Tag: Low wages

More Than 8,000 Kroger Grocery Workers Strike In Colorado

On the heels of a new report showing significant financial insecurity, including homelessness, among workers at Kroger grocery stores, more than 8,000 of the chain’s employees in Colorado went on strike Wednesday to demand fair wages and better healthcare benefits.

Amid a recent wave of successful strikes at companies including John Deere and Kellogg’s, the work stoppage is taking place at nearly 80 King Sooper grocery stores, which are owned by the Kroger Company, across the Denver metropolitan area. According to the Colorado Sun, 10 additional stores in Colorado Springs could also go on strike in the coming weeks.

The workers’ union, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, rejected the company’s “best and final offer” on Tuesday, saying the $84 billion company did not offer enough for employees to afford basic necessities.

Retail Workers Are Organizing And Speaking Out

In a petition Indianapolis Target employee Andrew Stacy drafted, one of the key demands is for a minimum $17 per hour, but when Stacy and their coworker were posting the flyers in the break room and distributing them, they were caught. Management confiscated the flyers and human resources held one-on-one meetings with workers about working conditions and higher-ups at the location—a move that Stacy saw as an illegal effort to shut down organizing and find out more about the union activity. In response, they filed a National Labor Review Board complaint on Dec. 15. Prism has reached out to Target for comment on the concerns raised by workers as well as the complaint.

Finance and the Economy Low wages Retail Worker Rights and Jobs

Workers At HelloFresh Speak Up Against Anti-Union Scare Tactics

Facing unlivable wages, higher-than-average injury rates, and a union-busting campaign, workers at two HelloFresh factories are pushing forward union drives. If successful, workers would form the first union in the nation’s growing meal-kit industry. Around 400 workers in Aurora, Colorado are currently casting votes, which are set to be counted on November 22. Another 850 workers in Richmond, California will receive ballots by November 18. In a petition to the company, workers say that while HelloFresh “profited from the pandemic, employees faced disrespect, a COVID-19 outbreak, and preventable injuries.”

According to data collected by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 2020, the incidence rate of recordable illnesses and injuries at the Richmond factory was over three times the standard rate of the warehousing and transportation industry and five times the rate of all private companies combined.

HelloFresh Low wages Unions Worker Rights and Jobs

Union Victory For NOLA City Workers As Council Ratifies $15 Minimum Wage

On Oct. 7, the New Orleans City Council ratified a $15-an-hour minimum wage for city workers, effective in January. This will be $3.81 more than the paltry $11.19 minimum currently in place.

Because of sky-rocketing inflation, $15 dollars doesn’t go as far as it did even a few months ago. Nevertheless, the raise is a major victory for the working-class movement here, and will be welcomed by city workers struggling to make ends meet.

As reported in Struggle-La Lucha back in July, the council was forced to move forward when the firefighters’ union and allies marched into the chambers on July 1, right in the middle of a session. When put on the spot, the council members voted unanimously that they would find the money for a raise. Now it’s official.

Fight for 15 Low wages New Orleans Worker Rights and Jobs

Group Home Workers Launch Strike Against Low Wages And Benefits

Group home workers in Connecticut went on strike on Tuesday morning after talks with their employer, Sunrise Northeast, broke down. The workers are demanding higher wages, affordable health benefits and pensions.

Sunrise runs 28 group home and day care programs for the intellectually disabled throughout Connecticut. Workers formed picket lines in front of the company’s homes in New London, Hartford, Danielson and Columbia.

The workers’ responsibilities include helping residents to shower and dress and reminding them to take their medication. Like other health care workers, the group home workers have been risking their health and lives during the pandemic. As of October 13, Connecticut had recorded 2,907 new coronavirus cases and one new death during the previous week. To date, the state has seen 8,667 deaths.

Health Care Low wages Strike Worker Rights and Jobs

Entire Staff Of A Burrito Restaurant In Georgia Quit

The staff of a burrito restaurant in Georgia quit by posting a sign claiming they had worked seven days a week for a month with “barely any time off.”

Employees at the Barberitos restaurant on New Street in Macon, central Georgia, said they quit over “pay” and “lack of appreciation,” per a photo of the sign shared on Facebook that was first reported by WGXA News.

“We have worked 7 days a week for the past month and barely any time off. We are so sorry and love you all! old Barbs family, out,” the sign read.

A spokesperson for Barberitos, which has 50 branches across southeastern states, confirmed the sign’s existence to WGXA, and said the staff’s claim that they’d worked seven days straight for a month was “simply not true.”

Low wages Restaurants Solidarity Worker Rights

Restaurant Workers Protest Poor Working Conditions And Low Wages

Food service workers are putting renewed pressure on their employers for better working conditions and wages.

Businesses across the country are blaming a “workforce shortage” for being understaffed or closed. But workers in the industry say poor labor practices are pushing potential employees away.

“It’s stressful working for a billion-dollar company when they’re not caring for the workers,” said Ieshia Townsend, a McDonald’s employee in Chicago, Illinois. She has worked at the McDonald’s location since 2015. “Even during COVID-19, we had to literally go on strike just for masks, just for gloves, just for supplies and protection to protect the workers, which should have been set in place.”

