First Skirmish: Ten Thousand Grocery Workers Strike Kroger

Ten thousand members of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 are on strike all across Colorado. They work for King Soopers grocery stores, owned by Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the U.S.

When their contracts expired January 16, they voted by 96 percent to authorize a two-week-long unfair labor practice strike, including high-traffic Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day weekends.

Even with scabs staffing the stores, these holiday weekends should give the boss a headache. Amanda Bateman, a Local 7 steward and a seafood department head at a store in Colorado Springs, said customers have trouble finding shopping carts during these times, and it’s a challenge to keep the shelves stocked.

For Valentine’s Day, the floral department and general merchandise (which is in charge of candy) get hit hard. “Entire aisles just get wiped out, like at the beginning of Covid,” she said.

The union is asking Colorado customers not to shop at King Soopers for the duration of the strike.

WILL SET A PATTERN

Much more is at stake than the contracts in Colorado. This is the critical first skirmish of this year’s large-scale grocery bargaining rounds—contracts will expire covering more than 130,000 members at Kroger and Albertsons across a dozen UFCW locals. In all, UFCW represents more than 700,000 workers at these two companies.

What Local 7 wins could help set the pattern for many more grocery workers. A top priority is to get the companies to schedule more workers per shift—the lean staffing approach has led to a shortage of hours for workers, unsustainable workloads for those who are on shift, and deteriorating customer service.

Workplace safety is another priority; violent incidents involving customers have risen since the Covid pandemic began. In 2021, a King Soopers store in Boulder was the site of a mass shooting that left 10 dead. Among other things, workers are asking for more diligent notification from the company when a dangerous emergency occurs within a few miles of their workplace.

The low pay has gotten dire: two-thirds of grocery workers are now unable to meet basic expenses, and 14 percent have been homeless in the past year. The union is asking for $4.50 in hourly raises over four years for all employees. Kroger is offering such an increase only to top-rate associates, department heads, and pharmacy techs. And the company insists on paying for these raises with $8 million from retiree health benefit funds—a proposal of dubious legality that is the subject of one of the unfair labor practice charges the union has filed.

Rather than meet the union demands, Kroger has prioritized $7.5 billion in stock buybacks for shareholders—which it announced in December immediately after the courts blocked its attempted merger with Albertsons, a close competitor.

The union also charges that Kroger has been illegally interrogating and surveilling workers, disciplining them for wearing union gear, and withholding sales and staffing information that the union is entitled to in bargaining. Kroger has also flown 1,650 scabs into Denver, reportedly from the South, and has been intensively training them for weeks.

In negotiations, the company reps are high-handed and dismissive. “They say they have more money than God. They’re very arrogant about everything they do,” said Local 7 President Kim Cordova.

“They have disdain for the people who work for them,” said deli clerk Conor Hall, who is on the bargaining committee. “We’re trying to be a partner in improving these stores, but they see us as the enemy.”

On the other hand, Hall says Local 7’s inclusive approach to bargaining has been energizing. “We have huge bargaining committees,” Cordova said. “Every member is invited to bargaining. Sometimes we have hundreds of people there.”

UNITED WE STAND

The strike covers 77 stores in Denver, Boulder, Broomfield, Colorado Springs, Parker, Pueblo, and surrounding areas. Other UFCW locals are depending on the strikers to hold strong, because this contract will set a pattern.

Local 7 is part of a pioneering coordinated bargaining coalition with three other locals representing a large chunk of Kroger and Albertsons workers in the West: Local 3000 (Washington and Idaho) and Locals 770 and 324 (both in southern California). More than 100,000 of the workers with expiring contracts this year are in the Western U.S.

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After Colorado, the next contracts will expire on March 2 for a cluster of locals in Southern California. Other major contracts will expire in Georgia in March, Northern California in April and June, and Indiana and the Pacific Northwest in May.

Until recently, most of these locals bargained separately; the UFCW lacks master agreements even when grocery workers have the same employer. But in 2022, Locals 3000, 7, 770, and 324 coordinated their bargaining in earnest for the first time.

When Local 7 went on strike in 2022, the other coalition members lent organizing and communications support. The coalition also pooled resources to produce a research report on the declining living standards for grocery workers, which helped set the stage for a showdown.

As a result, Cordova says, Local 7 won its best contracts ever, with raises of $4 over three years—the highest in the UFCW. Coordinated bargaining is a necessity for taking on Kroger, she says, because “we’re not dealing with a regional player or a mom-and-pop store.”

This year, all four locals have been attending Local 7’s bargaining table since October, and they have resumed coordination of communications, research, and member actions and trainings.

MERGER STOPPED

These four locals already have a major victory under their belts: they formed the nucleus of the Stop the Merger campaign, which managed to torpedo the $25 billion mega-merger of Kroger and Albertsons late last year.

The merger flop cost Kroger hundreds of millions of dollars, and the company stands to lose another billion or more if Albertsons wins an acrimonious lawsuit against it for breach of contract. Regardless, Kroger was posting year-to-date profits of $2 billion by December 2024.

After this slapdown in the courts, Kroger is playing hardball with Local 7. “They’re trying to make an example and harm workers for standing up,” said Cordova. The company is also trying to extend the contract so it expires in 2029 instead of 2028, to get Local 7 off the coalition’s three-year contract alignment cycle.

Now Kroger has also filed a lawsuit against Local 7, accusing the union of “forcing the Company to bargain with labor unions from Washington and California” and prioritizing “out-of-state special interests.” The suit is an attempt to intimidate the local and drive a wedge into the bargaining coalition. (Kroger, of course, had already been scheduled to bargain with UFCW locals in Washington and California this spring.)

In a statement, Local 7 called the lawsuit “frivolous” and argued that Kroger itself has a history of illegal collusion with another employer, Albertsons—the subject of an ongoing class-action lawsuit filed by the union, charging that during the 2022 King Soopers strike, Albertsons agreed not to hire strikers or solicit King Soopers pharmacy customers.

Unfortunately, the international union has not been proactive in offering support or even publicity. As of February 10, UFCW international has posted once on social media about the strike but issued no press release, nor otherwise made public reference to any upcoming Kroger or Albertsons contract expirations. The international also stayed largely on the sidelines of the merger fight.

Not coincidentally, the same locals were almost alone in standing up for reform at the union’s 2023 convention.

SUPPORT ON THE GROUND

Members who know about coordinated bargaining strongly support it. “It’s all the same company,” Hall said. “The only way we’re going to get anywhere is if we work together.”

Essential Workers for Democracy, the organization of members pushing for reform in the UFCW, has launched a solidarity pledge for members around the country to sign in support of coordinated bargaining for Kroger and Albertsons. On its page dedicated to 2025 grocery bargaining, members can also order contract unity pins and print solidarity signs. And to support the strike, EW4D is helping members travel to the picket lines in Colorado.

Bateman, in Colorado Springs, has been helping spread the solidarity pledge. She says, “I believe everyone deserves a fair contract and living wage across the entire country. It would be nice if we could travel to different places and support each other and band together.”