BURLINGTON — In the fall of 2019, workers at City Market, the grocery co-op in downtown Burlington, campaigned for a $15-an-hour wage in union contract negotiations that stretched for weeks. They didn’t get it.
The pandemic changed that. In March, City Market workers — like essential workers around the country — lobbied for hazard pay, as compensation for the risks of working during a pandemic. The co-op’s management obliged. Since March, workers at City Market have received $75 in bonus pay a week, bringing wages to at least $15 hourly.
Now, though, as coronavirus cases rise in Chittenden County, City Market is reducing that pay — which management calls an “appreciation bonus” — to $50 a week. On Jan. 2, the bonus will end entirely.
The elimination of hazard pay is part of an agreement last week between management and the union. City Market employees will now join the ranks of essential workers in Vermont and nationwide whose hazard pay is drying up as the pandemic worsens.
“This money has meant that everyone who works at City Market has earned a living wage for the first time in the co-op’s history,” the union, UE Local 203, wrote on Facebook last week. “Come Jan. 3, that will no longer be true.”
City Market management says workers earn a livable wage when employee benefits, such as paid sick leave, are taken into consideration. It’s a balance, the co-op’s general manager John Tashiro told VTDigger, of “how do we sustain jobs and continue our commitment to the livable wage?” That question, he said, informed the co-op’s choice on hazard pay.
But union leaders say wages for about two-thirds of co-op employees will dip below $15 hourly, their living wage standard, once the bonus is taken away. Workers have taken to social media to protest the decision, calling on City Market’s 13,000 members to voice their support. The cuts, they say, will create financial insecurity.
“Really, only for the first time now am I seeing the opportunities I was told about growing up, about working hard and actually being able to save some money,” Noele Leavey, a union leader and store assistant at City Market’s downtown store, told VTDigger.
“I haven’t bought myself anything fancy,” she said. “I’ve just been able to prepare for the future, which feels extra important right now. And I’m scared to have that taken away.”
Tashiro told VTDigger he considers the reductions a “mutual agreement” between the co-op and the union. The bonus was always understood to be temporary, he said, and the fact that it lasted seven months, longer than at many other local essential businesses, “is a tremendous achievement for all of us, collectively.”
Union leaders aren’t so sure. “It was frustrating that they decided to stop negotiating with us just as cases are spiking in Vermont, and the danger for our membership seems as acute as ever,” said Andy Decelles, who works at City Market’s South End store.
Workers worry
With cases rising, City Market workers told VTDigger they fear for their safety, even with the co-op’s precautions. Becky Galvin, a South End store employee in her 60s, said she feels safer now than in the very first weeks of the pandemic, but her worries have not eased in recent months. “I wouldn’t say I feel somehow safer walking in now,” she said. “If anything, it’s less so.”
Employees say that, while masks are required, not all customers adhere to the policy perfectly. And as cashiers and grocery stockers, they are frequently within 6 feet of others. A recent decision to increase the customer capacity in the South End store by 10 people at a time, Decelles said, left many of his coworkers “very upset.”
“For us, we have not for one moment been complacent about safety. It is our highest priority,” Tashiro said, noting that, even with the raised capacity, both the downtown and South End stores are well below the state limit for essential businesses.
Tashiro said he understands that safety concerns continue for employees. It was a “variety of factors” that led to the end of hazard pay, he explained — one being depressed sales for the co-op. According to a Powerpoint shown at a September member meeting, co-op sales were down about 5 percent in June from 2019, after recovering from a sharper drop in April.
“Our financial situation is challenging,” Tashiro said. Though in April, the co-op received more than $2 million in a PPP loan, which the union says could pay for the appreciation bonus several times over, Tashiro says loan forgiveness is uncertain.
Alex Smith, the union’s president, said she is not convinced the hazard pay is harming the co-op’s financial well-being. “There’s not a lot of transparency,” Decelles said. “We’re not privy to the books.”
The cuts betray the progressive ideals the co-op markets to its members, she said.
“They’re able to use locally sourced food as a cover for fairly normal business practices,” Smith said.
“We have so many smart and hardworking people who want City Market to be as good as it can be, and truly be a co-op which is part of the community,” she continued. “But if we want that to be the reality, things need to change.”
Still, City Market will be one of the last local grocery stores to cut hazard pay. The Healthy Living grocery store in South Burlington raised wages for workers only through May. In Brattleboro, Hannaford workers walked out when the chain grocery store cut hazard pay in June. Price Chopper cut its pandemic bonus that same week.
Help has been slow to come from the state, as well. Vermont has offered two rounds of hazard pay grants for essential workers, one of which opened last week. City Market applied to that program, Tashiro said, but only employees who worked from March to May 15 will be eligible.
And some companies, like Walmart, have chosen not to apply at all, which Vermont state senators denounced in a statement this week.
“The money was good,” Galvin said, as she reflected on hazard pay’s end. “But what was better was the sense that management respected the risk in the work that we were doing.”
That sense, she said, has been lost.
