After nine months of bargaining, members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555 employed at Fred Meyer, Safeway, Albertsons, and QFC have ratified new three-year contracts in the Portland and Vancouver area, Eugene, Longview, Newberg, Bend, Burns, The Dalles, Hood River, Klamath Falls and Lakeview. The union members work in grocery, meat, central checkout, and non-food departments.
All of the contracts include wage increases for journeypersons in each year of the contract, with retroactive pay for those with expired contracts; increases to the apprentice brackets so as to keep them ahead of the increases in the minimum wage; and no cost increases to the health and welfare plan.
“This could not have happened without members’ help sending a strong message to the employers that they deserve better,” UFCW Local 555 said in a statement.
Details of the contract will be made available to members upon request, and to the public once members throughout the Local’s jurisdiction have voted. Several Local 555 contracts don’t expire until later this year.
Why don’t the new contract people get a raise when the old contract employees do the new contract employees are the future is this statement not true? Thank you
The new employees do get raises. They get raises until they are topped out on the pay scale. Yes that includes the new topped out pay. You only get an immediate raise if you are already topped out. If your not topped out you have to work the required hours until your next raise. Moving up the pay scale just like everyone before them had to.