Neither thanks nor praise can take the place of a living wage for grocery workers
How about instead of thanking our grocery and convenience stores for getting us through a pandemic, as corporate lobbyist Stephen Chesnut suggested in his recent Op-Ed, we demand they pay their employees fairly for the critical services they provide? Thanks won’t pay your rent or mortgage, put food on the table, or clothes on your children’s backs, but money will. Chesnut claims that frontline workers risking their lives by coming into work everyday are the “backbone” of the grocery industry, but less than two months after announcing its so-called “hero bonus,” Kroger—a company Chesnut is paid to represent and provide spin for—canceled the $2 pay raise after spending several hundred thousand dollars crowing about their good deeds with national television ads. Later they suggested that employees in Houston, who continue to drop dead from COVID-19, occasionally passing it onto elderly family members, are just “exaggerating” the scope of the pandemic, proving the entire campaign was nothing more than a cheap media stunt cooked up by highly paid propagandists or “public relations specialists” in industry-speak.
Did Chesnut “watch with pride” recently when Kroger responded to a local ordinance in Long Beach, California mandating a measly $4 an hour hazard pay hike by permanently shuttering the stores? Does it fill him with delight to know that some Kroger executives, who of course have been able to work remotely and safely from home through the entire pandemic, make 800 times more than the typical worker? The average Kroger employee makes around $27,000 a year. Kroger’s CEO, Rodney McMullen? Around $22 million.
Chesnut’s cynical press release is as empty as the “thoughts and prayers” offered by politicians in the wake of other preventable tragedies and we should all be horrified that corporations like Kroger and Amazon are allowed to hoard obscene amounts of profit as everyday American workers continue to suffer and die. Though I live less than a mile away from a Kroger store, I’ll be spending my hard earned money at locally owned farms and food cooperatives that benefit Kentuckians and not these morally-bankrupt corporate overlords in Cincinnati.
Travis Kitchens is a writer from Livermore.