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Law360 (September 2, 2020, 6:58 PM EDT) -- The United Food and Commercial Workers union said it's stepping up demands that Whole Foods, Walmart and other retailers reinstate COVID-19 hazard pay, announcing plans to stage dozens of job actions at stores in California, Texas, Georgia and other hard-hit states.
The union said Tuesday it will hold at least 26 actions at grocery stores and other so-called essential businesses across the country and run ads highlighting "the serious health threats these workers continue to face." The campaign is meant to enlist the public to pressure businesses to maintain per-hour pay bumps during the COVID-19 pandemic, the union said.
"America's grocery workers are putting their lives on the line every day that they walk into the store, because this pandemic is far from over and the health threats are just as real now as they were when this crisis began," UFCW President Marc Perrone said in a statement.
A union representative did not immediately say Wednesday what sorts of actions the union will take and when.
This upcoming slate of actions is the food and retail union's latest effort to restore hazard pay for workers. Many businesses boosted hourly pay for retail and other low-wage workers by a dollar or two when the pandemic exploded in March and April, but largely discontinued these raises in the months that followed.
Retail workers still deserve extra pay to compensate for their increased exposure to COVID-19, the union said Tuesday, noting that at least 100 grocery workers have succumbed to the virus and more than 14,000 have been infected or exposed.
"While top grocery chains rake in billions in profits during this pandemic, these frontline grocery workers continue to put themselves at risk to ensure our families have the food we need," Perrone said.
The union has previously called out Walmart, Costco and Whole Foods for ending hazard pay and demanded that they reinstate it, and has enlisted the help of prominent Democrats. Last month, Perrone and Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris penned a CNN op-ed urging grocery stores to reinstate hazard pay. In July, Senators Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, headlined a group of Democrats who sent a letter to 50 grocery store CEOs calling on them to raise pay for essential workers.
Democratic lawmakers have made hazard pay a pillar of their proposal for the next COVID-19 aid bill, known as the HEROES Act. Among other things, the $3 trillion bill would fund $13 hourly raises for grocery and other essential workers in addition to their regular pay, retroactive to Jan. 27, when the pandemic is considered to have become a public health emergency.
The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives cleared the bill in May, but it has not been taken up in the Senate, where Republican leaders have pushed a less spendy bill that would limit employers' liability when workers contract coronavirus and would not provide hazard pay.
The National Retail Federation did not respond to a request for comment.
--Additional reporting by Andrew Kragie. Editing by Jack Karp.
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