In the first six months of 2025, grocery contracts covering over 130,000 union workers are set to expire. The contracts span five states, a dozen local unions, and several employers — namely the grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons.

United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 just announced a two-week strike at Kroger brand King Soopers, beginning Thursday, February 6. Ten thousand Colorado grocery workers will be on strike at seventy-seven stores across the state through Super Bowl weekend and Valentine’s Day. It’s the first major grocery contract expiration in 2025 and will set the stage for the contracts bargained for the rest of the year.

Kroger’s last, best, and final offer included abysmal wage increases, with thousands of workers offered $0.25 or less in the first year of the contract. It failed to address worker concerns over understaffing, low wages, two-tier discrimination, shorter wage steps, and protections from automation.

Grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons’ $24.6 billion mega-merger was blocked in court after a coalition of UFCW and Teamster locals, including UFCW Locals 7, 324, 770, and 3000, organized a powerful “Stop the Merger” campaign. But the fight to win better wages and better working conditions is still ahead. And to take full advantage of grocery workers’ numbers and leverage, we’ll need to change how we organize.

What We’re Fighting For

Over the last few decades, grocery jobs have changed from good union jobs with wages and benefits comparable to those of United Auto Workers (UAW) and International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) members into gig economy McJobs. In California, the statewide fast-food minimum wage outpaces starting grocery wages to the tune of $4 an hour.

Wage tiers are a dime a dozen in many UFCW grocery contracts. Take Fry’s Food & Drug, a Kroger brand in Arizona. A look at the contract bargained with Arizona UFCW Local 99 in 2023 reveals that workers hired before 1986 get a Sunday premium of time and a half. Employees hired after that will qualify for an additional 50 cents per hour on Sundays, with some employees eligible for Sunday pay after working nearly four thousand hours. Fast-forward some, and those hired after 2004 get not a cent more than their regular rate on Sundays — Sunday pay, for most, is now a thing of the past.

With more tiers than a wedding cake, past grocery contracts have slowly chipped away at solidarity and workers’ ability to fight back. On the shop floor, we are left hopeless, disengaged, and spread thin to the point of desperation. We’re given the minimum we need to survive, perform our jobs well, or feel the sense of pride that we deserve to feel as essential workers. The bosses target those least likely to speak up about their mistreatment.

With inflation and the cost of living exceeding wage growth, many of our coworkers live paycheck to paycheck. To cut costs, management has reduced some part-timers’ hours to just twenty-four hours a week. Fewer workers for the same amount of work, compounded by automation like self-checkout and electronic price tags, leaves us overworked and unsafe.

Corporate consolidation in grocery has accelerated over the past several years — but while the big grocers get bigger, grocery union leverage is shrinking. Union grocery workers still lack national master agreements for some 800,000 UFCW grocery members across North America. Instead, contracts are bargained local by local and employer by employer. As a result, workers’ collective bargaining power is divided, and members pay the price.

With starting wages barely above minimum wage, chronic underscheduling, and a growing trend of deskilling, grocery retail workers are among the lowest-paid union workers in the country. Grocery workers who kept stores open during the pandemic deserve significant wage increases, improved staffing, and safer stores. But to get them, we need a union willing to fight for them.

No Union Democracy, No Union Revitalization

At the 2023 UFCW International Convention, reformer delegates with our group Essential Workers for Democracy (EW4D) put forward commonsense resolutions for change: investment in organizing, first-day strike pay, salary caps for top officers, and a one-member, one-vote policy. The leadership’s fierce opposition — from procedural roadblocks to direct intimidation of rank-and-file members by paid staff and officers — revealed a union structure more invested in maintaining control than adapting to meet workers’ needs.

We believe the UFCW should put its $566 million in assets toward organizing better contracts with higher wages for workers. We also think we have more leverage to win with a national grocery bargaining table, combining the leverage of nearly 800,000 union grocery workers against the corporate giants. Right now, we negotiate separately even when dealing with the same company. A national table would give workers the power to set industry-wide standards and prevent companies from playing locals against each other.

National bargaining tables were big news in 2023, when 340,000 UPS Teamsters narrowly averted a major strike and the UAW led 150,000 workers on a “stand-up strike” against the Big Three automakers. Both of these unions have won a one-member, one-vote policy through rank-and-file reform movements just like EW4D. Following their example, we believe increasing union democracy and national coordination will energize and strengthen our union.

Grocery workers have already proven what’s possible when we work together. A coalition of UFCW Locals 7, 324, 770, and 3000 helped defeat the largest proposed grocery merger in US history between Kroger and Albertsons. Now these locals are collaborating on contract negotiations and sending support to the King Soopers strike in Colorado. We don’t have a national bargaining table yet, but EW4D members understand the value of solidarity between locals across the country, and striking Colorado workers have our full support.

Winning a more democratic union and putting members in the driver’s seat will allow us to build a more militant union — with more strikes, more organizing, and bigger and better contracts. At 1.2 million members, the UFCW is the largest private sector union in the country. But size only translates to power when workers organize to use it.

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