small talk we can make about runs on toilet paper,
00:00:57
Speaker
Grocery stores, yes, grocery stores are now the front lines in this pandemic. And it is grocery store workers who stock the shelves, who work the tills, who keep these places clean. These grocery store workers are now absolutely critical workers in this global health emergency.
00:01:15
Speaker
And I think after the past week or so, we can all agree that the brave folks coming overnight to stock shelves and spending exhausting days on their feet dealing with customers who are probably not on their best behavior are absolutely essential workers and who are not easily replaced by self checkout machines. And even though grocery store workers are now essential critical workers in this emergency, they're certainly not paid like it.
00:01:41
Speaker
And if your neighborhood grocery store is a Safeway, or I think in this one case, Tom, the Forest Lawn Sobies, in Calgary, these workers have been fighting for a fair contract with their employer for months. And to talk about the issues, both facing Safeway workers on the front lines, as well as their fight for a fair contract, we have Tom Hesse, the president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 on the Progress Report to talk about
Guest Introduction: Tom Hesse
00:02:09
Speaker
this. Tom, welcome to the show.
00:02:11
Speaker
Thanks so much, Duncan. How are you doing? I'd like to ask everybody out there how they're doing, but I suppose they can't respond. I am in a hotel room in West Edmonton on the fourth floor. The general manager promised me that the room had not been occupied before. And so I'm all alone up in my hotel room here. I live in Calgary. I hope to be going back to Calgary soon.
00:02:38
Speaker
have been consulting with our membership and have been sending them. And they go home soon and consult with our membership in Southern Elford. That's good to hear. I mean, I'm staying, you know, isolated. I had some cold symptoms. I had a sore throat and a cough last weekend. I've been socially isolating for the past week now. You know, we're dealing with it. It's me and my partner and a two and a half year old in a two bedroom, one bathroom apartment. But, you know, we go out sledding. You know, I got a dog to take for walks. We're kind of dealing with it, you know.
00:03:10
Speaker
Well, I've just been kind of working 24-7. I've been trying to monitor this very carefully and speaking with all of our local unions across Canada to find out what's happening with grocery store employees in every jurisdiction in Canada and with food processing employees.
Grocery Supply Chain During the Pandemic
00:03:30
Speaker
We've got to remember here that our members bring food to the tables of Albertans and there's a whole supply chain, there's a whole
00:03:39
Speaker
sort of farm to fork process. And many of our members produce and process food, which then finds its way through distribution centers, which then finds its way into the stores themselves where the cashier interfaces with the customer. A strange time indeed, I'm not a young fellow, but I'm in good health.
00:04:08
Speaker
I walk around every day and I make my calls and I represent our members, but somewhere in the back of my mind, deep down inside, of course, is my own anxiety like everybody out there. I reflect back in my life and I really don't have a comparable experience in my life. When I was very young, I remember anxiety in society around the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember this sense of collective anxiety
00:04:37
Speaker
I remember the FLQ crisis in Canada, where Prime Minister Trudeau declared martial law. I remember anxiety around that. I remember the peace movement in the late 70s into the 80s. And there was an escalation in tensions as between the West and the East. Thousands of people were walking through the streets to try to limit the development of
00:05:07
Speaker
of nuclear weapons and prevent nuclear war, if there were heightened tensions between the East and the West. But I honestly don't ever recall in my life a time like this. And certainly what also distinguishes the time that we're in from those times is in my hand is a box that I'm speaking on right now and speaking through that I never used to have and both
00:05:37
Speaker
information is just inches away and a button away. I don't have to wait for the six o'clock news or 11 o'clock news and it's instant and it's in my hand, but fear and anxiety and concern is also in my hand. And so the two realities we face here, I think, are the real substantive threat of the illness on the one hand and all of the social, economic and political
00:06:07
Speaker
Things that are flowing from that in the context of this of a society where information and connection is so readily available
00:06:16
Speaker
It is a scary, unprecedented kind of anxiety inducing time and no question, right? And nothing, I've never dealt with anything like this.
The Value of Grocery Workers
00:06:27
Speaker
I mean, the last time we had a pandemic like this was more than a hundred years ago, right? And the news reports from that are not something that we want to repeat. And I don't know what the good segue is to this, but
00:06:40
Speaker
I think what this crisis has done is that it has shown just how critical workers are. And workers who are typically not well-renumerated, are not held up or venerated by society, but how critical these workers are to the actual functioning of our society.
