Co-Op Food Workers Declaration of Demands
Our food system in America is broken. Our worker-led Union and member-led
Co-Op, workers and customers together, can help fix it while creating a sustainable, healthy and safe food system that feeds and supports our communities.
Our work is important. We stock shelves and produce, cut and wrap meat and seafood, cook and prepare food in the deli, order product, unload trucks, check out and bag groceries, clean the store, and make drinks, all while helping our customers.
Despite the importance of our work, it has become tougher to make ends meet. In the face of increased housing and transportation costs, higher food prices, combined with an often limited work schedule, and pay that hasn’t kept up with what it takes to survive, we are faced with a need for major improvements.
Nationally, the grocery industry has consolidated in recent decades and even co-ops are moving away from their original mission and embracing corporate values over community values, prioritizing profit and expansion over investment and inclusion in our neighborhoods.
We need to reclaim the promise of a collaboratively run business where Co-op workers and members live our values of:
- Fighting for one wage scale for the same type of work at all stores, beginning with a minimum wage of $25 per hour, a three-year path to the top of the wage scale, and cost-of-living adjustments.
- Safe working environments and staffing levels for every worker along the food chain, protection from aggressive customers, equipment, related hazards, bullying and other safety risks.
- Training and workforce development so we can better serve our communities and grow in our careers.
- Dedicated time for training new hires and pay that reflects that work and additional compensation when critically understaffed.
- The right to participate in collaborative governance, having dedicated worker seats on Boards of Trustees.
- Good affordable health care and a secure retirement.
- The ability for workers to form and participate in a union to take coordinated action with grocery workers around the state and the country to further grow collective power in our industry.
- A workforce that comes from and can afford to live in the neighborhoods where our stores are located.
- Sustainable food chain system from seed to sale.