OAKLAND – Employees of major grocery stores in Oakland receive a $ 5-hour increase after the city council unanimously approved an emergency ordinance on Tuesday requiring the “danger payment” until the coronavirus pandemic disappears.
Oakland joined Long Beach, Seattle and Santa Monica to take the measure. Other cities, including Berkeley, San Jose and Los Angeles, are considering similar actions, which were encouraged by workers and their unions, but condemned by the retail industry.
“We can help get the lowest paid essential workers paid at a time when companies are picking up profits,” Oakland President Nikki Fortunato Bas introduced during the board meeting with board member Noel Gallo.
The emergency ordinance immediately applies to large grocery stores – which defines it as ’15 .000 square meters in size … employing mainly domestic food (sold) ‘and employing 500 or more people nationwide. Such stores in Oakland include Cardenas Markets, Safeway / Albertsons, Save Mart, Target, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, according to a city note.
Many grocery stores enlarged the workers in the early months of the pandemic, but most have since stopped doing so. Lucky Stores continued to pay risk pay, and Trader Joe’s announced Monday that it would increase its coronavirus-related “thank you” wage increases from $ 2 per hour to $ 4 per hour above employees’ base wages.
According to a study by the Washington, DC-based think tank Brookings Institution, some of the top 13 retail businesses in the country saw their profits increase by 40% in 2020 compared to the previous year and together make an extra profit of $ Earned 16.7 billion. According to Albertsons Co., which owns the Safeway grocery store chain, profits rose a staggering 153% in the first two quarters of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, according to the report.
But the workers in the front line saw little of the money. The companies studied by the Brookings Institution have increased the wages of their frontline employees by only $ 1.11 per hour since the start of the pandemic.
Workers and their advocates say this needs to change, especially as COVID-19 cases have continued to rise at the highest levels since the start of the pandemic.
Several grocery workers and advocates spoke in favor of the ordinance during the public comment section of the meeting, as well as in written statements to Bas’s office.
“Danger pay means additional payment for the performance of dangerous duties or work that involves physical hardship. Grocery work is now dangerous and the physical hardship is sickness and death, ”said Devin Ramos, a 23-year-old employee at Oakland Safeway. ‘My workday puts me in a busy shop daily in close contact with hundreds of customers, and I have no realistic way of doing social distance while doing my job. I have no way of wearing a mask to every customer who enters my store or preventing them from removing their masks. ”
Melody Neal, an employee at Lucky, stressed that payroll benefits help get employees to work, providing an incentive for jobs that became much more difficult during the pandemic.
‘What we usually do once or twice a day, we do three to four times a day. The lines are long. “People are frustrated and stressed,” said Neal, 37.
Representatives of the grocery industry have complained that the regulation of Oakland and similar governments in the state and country is an excess and an unfair burden for the stores.
“Mandates for extra pay will have serious, unintended consequences, not only for groceries, but also for their workers and their customers,” said Ron Fong, president and CEO of the California Grocers Association. ” An additional payment mandate of $ 5 (per hour) represents a 28 percent increase in labor costs. It’s big. Grocers will not be able to bear the cost, and negative consequences are inevitable. ”
Fong said groceries are being forced to pass on the extra cost to consumers by raising prices.
In California, it is illegal to increase the price of food, consumables or medical and emergency supplies by more than 10% than the seller charged on February 4, 2020, when the pandemic had just begun.
The association has filed a federal lawsuit against Long Beach, the first city to introduce an advanced wage. The lawsuit argues that the Long Beach Hazard Payment Ordinance is unconstitutional because it targets grocery stores on other industries and interferes with federal labor laws that protect the collective bargaining process.
Fong said in an interview with this news organization on Friday that the association will consider filing lawsuits against other cities that are considering similar ordinances.
Miya Saika Chen, the chief of staff of the council’s president, said the ordinance would not affect employers through collective bargaining agreements that waive its provisions. It also allows employers who are already offering risk payment to use the amount as credit to reach the $ 5 hourly bonus. For example, a store that currently offers $ 2.00 per hour only needs to add $ 3.
The proposed Oakland ordinance will end when the Bay Area is determined by the state at a level of ‘minimal risk’, or the yellow level, according to the California color-coded risk assessment model.
Oakland City Administrator Ed Reiskin pointed out during Tuesday’s meeting that the city’s department overseeing the application of workplace standards does not have the capacity to undertake the extra work of answering questions. monitor the by-law and investigate complaints.
Chen pointed out that the ordinance has a private-law option so that employees can file a notice in court if their employers violate the ordinance.
Councilor Gallo cited earlier this year outbreaks at Cardenas Market in Oakland, where several employees tested positive for COVID-19, pointing out that grocery workers are at a higher risk of contracting the disease than those who can work from home.
“We need to recognize the workers, support their health needs and make sure they have the compensation to continue,” he said.