By Pepper Fisher
PORT ANGELES – The city councils of both Sequim and Port Angeles have received public comments during recent meetings from local grocery workers, asking councilors to consider passing temporary ordinances that would require big-chain grocery stores to pay their front-line workers hazard pay during the pandemic.
The Cities of Seattle and Burien have already done so, requiring grocers who employ over 500 people to pay workers an extra $4 per hour starting February 3. The City of Seattle was promptly sued by the Northwest Grocery Association and the Washington Food Industry Association, who argue that the ordinance is unconstitutional.
At the beginning of the pandemic, local grocery chains paid their workers an extra $2 an hour hazard pay, but that ended after 3 months back in May. Workers were also given 2 weeks paid leave if they were forced to quarantine due to possible exposure to the virus. Grocery worker Hailey Madsen, born and raised in Sequim, makes her case.
“All we want is for our community to show that they care about us. You know? We deserve this. At the beginning of this, I’ll never forget, we were on vacation when Seattle got shut down, and when I came back to my store, it was an entirely different place. I think it was March 23rd I came back. The shelves were empty. We were terrified, you know, and over time like they introduced certain things, PPE and the plastic shields and things like that. But it doesn’t stop the masses from coming into the store. It doesn’t stop the 400, 500, 600 people that we see every single day. Full families. And we love seeing those people, but it put us in a really difficult position. If I get sick, my child gets sick, I have nothing. I don’t get paid.”
Grocery workers are union employees with the UFCW 21. Union spokesman Tom Geiger says the move to appeal to city councils came as a last-ditch effort.
“We have been working since early May to secure hazard pay for grocery store workers. And despite many, many efforts with the big chains, we’ve have been unsuccessful in getting them to agree. In fact, they’ve refused. And so we’ve started the new approach, which is to try to work with different cities and see if we can get it passed that way.”.
Under order of virtually every state in the country, grocery stores were early-on deemed essential and advised to remain open. Geiger says corporate profits in the past year are way up as a result, but wages haven’t moved commensurate to the risk. He says while grocery workers aren’t the only essential workers in the community, they’re in a class of their own.
“Unlike an EMT, emergency room technician, an ER doc, I mean, those are people that, when they sign up for their job, they know what they’re getting into. When you sign up to be a grocery store worker, you also know what you’re getting into, and usually confronting a deadly virus on a daily basis with hundreds, if not thousands of various shoppers in a week who potentially have the virus is not the thing that they signed up for. But that’s what they’ve been working through for the last, just about a year. And so part of the effort is to say, ‘Look, while it doesn’t make up for the risk, having an extra hazard pay for those workers, I think, shows a certain amount of respect and in even like an honoring of that sacrifice that those workers have made. And their families, because they risk bringing the virus home to their families.”
Port Angeles City Councilmember Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin encourages people from all sides of the issue to contact the Council with their comments for consideration. He says while he’s open to the idea, he’ll also be keeping an eye on the lawsuits in Seattle and Burien which accuse the cities of, among other things, attempting to override federal laws on collective bargaining.
“The threat of litigation always has a chilling effect. Certainly, between Sequim, between Port Angeles, I think Sequim might have one lawyer on staff. We have two lawyers on staff. Seattle has a legal department that has its own constitutional law division. So it is certainly easier for us to not be first. You know before we would pass such a policy, we need to, you know, look at how it compares to what’s been done in other places.”