It hasn’t been easy for the workers, who are striking across metro Denver, to stay out in the cold while picketting — but they’re helping each other through the chill.
“It's like a whole different level of psychological trauma, to be perfectly honest with you,” says Gigi Jones, a service manager at the Ninth and Corona King Soopers. “You're either cold, or hungry, or both. I go home and I'll cook a big pot of soup and bring it out when most everybody's here and good and tired and drained, so at least they're full.”
Jones says she's angry at King Soopers for treating scab workers brought in from other states better than she and her fellow striking workers, and that anger is helping her keep going. In her mind, good wages, health care and pension benefits aren’t much to ask for, but it's been too much for King Soopers.
“We're in this fight for the right reasons,” Littleton Boulevard and Broadway King Soopers service manager Chris Lacey adds. “We want better staffing, we want better wages, we want better health care, we want better pensions. We want this company, that is an industry leader, to start acting like it and they're not.”
King Soopers workers at 77 stores across Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas and Jefferson counties have been on strike since 5 a.m. on February 6 with plans to stay on strike until February 20. (Workers in Pueblo later voted to join the strike, while Colorado Springs workers may strike at a later date.) According to the union, UFCW Local 7, the two-week timeframe was chosen to ensure customers would understand worker concerns and management would have time to respond.
The striking workers have alleged unfair labor practices committed by Kroger as employees and King Soopers attempt to negotiate a new union contract. The previous contract, which had been in place since the end of a 2022 worker strike, expired in January after the two sides could not reach an agreement.
UFCW Local 7 has a 37-member bargaining committee led by president Kim Cordova representing 12,000 King Soopers and City Market workers across the state. Workers want their new contract to address staffing and safety issues, improve health-care benefits and increase wages to match Colorado's cost of living.
According to Kroger, the National Labor Relations Board has not yet ruled on the union’s allegations, and the company denies the workers' allegations. King Soopers President Joe Kelley says the company is ready to engage with workers, but thinks the strike is “putting the cart before the horse.”
But over 96 percent of workers in the state voted to strike, and they're still out there in freezing temperatures this week. When Westword visited a string of King Soopers across the city on Wednesday, February 12, workers were present and picketing at each store despite the chill.
King Soopers Takes Legal Action Against Workers
Workers are facing more than just the weather as they hold their lines. King Soopers has also filed a lawsuit against the union and a temporary restraining order against the striking workers.On February 7, UFCW Local 7 announced it had learned that King Soopers filed a lawsuit claiming the union had acted illegally by making King Soopers bargain with workers from California and Washington in the Colorado contract process.
“The action is completely unlawful and it's intentionally causing delays as it relates to ratifying this contract,” Kelley says of the lawsuit.
According to the union, the lawsuit is “baseless” and “frivolous,” and leaders expect the court to immediately dismiss the claims.
Then, on February 11, King Soopers took to the courts again to request a temporary restraining order against picketing workers for alleged “unsafe conditions,” according to a press announcement from the company.
The union responded by pointing out that King Soopers specifically complained about workers using portable heating devices while striking the cold. According to the union, both the restraining order and the lawsuit are attempts to intimidate workers.
“To sue its workers over our constitutional rights is absolutely appalling to me,” Lacey says of King Soopers’s litigious activity.
Why King Soopers and Workers Can't Reach an Agreement
Workers are striking over alleged illegal interrogation and surveillance of union members by King Soopers as well as a refusal to provide sales data to the union, threatening or disciplining employees for wearing union buttons and other union-related gear, and proposing to take away $8 million in retiree health benefit funds in exchange for higher worker wages.Kelley says King Soopers has fulfilled over 350 requests for information but hasn't received a specific wage or staffing proposal in return — but Lacey, who is on the union's bargaining committee, says the company hasn’t provided the information the union actually needs to address those topics.
“They continue to shove proposals into our face, and they won't talk about our staffing concerns,” Lacey says. “How can I properly or appropriately give you a wage proposal when I'm asking for sales data that you refuse to give me? It's the same with staffing. There's data that they refuse to give us.”
