Grocery worker: we won’t settle for crumbs anymore

Phoenix – Columbus, OH

My name is Phoenix. I am a member of Socialist Alternative and a Kroger employee, working and living in Columbus, Ohio. 

Today, my store manager made an announcement over the PA system asking customers to thank us workers, and asking me and my coworkers to thank each other.

Meanwhile, cashiers do not have sneeze guards, or any sort of protection aside from gloves; customers are packed in the aisles beside employees like tinned sardines; there is no enforcement of a 6 foot radius for either customers or workers. We need more PPE supplies, we need mandatory enforced distancing, stricter cleaning protocols, and a limit to the number of customers in the store!

Some time this month, Kroger announced a $150 bonus for part time employees and a $300 bonus for full time employees. A one time bonus based on your status on paperwork, and not hours on the clock, is not hazard pay. We need real hazard pay, per hour, and we need it paid back for hours worked the last couple of months. Workers in many industries, but especially grocery workers, just got shoved to the front lines of a global pandemic without a choice. We did not ask for this, and we are not just lucky to still have a job. If we could survive without it, I would gladly hand my job off to someone else!

I don’t have insurance, I haven’t been to the doctor in almost 8 years, and I have a slowly worsening cough that I cannot do anything about. There is no telling if I am sick, if my untreated asthma is worsening, or if it is some other issue. All I can do to protect people around me is cough into my shirt and use hand sanitizer when we have it available. Thankfully both my husband and brother-in-law, whom I live with, have insurance. I worry for my family, more than half of whom do not have insurance. I worry for myself.

I am deeply, deeply afraid. I fear the inevitable deaths of people I know, whether they are family, or coworkers, or friends. I cannot sleep at night thinking that we could have had more supplies, more time to prepare, more beds ready and people trained to take on this virus. Capitalism touts the free market as the solution to all manner of crises; what tends to be left off of that argument is that it will only do so if there is a profit available in return. There are factories sitting empty that could be used to make ventilators and masks and other supplies. There are medical facilities sitting empty and unused because realty investors refuse to even lend the spaces during a global pandemic. 

Each day the death toll goes up, and I cannot help but think, if we had Medicare for All, would that person be alive? Another, I ask, if our government had taken this seriously instead of blowing off thousands of deaths around the world, would it have spread as fast and as far? The toll rises, and I wonder about their families, will they live through this to mourn? 

This virus has exposed a fundamental difference in purpose. My purpose, my coworkers’ purpose, is right now to survive this crisis and take care of ourselves and our families. My company’s purpose, unchanged by the crisis, is to turn a profit at any cost.

We have seen, also, in recent days that the interests of profit depend on us. The whole system depends on me, and my other underpaid coworkers, showing back up to work every day. What happens if we say we won’t go back until we’re paid like the essential workers that we are? 

Today, Instacart workers all over the country go on strike. They’re demanding hazard pay and PPE – which is, considering the crisis, a bare minimum demand. What could happen if we all went on strike for broader things too? Full unemployment pay for all, a halt on rents and mortgages, free healthcare for all, and a tax on the nation’s biggest companies and billionaires to do it? 

And through it all, a message to the richest of society, those holed-up in their bunkers and yachts, those who dumped stock while hiding the threat from the rest of us, those who use their wealth to buy safety and leave the rest of society to rot – we won’t settle for crumbs anymore. 

In 20 or 30 years, when someone asks me what it was like to live through this – I want to tell them that we fought back, and we won.