OAKLAND — Employees of large grocery stores in Oakland will get a $5-per-hour raise after the City Council on Tuesday unanimously passed an emergency ordinance mandating the “hazard pay” until the coronavirus pandemic subsides.
Oakland joined Long Beach, Seattle and Santa Monica in taking that measure. Other cities, including Berkeley, San Jose and Los Angeles, are considering similar actions, which have been urged by workers and their unions but condemned by the retail grocery industry.
“We can help get the lowest paid essential workers paid at a time when companies are reaping profits,” said Oakland Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas, who introduced the ordinance along with Councilmember Noel Gallo, during the council meeting.
The emergency ordinance applies immediately to large grocery stores — which it defines as “15,000 square feet in size … that (sell) primarily household foodstuffs” and employ 500 or more people nationwide. Such stores in Oakland include Cardenas Markets, Safeway/Albertsons, Save Mart, Target, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, according to a city memo.
Many grocery stores bumped up workers’ pay in the early months of the pandemic but most stopped doing so after that. Lucky Stores has continued paying hazard pay, and Trader Joe’s announced Monday it would boost its coronavirus-related “thank you” wage increases from $2 per hour to $4 per hour above employees’ base pay.
According to a study by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Brookings Institution, some of the top 13 retail companies in the country saw their profits soar 40% in 2020 over the previous year’s and together earned on average an extra $16.7 billion in profits. At Albertsons Co., which owns the Safeway grocery chain, profits in the first two quarters of 2020 rose a staggering 153% compared with the same period in 2019, according to the report.
Yet, front-line workers saw little of that money. The companies studied by the Brookings Institution raised the wages of their front-line workers by an average of only $1.11 per hour since the start of the pandemic.
Workers and their advocates say that needs to change, especially as COVID-19 cases have continued to surge at the highest levels since the start of the pandemic.
Several grocery workers and advocates spoke in favor of the ordinance during the meeting’s public comment portion, as well as in written statements to Bas’ office.
“Hazard pay means additional pay for performing hazardous duty or work involving physical hardship. Grocery work is now hazardous work and the physical hardship is sickness and death,” said Devin Ramos, a 23-year Oakland Safeway employee. “My workday puts me in a busy store in close contact with hundreds of customers everyday, and I have no realistic way of social distancing while performing my job duties. I have no way of having every customer who enters my store wear a mask, or of stopping them from removing their masks.”
Melody Neal, an employee at Lucky, emphasized that hazard pay helps keep employees coming to work, providing an incentive for an job that has become much more difficult during the pandemic.
“What we usually do one or two times a day, we’re doing three to four times a day. The lines are long. People are frustrated and stressed,” said Neal, 37.
Grocery industry representatives have complained that Oakland’s ordinance and similar ones around the state and country are an overreach and an unfair burden on the retail stores.
“Extra pay mandates will have severe unintended consequences on not only grocers, but on their workers and their customers,” said Ron Fong, president and CEO of the California Grocers Association,. “A $5 (per hour) extra pay mandate amounts to a 28 percent increase in labor costs. That’s huge. Grocers will not be able to absorb those costs and negative repercussions are unavoidable.”
Fong said that grocers would be forced to pass along the extra costs to consumers by raising prices.
In California, it is illegal to increase the price of food items, consumer goods, or medical and emergency supplies by more than 10% of what a seller charged for that item on Feb. 4, 2020, when the pandemic was just beginning.
The association filed a federal lawsuit against Long Beach, the first city to introduce a hazard pay ordinance. The lawsuit argues Long Beach’s hazard pay ordinance is unconstitutional because it targets grocery stores over other industries and interferes with federal labor law that protects the collective bargaining process.
Fong said to this news organization in an interview Friday that the association would consider filing lawsuits against other cities considering similar ordinances.
Miya Saika Chen, the council president’s chief of staff, said the ordinance won’t affect employers with collective bargaining agreements that waive its provisions. It also allows employers already offering hazard pay to use that amount as credit toward reaching the $5-per-hour bonus. A store that is currently offering $2 per hour on top of base pay, for instance, would only have to add $3 more.
Oakland’s proposed ordinance would end when the Bay Area is determined by the state to be at a level of “minimal risk,” or the yellow tier, according to California’s color-coded risk assessment model.
Oakland City Administrator Ed Reiskin pointed out during Tuesday’s meeting that the city’s department in charge of enforcing workplace standards does not have the capacity to take on the extra work of answering questions, monitoring compliance with the ordinance and investigating complaints.
Chen pointed out that the ordinance has a private right-of-action option, so employees can file a notice in court if their employers violate the ordinance.
Councilmember Gallo cited earlier outbreaks this year at Cardenas Market in Oakland, where multiple employees tested positive for COVID-19, in noting that grocery workers are at higher risk of contracting the disease than those who can work from home.
“We need to recognize the workers, support their health needs and make sure they have the compensation to continue,” he said.
"emergency" - Google News
February 03, 2021 at 08:26AM
https://ift.tt/3pJovSP
Oakland passes emergency ‘hazard pay’ ordinance; grocers must pay workers an extra $5 per hour - East Bay Times
"emergency" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2VVGGYQ
https://ift.tt/3d7MC6X
emergency
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Oakland passes emergency ‘hazard pay’ ordinance; grocers must pay workers an extra $5 per hour - East Bay Times"
Post a Comment