00:07:01
Speaker
and that if we didn't have them, it would break down real fast. And I think it's worth providing a bit of context to our readers. Who are the workers that are a part of your union? What are the stores that they're working in? What are the numbers that we're talking about here? We have 32,000 members. So we're the largest private sector union in Western Canada. The members that we're talking about in Alberta, the workers that we're talking about,
00:07:29
Speaker
mostly, with some exceptions, work at Safeway and Superstore, Safeway, Solby's and Superstore, when it comes to talking about food retail. And in food processing, we have members at Sofina, Cargill, Cargill Case Ready, and the big processing plant in the High River, employees at JBS,
00:07:58
Speaker
employees at all email in Redbeard. So, you know, we're really talking about workers that arrive at work. And at JBS, they take a cow apart and at the other end, there's hamburger, there's steaks and there's meat. All the way through that, through those linkages, through the grocery store,
00:08:26
Speaker
where cashier scans pulls that stake through the check stand. And everything in between that you might imagine. Certainly we have other members who are being impacted. Food workers are critical, but we have other workers in our union who we represent who are also being impacted, and it's a strange circumstance.
00:08:53
Speaker
We have a difficult economy and many of our members who are working in the food business as it were are grateful To go to work and make some money right now That is a that's a difficult thing for me to say really and gives me mixed emotions because you know people need a paycheck and
00:09:20
Speaker
Some are going because they need that paycheck, and I'll come back to this later on, but there's a risk.
Union Negotiations for Fair Treatment
00:09:26
Speaker
They're making a sacrifice. They're setting their personal well-being aside, and they're going to work.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yeah, it is. It is. It is incredible. Like grocery store workers are the troops now. And it took this global pandemic for us to realize it. And and the thing that I mean is undergirding all of this is the fact that these workers have been fighting for a fair contract with their employer for months now. And these Safeway UFCW workers have been without a contract for quite some time. And these negotiations have not been going smoothly.
00:10:09
Speaker
No, we are in bargaining for employees. And we're really the only union in Canada, the only local union in Canada that is in major bargaining with food workers, food retail workers, both at Superstore and at Safeway Sobeys. Only in Alberta is major bargaining going on. And the environment is a tough one. The employers, of course, are
00:10:37
Speaker
You know, these are very wealthy people. We're talking about Galen Weston on the Loblaws superstore side and the Sobies family. These people are billionaires. They are the beneficiaries of what's happening right now. Sales have skyrocketed. It's interesting, you know, people with the shutdown of restaurants. I know Albertans like to go to restaurants. I've seen some data on that.
00:11:05
Speaker
drove down the street the other night and the restaurants are all essentially closed with the exception of some takeout or walk-in, walk-out business. And so food consumers are being channeled to grocery stores. I suppose people have to learn how to cook now and maybe do some grocery shopping that they might not have done before. But the point is that all of this traffic is causing sales to skyrocket at the same time that these employers
00:11:35
Speaker
or at the bargaining table, asking employees for takeaways. Safely, for example, wants to take things away from their employees at the bargaining table. And this is not a time to beat up on these people or take things away or ask for confessions. This is a time to reward them. This is a time to acknowledge them. The optimist in me tells me that this
00:12:03
Speaker
This could be a time in our society to realign our values about ordinary working people. Our members, they're straightforward people, very unassuming people. Many of them have said to me, we want to go to work and do our part. Yeah, we've got some anxiety. We know there's a risk. Production standards are crazy right now.
00:12:30
Speaker
You know, we're bumping into people in the stores, we're working at their social distance. They've always been aware of the role that they've played in bringing food to the tables of Albertans. And so I think about this realignment, potentially, of our values, where we may start, you know, to return to basics, where we see nobility. Real nobility.
00:13:00
Speaker
in all human work. And if there might be a silver lining in this, perhaps that's it.
00:13:10
Speaker
Yeah, and the people at the top of these, the two families at the top of these grocery store empires in Canada, the Sobies family and the Weston family, it cannot be emphasized just how incredible and ludicrous their wealth is. The Sobies families have something approaching $3 billion in wealth, the Weston's even more.
00:13:31
Speaker
And these are the people who own the system about where we get our food from, which I think we're seeing now more than ever is something approaching a public utility. And it's incredible to think that there are these people at the top of it.
