Surveillance pricing and profits over grocery workers’ wages

Faye Guenther Courtesy photo

It doesn’t take a high-paid consultant to tell you that grocery store workers do a better job engaging with other humans than self-check outs, robots, and other “shortcuts” that make the store experience unpleasant. An AI rush is driving mass layoffs in some industries and transferring jobs to unpaid consumers.

The ICE deportation campaign is inhumane and unconstitutional. It’s also driving a labor shortage that makes it harder for farms and businesses in the food supply chain, increasing costs and resulting in higher prices for consumers.

While Americans struggle to afford essentials like food, gas, electricity and healthcare, corporate grocery stores are investing millions into creepy tools like surveillance pricing. Similar to software being used by corporate landlords to boost their profits by driving up housing costs, investigations by organizations like Consumer Reports show grocery companies are using surveillance technology to charge different people different prices for the same items.

While many factors are driving up prices for food and other goods and services, be skeptical of the narrative being pushed by grocery giants like Albertsons, which just blamed lower earnings projections on customers for spending less. They say they are doubling down on customer experience, but that doesn’t square with their actions.

They are using AI as an excuse for laying off workers, but big grocery chains have been cutting employee hours for years, fueling a downward spiral where understaffed stores are causing long checkout lines, empty shelves and other operational problems that hurt the business.

Grocery executives’ strategy to cut their way to profitability is backfiring. During the 1st quarter Albertsons spent $225 million on stock buybacks ($300 million pre-tax) for Wall Street instead of bringing prices down and investing in their workforce. They need to make a U-turn and invest those dollars back into the stores by lowering prices and investing in staff, which would likely have boosted sales and customer traffic. When stores invest in the workers who make their companies successful, robust inventory and keeping prices affordable, that is a win for shoppers, not just the shareholders.

Called essential during the pandemic, today many grocery store workers, like a quarter of Americans, can’t afford the food they stock on the shelves. Government spending on social services has been slashed, driving up bills for low-income families. Women are disproportionately impacted by grocery giants’ profits over people tactics. The service industry workforce is majority women , who deliver the bulk of frontline grocery, retail, healthcare, and education labor.

Women are also the primary decision maker for household spending, and therefore the most powerful consumers in America, but their buying power is still 81 cents for every dollar a man makes. Wage disparities are growing, not shrinking. Not surprisingly, the majority of workers organizing for union representation are women.

Grocery workers, hospital workers, domestic workers, child care providers, nursing home aides, factory workers are among the lowest paid workers in America. Republican-backed cuts to food benefits are disproportionately harming American women (60% of SNAP participants are women), especially women of color who most often fill those frontline service jobs.

Women are also most often the primary caregiver in their families, reducing or eliminating their income.

More than ever, the most powerful tool for women to gain pay parity are legally-enforceable contracts collectively bargained by workers that specify pay rates and raise schedules. Union jobs help close the gap between wages and the cost of living. Workers represented by a union make on average 12% more than people in the same non-union job. A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute estimated that if union membership grew to where it was in the 1950s, the average worker would see a 14.5% raise, or more than $7,000 a year in their wallet annually. Union contracts also often include strong anti-harassment policies and provide safe, confidential grievance procedures for workers.

Union protection is needed more than ever in an economy dominated by corporations that grow bigger and more powerful through mergers and deliver less choice and higher prices to working families.

Faye Guenther is president of UFCW 3000, the nation’s largest grocery, retail, and health care worker union local with more than 58,000 members in the Pacific Northwest

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