We Are Forgotten’: Grocery Workers

Hope for Higher Pay and

Vaccinations
Booming business during the pandemic hasn’t always meant better wages, and they
have largely been left off vaccine priority lists.

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Workers protesting outside the Food 4 Less in Long Beach, Calif. Kroger plans to close
the store after the city required “hero pay” for grocery workers.Credit...Maggie Shannon
for The New York Times
By Sapna Maheshwari and Michael Corkery
 Feb. 8, 2021

It has been an exhausting 10 months for Toni Ward Sockwell, an assistant manager at
Cash Saver, a grocery chain, in Guthrie, Okla. She has been helping to oversee about 40
anxious employees during a deadly pandemic, vigilantly disinfecting counters at the
store and worrying about passing the coronavirus to her elderly mother while dropping
off produce.

News of the vaccines initially boosted her spirits, but her optimism faded as she learned
that grocery store workers in Oklahoma would not be eligible for them until spring.

“When they said we were Phase 3, I wanted to laugh,” Ms. Sockwell, 45, said. “We’re
around just as many sick people as we are around nonsick people, just like health care
workers, because we are always going to be open to supply food to the public.

“Health care workers are heroes in my eyes,” she added. “But we are forgotten.”

The race to distribute vaccines and the emergence of more contagious variants of Covid-
19 have put a renewed spotlight on the plight of grocery workers in the United States.
The industry has boomed in the past year as Americans have stayed home and avoided
restaurants. But in most cases, that has not translated into extra pay for its workers.
After Long Beach, Calif., mandated hazard pay for grocery workers, the grocery giant
Kroger responded last week by saying it would close two locations.

And now, even as experts warn people to minimize time spent in grocery stores because
of new coronavirus variants, The New York Times found only 13 states that had started
specifically vaccinating those workers.

“Grocers are known to have these very thin margins, which they do, but they have been
very profitable during the pandemic,” said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings
Institution who has researched retailers’ pay during the pandemic. “Employers by and
large, with only a few exceptions like Trader Joe’s and Costco, ended hazard pay months
and months ago.”

She added, “If you look at how the virus has gone since then, it’s so much more deadly
now.”