00:13:48
Speaker
hoarding hoarding billions of dollars and then on top of that they're trying to chisel you know regular working people for what overtime benefits you know fifty cents here a quarter there on overtime like the sense of these these negotiations is that they've been going on for months they are not giving up not giving up anything and and everyone's still just going to work doing their job in this in this incredible kind of like global health emergency right
00:14:17
Speaker
They certainly are. In terms of negotiations, a lot, if not all of those concessions are sitting on the table with Safeway. We're about to commence bargaining with Superstore. We've been without a contract for a long time with both of them. And so we're staring down the circumstance
Challenges in Negotiating with Employers
00:14:34
Speaker
that we face right now. We're trying to act responsibly. Here's what I'd say about the employers
00:14:44
Speaker
It's a mixed bag. I certainly deal with employers, employer representatives from Safe Place OBs and from law laws who are doing some good things. They're really talking about the safety of the employees. But you know that on the other side of the business, there are the bean counters. There are the numbers people who are just looking to make money and make profit.
00:15:14
Speaker
And so they are doing good things in the stores to protect our members. We have been advocating for that and pushing them hard. They've been responding in some measure and I've got to celebrate that. I think it is as a result of our work, our collective strength, pushing these employers across this country and in Alberta to do the right thing. Um, but on the other, you know, the other side of their brain and their offices, the,
00:15:41
Speaker
There's another set of offices where there are people who are saying, well, we need to do these things so we have a competitive advantage so we can attract labor. So customers come to our stores rather than the competitors stores because they feel safer. And so that, that business motive, that profit driven motive that has made these families so rich hasn't gone away. Our job as a union.
00:16:06
Speaker
is to speak to the former of the two groups and hope that inside companies that the humanitarians and the moderates and the people who really are interested in putting people first, that their voices are the ones that are heard in the corporate boardrooms, you know, not the profits, not those who are driven solely by profit. That's our challenge right now. Our union has certainly had some successes
00:16:35
Speaker
We've convinced both, we've certainly convinced, convinced Superstore law laws to bring plexiglass shields into stores, more initiatives in terms of social distancing. We've asked them to raise wages. We've asked for higher wages. At this point, they've agreed to an interim wage increase for workers of $2.
00:17:04
Speaker
that's not enough. And of course, we worry that this won't translate into a longer term perspective on their part to pay wages all the time.
Essential Workers Label and Its Implications
00:17:17
Speaker
You see, the issue really is here. Are we going to treat these workers all the time? Whether there's a COVID crisis or not in the way in which they deserve to be treated. Again, I harken back to my comments about the silver lining, and there's an opportunity here.
00:17:35
Speaker
on the safely so beside, they have not yet agreed to a wage increase, even on a temporary basis. They have agreed to do some things in terms of plexiglass shields and additional initiatives to keep both the public and their staff safe. And all of this intersects at a time when we're in contract negotiations with them. So we actually enjoy
00:18:03
Speaker
you know, a lot more leverage than you might enjoy because the status that has should attach to this work. The status should have always been attached to this work is front and center in the public's mind. But I worry about the phrase essential service. I really worry about that phrase and I'm hearing that more and more. What I like to say is, you know, two basic human rights in society are the right to health care and the right to food.
00:18:32
Speaker
I like to say that our members, food workers, whether they be working in a processing plant or in a retail food store or providing a basic human rights for Canadians, that's the right to have access to food. And we ought to be celebrating these workers and valuing them naturally with that. I worry about the phrase essential service because I worry that the political rights in the corporate world
00:18:57
Speaker
is going to use that phrase to take away these people's rights to demand more. We see that phrase utilized to hold back workers in all sorts of industries where workers, that phrase is utilized rather than as a tool of recognition, but as a tool really of suppression. Oh, you're essential. We need you. So you must work for less. You don't have a right to strike. You don't have a right to stand up for yourself.
00:19:27
Speaker
You don't have the right to withdraw your labor. In fact, it's sort of this modern day slavery. We don't really care what your value is. We're going to force you to come to work. So that's all of this is part of the narrative right now. And, you know, I encourage customers to plug into that narrative and go to those stores, you know, to thank those workers, but also, you know, to remember
00:19:57
Speaker
Do they have a right to stand up for themselves and ask for more? This $2 an hour wage increase that Loblaws just announced, I'm looking at the release on the UFCW Canada page right now. I don't know how much details are out on this. It literally came out this morning. But it says it's only for frontline employees. It's only Loblaws as opposed to Soviets at this point.
00:20:24
Speaker
I mean, it certainly is welcome for the people who are putting in ridiculous hours and again, dealing with conditions that they've never had to deal with ever in the context of working in a grocery store. But I mean, you're right when you worry about this kind of like essential services thing. I mean, public sector workers in Alberta didn't have the ability to strike, I think, until like they only wanted in the past five years. They didn't even win it. It was just like legislation changed, right?
