Portland Grocery Workers Strike Together

Over Labor Day weekend, 5,500 grocery workers in Portland, Oregon, went on strike across 38 stores—and two unions.

A thousand workers at 10 New Seasons Markets, members of an independent union seeking a first contract, struck for one day on September 1, in their first union-wide strike.

And 4,500 members of Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 555 walked out of 28 Fred Meyer supermarket-department stores August 28 on a seven-day strike. This month they reached and ratified a tentative agreement.

Though the two unions did not coordinate their strike plans—both chose Labor Day because it’s a big grocery shopping weekend—workers at New Seasons donated leftover food from their one-day strike to Fred Meyer picket lines. That’s a positive first step between two organizations that have been rivals.

Across the grocery industry, many major contracts are expiring in 2025, including in Seattle, Tacoma, Northern and Southern California, Minneapolis, Colorado, and New Mexico. Workers in the independent union Trader Joes United are also struggling with a first contract campaign.

BIG PAY GAP

The New Seasons Labor Union won a series of elections in 2022 and 2023 to unionize the stores, after the UFCW and the Industrial Workers of the World had made multiple failed attempts to organize the Portland-based natural foods chain in the preceding decade.

But since bargaining began in January 2023, the company has refused to budge on NSLU’s economic demands, and has retaliated against the union by taking away many pre-existing perks. Workers have staged short walkouts at individual stores.

UFCW members at Fred Meyer last went on a one-day strike in 2022. The chain is owned by Kroger, which has faced several strikes and contract rejections in recent years, including the massively successful King Soopers strike of 2022 in Colorado.

This year, Local 555 was demanding pay parity with neighboring contracts (top pay in Portland is $4-$8 below equivalent positions at Fred Meyer and other Kroger stores in Seattle, Tacoma, and Northern California). The $3 raises that Kroger was offering would still have left Fred Meyer workers behind their neighbors—and to add insult to injury, would have been funded by a surplus in the union’s health fund.

The local had also demanded to establish common rates of pay throughout its jurisdiction. Traditionally Local 555 bargains a pattern agreement with modifications across the state, but carve-outs have left many areas behind the Portland standard.

Kroger was demanding to outsource the production of cut fruit—a huge and labor-intensive part of the produce department’s workload.

TOO FEW PEOPLE

Like most grocery chains, Fred Meyer has run in recent years with fewer and fewer workers.

“Way too much work and not enough people” is how one worker succinctly described it. This person works in the health and beauty section with only two other workers, and they’re always running behind. Since they can’t keep pace with orders coming in, they fall further and further behind on stocking—leaving their store shelves increasingly empty.

The current top pay for this position is $21.85; a living wage for the region is $26.45. Although the union made progress in the 2022 contract, this worker said, it wasn’t enough to catch up to inflation.

While workers are making do, grocery companies have been doing well—Kroger made a profit (net income) last year of more than $2 billion.

Corporate mergers have turned an industry that was once based around regional chains into one dominated by giants Kroger and Albertsons, alongside the nonunion Walmart, Target, and Amazon. Smaller chains have not been immune to the consolidation either—New Seasons, for instance, is now owned by South Korean retail chain E-mart.

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Now Kroger and Albertsons have been fighting in the courts to move forward with their proposed mega-merger, which would result in hundreds of stores being sold off, primarily in the West Coast.

Albertsons’ merger with Safeway in 2014 led to a similar sale, which ended a year later in a fiasco with the purchaser entering bankruptcy. Local 555 President Dan Clay and others have expressed fear that the proposed buyer for this sale, C&S Wholesale Grocery, will be similarly unable to operate the stores.

NO SCABS

At both sets of picket lines, scabs were few and far between.

At New Seasons, many strikers showed up to picket, and the stores were basically ghost towns that day—sales were one-sixth of the previous year’s, and most parking lots were empty. The Portland chapter of Democratic Socialists of America had helped get the word out by leafleting customers in the days before.

Some stores couldn’t find enough managers to receive deliveries, and had to cancel orders from suppliers. Workers estimate their strike cost the company more than $750,000.

At Fred Meyer, Local 555 provided every worker with $575 in strike pay for the week, which certainly helped in stopping scabs. It was much harder to effectively picket the massive parking lots, though, and the vast footprint of the stores made pickets feel much smaller and spread out, according to a worker I talked to. Customers would cross the line, though many were only doing so to pick up their prescriptions. (New Seasons does not operate a pharmacy.)

$4.50 RAISE, BUT FRUIT OUTSOURCED

When Local 555 returned to the table on September 11, any hopes of a quick agreement were slashed. Kroger still refused to move. So the union announced a new tactic: a boycott of Fred Meyer stores.

The union also announced its intention to negotiate contract by contract, in each affected city. This was a concession to Fred Meyer, which had been refusing to follow the past norm of negotiating in Portland for a statewide pattern agreement—but it could also have created an opportunity to take the campaign statewide.

On October 17, Local 555 announced it had reached a tentative agreement with Fred Meyer on all contracts. This agreement includes a $4.50 raise for most workers, amounting to just over 20 percent over three years for top-of-scale workers, and a $500 raise in the dental insurance maximum. The raises will not come out of the health fund.

However, Fred Meyer will be able to contract out cut fruit production within the stores, and contract carve-outs for certain employees will remain. The contract also moves most grocery workers to the “All-Purpose Clerk” job title, which allows them to be placed in any department on a given day.

The worker I talked to said that even a 20 percent raise won’t bring most workers to a living wage in Portland, or parity with top-of-scale workers in neighboring states.

NSLU FIGHT GOES ON

NSLU announced new tentative agreements on a grievance process and just-cause discipline after a bargaining session on September 17, but still has not received a wage offer from New Seasons management.

After another bargaining session in October with little progress, the union announced that it was conducting another strike authorization vote, this time for an open-ended strike that could be called at any time, in advance of the busy holiday season.

As an independent union without a contract collecting dues, NSLU’s ability to effectively strike depends on material donations from supporters. You can donate at NSLU.org/donate.

Paul Kirk-Davidoff is a meat cutter and union activist with UFCW Local 663 in Minneapolis.