Grocery Store Workers Go On Hunger Strike Over Stagnant Wages

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"It's perfectly good food," Garcia says through a translator. In the past, when he's asked if he can take the food home, he says he's been told that under-the-table giveaways are against store rules.

Sometimes he resorts to visiting the charitable food pantries around town. The irony there doesn’t escape him, either: Grocery stores like the one where he works often donate the very food that goes to those pantries and, eventually, to the needy like himself.

Like a lot of the workers who clean retail and food stores these days, Garcia doesn’t work directly for the store he cleans. He's employed by a company called Carlson Building Maintenance, which has a contract to wax and buff the floors inside Cub Foods stores, a chain concentrated in Minnesota. Cub is owned by Supervalu, a grocery conglomerate that also has Acme, Albertsons and Shoppers among its many holdings.

Although they had once been decent-paying union jobs, a lot of the cleaning and other grunt work in grocery and retail stores now gets farmed out to third-party contractors like Carlson. Sometimes there are even sub-contractors beneath the contractors. If these companies can't get the job done at a certain price point, the retailer will simply find another company that will. The system puts downward wage pressures on bottom-rung workers like Garcia.


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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/28/grocery-store-workers-hunger-minneapolis-minnesota-cub-foods_n_868195.html