00:20:50
Speaker
I think you're right to be leery about that. And I mean, my biggest question is like, what can we do as, you know, regular ass folks dealing with this pandemic to stand in solidarity with grocery store workers?
Public Support for Grocery Workers
00:21:07
Speaker
Regular, you know, regular ass folks like you and me need to get off our ass. You know, it's not hard to call up your MLA regardless of their political stripes.
00:21:17
Speaker
Shop units, you know, saveline stores in Alberta, they're not real unionized stores. The Sobey's stores are not human stores. It's only the safely side of Sobey's that's unionized. You know, Costco is not unionized. So go to places that are good grocery stores and a good grocery store
00:21:42
Speaker
Let's be clear, you know, we can be critical of grocery industry wages and benefits. But the fact of the matter is, is if you work at Safeway or Superstore, you're making 30, 40% more in terms of wages and benefits than if you work at a, you know, at a non-union, at a non-union grocery store. So there still is a significant difference in terms of the, you know, the
00:22:10
Speaker
the value of work and how you work valued in the unionized grocery store. Those employers did not surrender that easily. But at a super store or a state plate, at 10 hours a week, you get benefits. You can go to one of the 20 or 30,000 jobs at Chinook Mall in Calgary or West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, and part-time workers don't get any benefits. The reason they have those benefits is because they have a union. So, you know, we should reward and encourage
00:22:38
Speaker
good grocery stores that respect collective bargaining, workers have some rights, decent wages and benefits. So we're in a bit of a gray area right now. I want to be reluctant to say that Safeway and Superstore, we should be criticizing them a lot because there's an upside to those stores, perhaps
00:23:08
Speaker
that they don't deserve, but certainly credit that the Canadian labor movement deserves because they've unionized those stores and there are real benefits to those stores because of that. This environment though, highlights the fact that even with a union, it's not good enough. And unions and citizens are challenged to push harder. Employees in non-union stores need to organize so they receive those benefits. Employees in those stores don't have the voice
00:23:39
Speaker
that you're hearing right now, my voice, or the voice of our representatives, our lawyers, our workers' compensation advocates. If they don't like their job, and they got one choice, that's the quit. If there's something happening in a unionized grocery store that doesn't seem right, they have a union to stand up for them, and they have collective bargaining power. That is more important in this day and age than ever. And so, you know, you see,
00:24:08
Speaker
unions across Canada, being in the media and in the front lines, speaking up for their workers during this time. In the non-union world, employees do not have those rights and do not have that voice. And that union, non-union, grocery store distinction, I think is really important, especially when you look at what Sophie Safeway has done in other provinces, right? They have used these discount, fresh co-locations to slash wages and benefits.
00:24:34
Speaker
for the workers at those locations compared to the unionized locations. And I imagine that's something that's coming up in contract negotiations right now, right? Certainly. If there's one thing the citizenry like us, I can't remember what you called us, us asses or as customers, we are concerned in a more stratified society when gaps between rich and poor is bigger than ever. We used to say back in the day,
00:25:01
Speaker
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And that just never seems to stop. So people, working people, lots of people are looking for a deal. And so what's happening in the retail food industry is employers are looking to take advantage of that so-called discount market. And sobies in Western Canada has been looking to introduce a store called Beshco.
00:25:30
Speaker
What our union has been saying is, okay, fine. Maybe there's room for some discounters. Maybe there's some room for some discount grocery stores in society. That's fine. But we have to be very careful about the price that we're prepared to pay for that. So in those stores, we're going to try in Alberta to negotiate that workers still have rights, that workers still have decent wages, and workers still have human benefits.