King Soopers has continually questioned why the union hasn't sent back a counter proposal since the company issued its “last, best and final offer” before the strike was authorized. That proposal includes $4.50 an hour raises over the life of the contract for Top Rate associates (excluding courtesy clerks), department heads and Pharmacy Techs, according to King Soopers.
King Soopers also said it would provide affordable health care, keep pensions for workers and hold meetings about staffing concerns and workplace violence prevention training; the company also pledged to add sanitation clerk and hourly manager roles to at least twenty stores over the next four years.
However, workers say those terms do not represent real improvements to safety standards or staffing issues in stores. According to the union, the company’s proposal also requires employees to choose between health-care benefits now or in the future rather than preserving benefits. Additionally, workers say the contract would cut wages for some employees and allow Kroger to outsource some union jobs to gig workers.
Kelley says the company does not plan to take money out of health care for workers and believes that information is being erroneously spread by Cordova. He also says King Soopers has almost 4,000 more employees than when he was hired three years ago so he doesn’t understand the staffing concerns, either.
But Lacey says that assessment ignores the conditions on the ground, where customers are struggling with long wait times in lines and workers can’t restock shelves as fast as customers need them to.
“It also impacts our safety,” Lacey says. “When there are less of us, we are less safe. We have to do the job of three to four people, so most of us run around like chickens with their heads cut off and we can't meet the demands of the business. It's very disheartening to us.”
Kelley doesn't see it that way. He says that holding a strike before the NLRB's ruling was unfair, and that workers never had a chance to vote on King Soopers's latest offer before the holdout.
“We put a last, best and final offer on the table, which means all the money is on the table,” Kelley says. “[Cordova] refuses to let her members, our associates, vote on that offer. She has a job to do, and the job is to let them vote. If our associates don't like the offer, that's their prerogative. If they do like it, which I'm hearing they do because I shared it with them, they should be allowed to vote on it and ratify it.”
Lacey says the workers’ strong vote in favor of a strike represents their vote on the offer. Jones, too, says she had seen the proposal and didn’t agree with its terms.
“We most definitely did vote on that ‘last, best, final,’ and we're not interested in a contract that is going to bottom our health care and steal $8 million from retirees’ pension and health-care benefits to give us a raise,” Lacey says. “They can do better.”
Kelley says because the strike vote occurred at hotels and not in stores, he doesn’t think every worker had the chance to weigh in. He says when he and his team have spoken to workers, they want to vote on the contract.
But the workers standing on the picket lines in spite of the cold and lawsuits by their employer say they know exactly why they're striking.
“It's like a contract with invisible ink,” Jones says. “There's things in there that you don't see. …I'd even be happy if everything just stayed the same and they just gave us a couple extra bucks. Let's just make this easy.”
Lacey says the bargaining committee would happily listen if King Soopers showed the company is acting is good faith, but they're still waiting. For now, the encouragement from customers while they’re picketing is fueling workers to stand strong.
Jones says she’s noticed that longtime Cap Hill residents won’t cross the picket line at Ninth and Corona but less familiar faces are more willing to do so. Building relationships with longtime residents is what has kept her working at the store since 2013, she adds.
“I love my job,” she says. “It's a community thing. ….I'm just really angry at [King Soopers] right now. I feel like it's an ex-boyfriend. I'm just like, ‘how could you?’” You got new people in there and you're doing all these things for them. What about us? And in the meanwhile, you're losing money. I don't get it.”
King Soopers says more than 50 percent of customers are still shopping at its stores in Colorado. Seeing long lines and crowded parking lots at a nearby Safeway shows Lacey that plenty of people are behind workers, however.
“Our customers are fed up with the games that this company is playing,” he says. “They're not interested in supporting a company that won't support its workers. …We don't do this out of greed or want for something that isn't right. We just want a fair piece of the pie.”
