DENVER | Some 10,000 grocery store workers across the greater Denver area went on strike Thursday, claiming unfair and illegal negotiating practices by King Soopers while their union has been negotiating a new contract with the store chain.
Striking workers at 77 King Soopers stores in Denver and its suburbs, plus those in nearby Boulder and Louisville, Colorado, urged customers not to cross picket lines that began taking shape before dawn.
“Stand together. Stay strong,” United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 7 President Kim Cordova wrote union members in a Monday letter announcing the strike.
UFCW Local 7 members voted by 96% last week to authorize the unfair labor practices strike.
King Soopers, a chain owned by Kroger, with 121 stores in Colorado and Wyoming, has been negotiating a new contract since October. The current contract expired in January.
Stores with striking workers will remain open under a curtailed schedule that starts an hour later and closes two hours earlier than usual each day, King Soopers spokesperson Jessica Trowbridge said by email.
Cordova accused the company of flying workers in from out of state to staff stores.
Locations in northern and southern Colorado and Cheyenne, Wyoming — where workers are not on strike — will remain open during their usual hours, Trowbridge wrote.
The union alleges King Soopers illegally interrogated and surveilled union members, refused to provide information needed for contract negotiations, threatened union members with discipline for clothes and buttons expressing union support, and insisted on using $8 million in retiree health benefit funds to cover pay increases.
King Soopers denies all of the allegations, saying in a statement Friday it has acted in full compliance with the law and its collective bargaining obligations. Management has gone to “great lengths” to share all relevant data with the union, is committed to fair and lawful negotiations and disputes the union’s claim that it would “gut” the retiree health benefit funds.
“We want to be clear — the Union’s call for a strike is not about wages, health care, or pensions. It is based on allegations we believe lack merit,” King Soopers President Joe Kelley said in the statement.
The strike will force customers to pay higher prices at competing stores and stores with nonunion workers, Kelley added.
The strike follows several recent threatened and implemented labor union actions in the U.S. Last week, the Teamsters union and Costco reached a tentative contract agreement to avert a strike.
At Utah’s Park City ski resort, the biggest in the U.S., some 200 union ski patrollers ended an almost two-week strike Jan. 9 after reaching an agreement with resort owner Vail Resorts for higher pay including raises for senior ski patrollers.
Labor unions have secured other meaningful employer concessions in recent months following strikes by Boeing factory workers, dockworkers at East and Gulf coast ports, video game performers, and hotel and casino workers on the Las Vegas Strip.
Just stating that I won’t cross the picket line until a resolution is reached. I trust average workers a lot more than I do Kroger (King Soopers). We have spent the last 50 years with increasing wages (real wages) for owners and C-suites and decreasing real wages for workers. Big corporations are slaves to profit and shareholder return. They don’t give a damn about workers until we make them care through strikes!
These lazy-ass workers were just on strike a few years ago and now they’re back at it. Whining and complaining about unfair treatment of the company. They’re frickin’ grocery store workers. They’re not Software Engineers or Accountants or Electricians; careers that actually require half a brain to get into. Unions are outdated institutions that are as greedy as the corporations they rail against. Is employees are so frustrated and dismayed by their work environment, they have every right to quit and find work elsewhere. This is 2025 after all; not 1900.
I’d love to see them try to operate a massive grocery store company and manage the logistics, finances, and operations that it takes keep the doors open, much less be profitable in an extremely competitive industry. Kroger faces challenges from WalMart and Amazon, which are both significantly more deep-pocketed than they are. If I were in the seat of the chairman, I’d fire everyone of these communists union workers, then sue the Union organizers for malicious intent to harm the business.
Headline reads thousands go on strike = thousands out of a job = thousands of good jobs available at King Soopers. As to the union, you struck in 2022, settled and sent your workers back to work = if you didn’t get the concessions you wanted (and a contract you could live with for say ten years) you shouldn’t have settled.