Halifax Demonstrators Condemn Grocery Giants For Cutting ‘Hero Pay’
HALIFAX—Demonstrators rallied outside the Quinpool Road Superstore Friday to demand Loblaw and other major grocery chains bring back pay increases for their frontline workers.
Loblaw Companies (which owns Superstore), Metro, and Sobeys parent company Empire Co. had all raised frontline employees’ wages by about 15 percent at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Earlier this month, about 12 weeks after they announced the so-called “hero pay” increase, all three companies clawed it back.
The decision came as Loblaw and Empire both saw their corporate earnings jump by more than 20 percent over the first quarter of 2020.
Judy Haiven is a member of Equity Watch, the advocacy group that organized the demonstration.
As she took a break from handing out leaflets, the former St Mary’s University professor said it’s “disgusting” that big corporations are slashing wages for employees who “have to live on probably $20,000 a year.”
“We feel it’s shameful for big companies like the Atlantic Superstore… or Sobeys to be taking away the hero pay for the heroes that have actually worked throughout the pandemic” while the chains continue to turn huge profits, Haiven said.
According to the Canadian Centre For Policy Alternatives, Halifax residents need to make about $19 an hour to afford the basic necessities of life: food, shelter, childcare, transportation, and other expenses.
Haiven points out this “living wage” is at least four dollars an hour higher than what grocery workers were making with their “hero pay” bump. Now, workers will fall even further below the $19-an-hour living wage mark.
Lisa Cameron, a union organizer and labour activist in Halifax, told the crowd the Covid-19 recession had disproportionally affected low income workers like cashiers.
“While office workers and higher-wage earners have more often enjoyed the ability to work from home and have not experienced an interruption in their earnings, minimum wage and grocery store workers… have been forced into public, risking their own health just to maintain the right to earn starvation wages,” Cameron said.
She argued private corporations can’t be trusted to put the welfare of their workers ahead of their own profits.
“It is not impossible to pay grocery store workers decent wages, especially when you’ve seen a 21 percent increase in your profits,” she said. “This is obviously not a scarcity of funds issues, this is just an ethics issue.”
Speaking about the hero pay cuts last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadians “expect that people who’ve stepped up during this time be properly supported and paid for it.”
“We need to make sure that people who’ve stepped up to help Canadians, often at question of their own health and safety, continue to be supported and respected,” Trudeau said during his June 19 press briefing.
On June 18, the House of Commons Industry Committee passed a unanimous resolution calling on executives of Loblaw, Empire, and Metro to testify on why they cancelled their employees’ hero pay.
None of the chains demonstrators targeted today responded to Huddle’s request for comments by our publication deadline.
On June 11, Loblaw president Sarah Davis wrote in an email to her workers that the company had “settled into a good rhythm” and that “with this stability and economies re-opening, we have decided the time is right to transition out of our temporary pay premium.”