The Grocery Store Fight Continues Nationwide
 - With 400 Dead & 77k+ Infected or Exposed
From LA to Dallas to Chicago & NYC Grocery Workers Fighting for Vaccines & Hero Pay

Dallas: Union says front-line grocery workers need vaccines sooner & should earn hazard pay

Walmart is offering 3 days of paid leave if employees have vaccine side effects. Kroger is giving employees $100 to get vaccinated.

Front-line food industry workers say they’re still getting sick and should receive some priority for COVID-19 vaccinations.

Members of the United Food and Commercial Workers also said Tuesday that they should continue to receive hazard pay.

The union, which represents 1.3 million grocery, meatpacking and food processing workers, said COVID-19 infections and deaths in the U.S. remain at peak levels, but many employers aren’t reflecting that reality in the workplace.

The threats to essential workers are worse than in the early days of the pandemic, said Marc Perrone, president of the UFCW. The union has had trouble gathering statistics from employers, he said, but he estimates that 400 front-line workers in the U.S. have died from COVID-19 and 77,600 workers have been infected or exposed.

Dawn Hand, a Kroger store employee from Houston, said that since Christmas, 500 Kroger employees have been infected in the Houston area. She said that her store is in “worse shape” now than it had been, and that it’s lacking cleaning supplies and needs more staff to maintain the store.

“Kroger is acting like the pandemic is over,” Hand said, “and it feels like the leaders in Texas have abandoned us.”

She said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was “blatantly ignoring CDC guidelines” that say front-line workers should be among the first to be vaccinated.

All or parts of 13 states say that grocery workers can be vaccinated now: Alabama, Arizona (varies by county), California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Nebraska, New York, Virginia and Wyoming, according the UFCW. All those states, with the exception of New York, also grant vaccination eligibility to meatpacking workers.

On Tuesday, Kroger offered to pay $100 to employees who get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Walmart said in an emailed response that it is “strongly encouraging all associates to get vaccinated, once eligible, but are not requiring anyone to receive the vaccine.”

Walmart says it has no plans to offer incentives for receiving the vaccine. The retailer’s COVID emergency leave policy remains in effect, and it has added up to three days of paid leave for people experiencing side effects from the vaccine.

Perrone noted that Kroger doubled its profits in 2020 but cut hazard pay in May, telling the union that it “was no longer necessary.”

Kroger said Tuesday that it is thanking each hourly front-line employee with a $100 store credit and 1,000 fuel points.

The gift certificate is money that will come back into Kroger’s coffers, Perrone said, but workers have higher expenses outside of buying groceries.

He criticized companies, saying much of what they’re doing amounts to “good PR.”

Food processing plants have done a better job because they know who is coming in and out of their buildings, he said, “but that’s not the case at the grocery store.”

The UFCW has pushed for the restoration of grocery hazard pay for front-line workers and said that last week, local unions helped secure new grocery hazard pay in Seattle, Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Francisco and Oakland.

In response, Trader Joe’s expanded hazard pay to all of its grocery workers, including in Texas.

Kroger responded in California by closing two stores instead of paying the additional $4 an hour mandated by the city of Long Beach.

Article originally published on dallasnews.com