About 3,000 employees of Kroger could be on strike later this week after union leaders voted unanimously to reject the latest contract offer from the grocery store chain. As Sandy Hausman reports, workers want a bigger raise, paid sick and personal days and insurance coverage for retirees.
41-year-old Mary Little has worked at Kroger in Boonsboro for nearly a decade. She’s a department manager who earns just under $17 an hour, but she’s not entitled to any sick leave or personal days with pay, and the latest contract offer from the nation’s largest grocery chain doesn’t meet union demands.
“They agreed to give us one personal day, but we can’t use that until 2019," Little says.
She needed an average of forty hours a week for one year to get health insurance for her husband, but she fell short, and without the medications and doctor visits he needed, she says he suffered a heart attack and died. Now, she’s fighting for Kroger retirees to get health benefits, and she’s hoping for a raise in her hourly rate.
“We currently asked for 45 cents for full-time people and 30 cents for part-time. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for a company that makes $2.4 billion in profits.”
Her union agrees, noting the company’s CEO recently got a 17% raise. The United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents about 3,000 Kroger employees in Roanoke, Salem, Vinton, Blacksburg and Christiansburg, Lynchburg, Charlottesville, Staunton,Waynesboro and Abingdon will explain the company’s latest contract offer to its members Wednesday morning at the Salem Civic Center. If members vote that proposal down, they will then take a strike vote and could walk off the job if 2/3rds of members go along.
Kroger declined an interview, but in a written statement described its compensation package as solid. It cited the need to stay competitive with other grocery chains to ensure future jobs, and said the current contract had been extended to June 4, giving the parties more time to talk.