Union members plan strike vote next week

KING SOOPERS

By Lucas High

BizWest / Prairie Mountain Media

Unionized King Soopers workers in Broomfield and Boulder counties will join their peers from around the Denver metro area, Colorado Springs and Pueblo next week to vote on whether to hit the picket line.

Thousands of Front Range workers could strike after the Kroger Co.-owned (NYSE: KR) grocery-store chain and the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 failed last week to reach a last-minute agreement on a new labor contract.

“We have finalized our plans to hold strike vote meetings” from Jan. 29 through Feb. 1, UFCW Local 7 president Kim Cordova said in a prepared statement. “The specific times and locations are being communicated to grocery store members directly.”

The union, which has asked for better pay, benefits and working conditions, rejected what King Soopers called “its last, best and final offer” last week. The company said that offer included “significant wage increases,” “affordable healthcare” and a “committed focus on effective staffing.”

On Wednesday afternoon, the union said that “the negotiations have been marred by myriad unfair labor practices, including refusal by the Company to produce information responsive to the Union’s requests, targeting workers who are supportive of the Union, unilaterally changing terms and conditions of employment for workers, and a failure to negotiate with the Union in good faith. Indeed, the Company’s supposed last, best, and final offer is itself unlawful.”

King Soopers said this week that “(d)espite the Company’s commitment to the bargaining process, the Union has consistently failed to represent King Soopers associates, their members, and instead have deployed a strategy focused on disruption rather than stability.”

Should the union decide to stop working, it will be the second time in three years for UFCW workers, who went on strike in January 2022 when negotiations over the most-recent labor agreement broke down.

Contract negotiations between the grocery chain and the union, members of which are seeking wage increases, seem to have a habit of occurring against a background of broader tumult for King Soopers.

The 2022 strike came as the COVID-19 pandemic was shining a spotlight on the critical role that essential workers such as grocery-store employees play in everyday life, and just months after a gunman killed 10 people, including King Soopers employees, in the King Soopers store in Boulder’s Table Mesa shopping center.

That labor dispute was an ugly one, with both sides suing the other and King Soopers successfully petitioning a judge for a temporary restraining order against picketers, who were accused of aggressive tactics.

King Soopers brought in non-union workers to staff stores during the strike, some of whom were paid more than what was being demanded by the union. Private security was also used by the Kroger Co. chain during union rallies and picketing events.Management also blamed strikers for its decision to delay the reopening of the Table Mesa store in Boulder, closed for nearly a year after the March 2021 shooting.

The union had cited this violent tragedy, which occurred during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as an example of management’s failure to properly account for employee health and safety.

The most-recent contract negotiations collapsed just after a planned merger between King Soopers parent company Kroger and Albertsons Cos. (NYSE: ACI), which was opposed by regulators and the union, exploded last month in a flurry of lawsuits.

After a pair of judges issued injunctions in mid-December blocking a merger between the companies, Albertsons threw in the towel, calling off the $24.6 billion deal and suing Kroger for failing to secure regulatory approval for the business combination.

Kroger failed “to exercise ‘best efforts’ and to take ‘any and all actions’ to secure regulatory approval of the companies’ agreed merger transaction, as was required of Kroger under the terms of the merger agreement between the parties,” Albertsons said last month.

Cincinnati, Ohio-based Kroger breached its merger contract with Albertsons, which owns and operates Safeway grocery stores in Colorado, “by repeatedly refusing to divest assets necessary for antitrust approval, ignoring regulators’ feedback, rejecting stronger divestiture buyers and failing to cooperate with Albertsons,” Boise, Idaho-based Albertsons said.

Albertsons said it plans to ask the court to enforce a $600 million contract termination fee, and is “seeking billions of dollars in damages from Kroger to make Albertsons and its shareholders whole.”