UFCW Local 75, Kroger revisit wages after cut-fruit pilot

United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 75 revisited its contract with The Kroger Co. to earn a 50-cent hourly wage increase for about 11,000 supermarket employees in the Cincinnati/Dayton area.

The wage hike came about when the union and Kroger agreed to pilot a fresh-cut fruit program at eight stores, Kevin Garvey, president of UFCW Local 75, said in an interview with Winsight Grocery Business. Under the yearlong initiative, outside staff from Kroger’s Cincinnati Fresh Center in Blue Ash, Ohio, worked inside the stores to slice up the fruit for sale in single-use containers—a task previously done at the Blue Ash facility.

Kroger’s Cincinnati/Dayton Division didn’t respond to a request for comment from WGB.

Around the start of 2022, Kroger approached UFCW Local 75 with the idea for the cut-fruit pilot as a way to improve product freshness and reduce shrink, since processing the fruit at the store would save a day or two in distribution time, Garvey explained.

“They came to us and said, ‘We’d like to do this program for a year.’” And I was like, ‘Hey, fine. At the end of the year, this is what we need.’ And that’s what happened. That’s how we got it done,” he said.

Because bringing personnel into the stores from another facility would take away potential work for unionized employees, Kroger agreed to a revisit wages in the current contract as an incentive after the cut-fruit pilot ran its course, according to Garvey.

“At the end of December or beginning of January, I told them, ‘The program is over. What are we going to do?’ And they said, ‘Well, let’s sit down and talk. This is something we want to do for the future.’ And they basically doubled their pay increase [in the existing contract],” he said. “They have the program well forward now. When they expand it and to how many stores, I don’t know.”

UFCW Local 75 employees in the Kroger stores receiving the raises include retail clerks and department heads. “The majority of the people were getting 50 cents [hourly wage increases under the existing contract] and now it’s $1.00,” Garvey said. “I had some that were getting 90 cents, some $1.00 and some were getting $1.45, depending on their classification.”

Garvey estimated that, this year, the wage gain from the cut-fruit program will bring $11 million of “new money” into UFCW Local 75’s contract, which runs another three years. “Now, if you add that to what they had coming, you’re talking $20 million,” he said.

Among UFCW Local 75 members, the wage hike brought by the cut-fruit program has been “well-received,” especially amid the inflationary economy, Garvey reported. The membership is slated to vote on the measure on Sunday.

The effort represents a good example of what employers and labor can achieve by maintaining a steady dialogue, according to Garvey.

“That’s what these labor management cooperatives are designed to do. There’s something they want, there’s something we want. We talked about it for a while. Then I agreed to the pilot program, and they agreed to my wage reopener,” he said. “So they had the ability to pay, and they wanted this program. And it was a win-win.”