Signs have been taped to the doors, drive-thru speakers and facades of fast-food and fast-casual restaurants with descriptions of long workdays, no lunch breaks and poor pay to accommodate for the risk of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

COVID-19 Low wages Restaurants Worker Rights

Service Workers Aren’t Lazy — They Don’t Want To Risk Dying

Business owners around the country are offering up a lament: “no one wants to work.” A McDonalds franchise said they had to close because no one wants to work; North Carolina congressman David Rouzer claimed that a too-generous welfare state has turned us all lazy as he circulated photos of a shuttered fast-food restaurant supposedly closed “due to NO STAFF.”

Most of these complaints seem to be coming from franchised restaurants. Why? Well, it’s not complicated. Service workers didn’t decide one day to stop working — rather huge numbers of them cannot work anymore. Because they’ve died of coronavirus.

A recent study from the University of California–San Francisco looks at increased morbidity rates due to COVID, stratified by profession, from the height of the pandemic last year.

COVID-19 Essential workers Low wages Restaurants

Report Finds Low Wages Make Food Workers Want To Quit

Following the passage of stimulus packages with aid for workers like expanded unemployment benefits, politicians and business owners have wrung their hands over a supposed worker shortage as people refuse to return to work, as they say. A new report pushes back on that narrative and shows that actually, it’s more likely low wages offered by businesses that are causing workers to want to quit.

The report by One Fair Wage finds that 53 percent of restaurant workers have considered leaving their jobs during the pandemic, and 76 percent of restaurant workers cite low wages and tips as the reason for leaving the industry. Being paid a low wage was the most common reason for leaving by far; COVID-19 concerns were the next highest reason, with 55 percent of workers saying they were concerned about pandemic safety.

Employment Essential workers Low wages Worker Rights

Fast Food Workers Went On Strike For $15 An Hour In 15 Cities

Fast food workers in 15 cities across the country went on a one-day strike on February 16, to demand that their employers—including McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s—pay them $15 an hour and give them union rights.

The effort, which is part of the nationwide Fight for 15 movement, comes as lawmakers in Washington debate enacting a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage as part of President Biden’s first COVID-19 relief package.

The strikes also honor Black History Month by emphasizing the generations of low pay and lacking workplace protections among Black workers, historical inequities that have been worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have left Black Americans particularly vulnerable to both the virus and its economic devastation.

Black Working Class Fight for 15 Low Wage Workers Low wages

Real Unemployment Is Three Times What They’re Telling Us

Southwest Harbor, Maine – As Congress gets set to debate the Biden Pandemic relief package, one of the favorite Republican lines is the contention that an economic recovery is already well underway. Pouring more money into an accelerating economy is likely to induce seventies style inflation. It is time, they argue, for a little cautionary austerity. However politically efficacious this line may be, rosy portraits of an expanding economy hide the chronic weakness of the US economy and especially the burdens imposed on poor and minority communities.

Fear of inflation on the part of Republicans is insincere and ill timed.

Low wages Poverty Recession Unemployment

Surveillance, Stress, And No Bathrooms

The Amazonification of logistics has created a new group of highly exploited workers: delivery drivers. Amazon itself increasingly relies on an expanding network of subcontracted drivers and independent contractors to deliver packages to customers’ doors.

The working conditions facing Amazon’s last-mile drivers are defined by a frantic pace, low wages, and relentless pressure to meet tight delivery deadlines. Workers of color and immigrants are overrepresented, as they are in all the lowest-paying segments of last-mile logistics.

When an Amazon Prime member orders an item, the first step in the delivery process begins at an Amazon Fulfillment Center, where the item is picked by a worker and put into a box, and an address label is created.

Amazon Low wages Surveillance Worker Rights

Shipt Workers Demand Better Pay, Treatment

Alabama – More than 20 Shipt workers demonstrated in front of the grocery delivery company’s headquarters in downtown Birmingham Sunday afternoon. They were there to protest Shipt policies that some of the company’s delivery people – known as Shipt Shoppers – say have led to decreased wages during a global pandemic and continue to leave them without health insurance coverage, paid sick time and other benefits.

Demetria Barlow has been a Shipt Shopper since 2016, two years after the company launched in Birmingham and one year before Target purchased the company for $550 million.

COVID-19 Essential worker Low wages Shipt Shoppers

Courts Worldwide Ruling That Gig Economy Is A Road To Serfdom

The tech industry buzzword “gig” has distracted society from important questions about the gig economy that are surprisingly traditional: whether a business has employees or contractors, and how it can avoid payroll taxes and legal liability. Countless Silicon Valley business models have been built under the guise of gigs, Uber and Lyft two of the best known cases, which is ironic considering that for all of their high-tech pretensions, at the core both are taxi and food delivery services.

Gig Economy Legal System Low wages Worker Rights and Jobs

Target Workers Call For A Boycott Of Shipt On April 10

We’ve demanded that Shipt HQ offer us hazard pay for choosing to risk our health to deliver groceries to those who are self-quarantining. The Shipt spokesperson said that they are essentially using promo pay as a substitute.

This is not the case. Promo pay has been around for a long time. It is used as an incentive for Shoppers to pick up orders that are close to the delivery window, so that orders would not be further delayed or cancelled altogether.

This is not the same as “hazard pay,” as it does not address the risk Shipt Shoppers are taking on due to the coronavirus. It is simply something that has always been in place.

The spokesperson also said that the company is paying up to four times the amount of normal promo pay.

COVID-19 Low wages Target Worker Rights

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