Good Grocery Store Initiative
00:25:59
Speaker
They're, of course, pushing for a model that would suggest that these stores almost be operated like they were non-using stores without appropriate wages and benefits. We're opposing that, and we're fighting hard to ensure that if the new banner or new brand of grocery store opens in Alberta, that it's a good grocery store. We have a website, goodgroceries.ca, Duncan, where we really encourage people to go to that site
00:26:30
Speaker
learn about what a good grocery store is about. It's like a video game. You push a grocery cart through down grocery store aisle. If you select items, you'll get some messaging and you can win $250 in free groceries by doing that at a unionized grocery store. We also have a campaign. You'll see these good grocery store bags, reusable bags around town. Right now, we're not encouraging people to use reusable bags, of course,
00:27:00
Speaker
because of the exposure of the surfaces. We've lobbied our employers to make plastic bags free, at least right now, so that people are not being exposed to used and reused surfaces in the current environment. It's a very, very tricky time in terms of
00:27:31
Speaker
finding a balance between preserving our wellbeing and the health of society, it's really life and death. I mean, our members every day that are going to grocery stores, just like people who are working in hospitals and clinics, people who are working in healthcare, these people, the nobility of their work, the nobility of all human work. Again, I would repeat what I said earlier,
00:28:00
Speaker
If there is a silver lining here, we might be hitting the pause button in society and hopefully reminding ourselves of the key message. And I'm hoping that that message will resonate and be enduring, that there is mobility and value in working people and the services that they bring to keep society operating.
00:28:27
Speaker
I mean, I think that's the biggest thing that I'm learning and that broader society is learning from this pandemic, right? It's that it's the grocery store workers, the janitors, the nurses, the lab techs who are actually holding society together and preventing what we have from
Essential Workers vs. Corporate Leaders
00:28:42
Speaker
collapsing. It's not the bankers, the CEOs, the bosses, they are not holding our society together. And fundamentally, once we realize that, then we realize that it's us who has the power.
00:28:53
Speaker
and that by coming together, standing together, we can keep building that power for the working class. Tom, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and explain just what's going on with your members right now. We're going to put that Good Groceries link in our show notes. Is there any other message you'd have for our audience for them to take away from this? Anything to plug? Any website to visit? Anything? Any advice? We have a message to all the activists
00:29:23
Speaker
all out there. I'm personally torn. I've gone and visited some workplaces. I've practiced social distancing. I've done it in a very limited way. On the one hand, I have people who are saying to me, saying to me, you need to be physically visible. Others saying, are you crazy? You can't be wandering from workplace to workplace. You're exposing yourself.
00:29:50
Speaker
And I guess you could potentially be spreading something. What I would say to activists out there is, do practice social distancing. Do do everything you can to keep your friends and your family safe. But I would say, when you're going to the grocery store and everyone's gonna do it, say something to these people. When you're with a healthcare professional, say something to these people.
00:30:20
Speaker
kindness, empathy, compassion, real human voice. You can't look someone in the eyes, pick up the phone, let them hear your voice, emails, texts, technology, nothing wrong with that, the world we live in, but hear each other's voices.
00:30:46
Speaker
And we do have social interaction, albeit at a distance. Be kind and thank you.
00:30:56
Speaker
Okay, well thank you so much, Tom, for coming on the show.
Supporting the Podcast
00:30:59
Speaker
And thank you for that message. Folks, if you like this podcast, you want to keep hearing this podcast, you want more people to listen to this podcast. There are a few things you can do to help out as well. By all means, please share it. Share it over social media. You can create a mixtape, pass that along via through the mail. I don't really care how you do it.
00:31:19
Speaker
But word of mouth is the best way to kind of grow the audience. The other big thing you can do to help this podcast is you can give us money. You can join the 250 other folks who help keep this independent media project going by going to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, putting in your credit card and giving us anywhere from five to $15 a month. That goes a long way, that kind of steady monthly contribution.
00:31:42
Speaker
Also, we've got something up right now on our website, on our social media platforms, which you can find and use right now. We have got an email tool. So just go to our internet, go to our Facebook account or go to our Twitter account. It's our pinned tweet. It's our pinned Facebook post. It's our paid sick leave letter tool. Fill it out real fast. It takes 20 seconds to put in your name, your email address, and fire off an email to your MLA that there needs to be actual paid sick leave right now. The UCP have
00:32:11
Speaker
Uh, waffled on this. They initially said they were going to, and now it doesn't look like they have, they've walked back their initial promise. We need to keep up the pressure on these, on these, uh, I was going to say something worse, but I mean, I swear on this podcast all the time on these motherfuckers. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear about, I am on Twitter. You can reach me on Twitter at Duncan Kinney. And you can also reach me by email at Duncan K at progress, Alberta.ca. Thanks so much to cosmic family communist for the amazing theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.
00:32:42
Speaker
Did you know that Progress Alberta is part of a national community of leftist podcasts on the Ricochet Podcast Network? You can find the Alberta Advantage, 49th Parahel, Kino Lefter, Well Reds, The Progress Report, Laffy Sales, Out of Left Field, and Unpacking the News, as well as a bunch of other awesome podcasts at Ricochet Media or wherever you download your podcasts.