Grocery East Bargaining Update

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Our union member Bargaining Committee had our second bargaining session with the Employers to fight for a safer workplace, maintain and strengthen our benefits, and improve wages.

Over the two days of bargaining, we came to several Tentative Agreements:

  • Greater Workplace Safety. We secured an agreement for a Master Safety Committee, which will allow us to raise safety issues that are not being addressed at the store level, up to the corporate Management level. We also established yearly walk-through trainings for emergency situations, including natural disasters and active shooter situations.

  • Increases to Leaves of Absences for personal illness/pregnancy from 6 months to 9 months.

  • The ability to keep our information updated so that we can get critical information about our wages, benefits and working conditions.

We continued to trade proposals over important contract language items, including:

  • Funding for Workforce Training, so we can get the training we need and expand the Meat Cutters Apprenticeship Program around the state of Washington.

  • Worker Severance and Retention language to ensure that, in the event of any merger or sale of the companies, the Employer must retain workers for a set period and compensate workers fairly if there are lay offs or terminations.

  • Allowing workers to accept tips from customers.

We also proposed the following IMPROVEMENTS to our contract:

  • Improve vacation accruals and lower qualifying threshold for vacation. We proposed vacation accruals be based off the average of hours worked in the previous 12 months. This will help ensure that no worker gets less vacation per week than they normally work per week. Additionally, we proposed to lower the threshold to qualify for vacation from 1000 hours to 800 hours worked in a year.

  • Increased scheduling notice so we can better plan our lives.

  • Add Presidents Day as an additional holiday.

  • Align past experience credit among all contracts so workers can claim more hours upon hire.

We proposed the following UPDATES to our contract:

  • Align notice of technological changes in the store with other UFCW 3000 grocery store contracts.

Finally, we made a comprehensive economic proposal that would:

  • Create Journey wage increases of multiple dollars over the life of the contract.

  • Institute one wage scale for all UFCW 3000 Eastern Washington, Oregon and Northern Idaho and the same journey wage rate across all grocery scales.

  • Gain ground on Puget Sound clerk wage rates, because the cost of living is high everywhere!

  • Create raises of multiple dollars for Journey Meat Cutters over the life of the contract, a proposed dollar premium for Head Meat Cutter, and new designation of Head Butcher Block.

  • Increase the amount between steps from $0.10 above minimum wage and $0.05 between steps to $0.25 and above the minimum wage and between steps so that every step sees an increase as the minimum wage increases with cost of living.

  • Reduce the length of our wage scales so our coworkers can reach the Journey rate sooner.

  • Maintain our strong healthcare plan and coverage and improve benefits without increasing employee premiums.

  • Fund our pension and increase contributions and benefits for future earned benefits.

  • Institute resort store pay premiums for Chelan, Leavenworth, Sandpoint and CDA.

  • Award $800 longevity bonuses for workers with more than 10 years of service.

  • Create premiums for short staffing & Person-In-Charge pay.

  • Make a quicker path to Journey for Meat Cutters that complete the Meat Apprenticeship program.

  • Ensure full back pay to date of expiration.

Next bargaining dates: January 10, 11 and 12

Join us and show our unity in fighting for a strong contract!