Take it from an ex-supermarket worker: This Metro strike is a reminder of what we’ve lost


When I worked at a grocery store, it was a retail job that could give you a career and stability. I’m cheering for the Metro workers.

By Bruce Arthur Columnist
Saturday, August 26, 2023


Metro workers picket a Metro warehouse at 5559 Dundas St. W. this past week, preventing the flow of goods to the distribution hub.R.J. Johnston / Toronto Star

At Safeway the men wore ties under our aprons as we stocked shelves, or collected shopping carts, or cleaned up the vomit from the four-year-old in the produce section who was asked what happened and said, staring at his shoes, “I pooked.” It was a professional operation, you see. We had timecards that rested in slots and everybody’s hourly wage peeked out at the top, so every time I clocked in, it was like staring at a possible future. Some cards whispered to me: if you wanted, you could stay here forever.

The memories resurfaced because of the Metro strike, which is nearly a month old. My third real job was in a supermarket at 12th and Cambie in Vancouver in the 1990s, after the doughnut shop and the fabric factory, and mostly I remember the people.

Chester worked in dairy: he had Hanson Brother glasses and a wispy moustache and a 40-year smoker’s rasp, which was about how long he’d been in the business. There were two cashiers named Noreen, but only one was a Jehovah’s Witness. Joy, the most serene cashier, was married to Willie from the realign crew, which would reorganize stores when head office wanted something changed; Willie was the definition of a lifer. Bianca worked in the deli: she was thin and birdlike and a little tremulous. She married Mark, a handsome grocery clerk who had a disconcerting wildness in his eyes. They had a kid, then divorced. They both kept working in the store.

They stayed because in the 1990s it was a retail job that was also a career. There were benefits and pensions and you could make $25 per hour, or about $46 an hour in today’s dollars. Rosella was a kind and wise travel agent living below the poverty line; she picked up a cashier’s job, was chosen to run the floral department, and all of a sudden she could afford her own apartment. She’s been a florist, in and out of Safeway, ever since.

Because they had been there so long, people had time to grow and mature into themselves, or not. Sometimes on night shifts the acting manager would ask a junior employee to fetch dinner off the shelves; ideally microwaveable, though one guy would actually cook food in the bakery oven. Years before that, when inventory was less formal, some clerks would apparently roll their car up to the loading dock and load it with groceries. When it was slow, we’d throw a banana or a bag of potato chips into a ceiling fan to see what happened. The result was about what you would think.

But employees were taxpaying members of society, able to afford a house and a car and vacations to someplace nice. Jackie, a wisecracking German cashier, once inexplicably lent me her newish Nissan Pathfinder when she vacationed in Europe for a month, because she didn’t want it to sit and considered me a responsible young man. I drove her Pathfinder to Whistler and nearly died while swimming in a glacier lake after putting shrooms into a strawberry margarita. In fairness to Jackie, my death in the lake, while regrettable and ridiculous, would not have damaged her car.

But the work got done, and workers were taken care of. Jason was albino and legally blind and held price checks right up to his face, and was also a Paralympian, a sprinter; as a bag boy he made $12-14 an hour, which was double the minimum wage at the time. Cashiers and clerks started closer to triple the minimum wage.

Which brings us to Metro, where the strike is nearly a month old. The 3,700 workers are fighting to restore the “hero pay” bump of $2 an hour from the pandemic on top of higher wages amid the past two years of record grocery profits and stagnating wages and inflation. An average full-time Metro employee makes $22.60 an hour, but 70 per cent of the union makes less than $20, because part-time jobs make less.

Minimum wage in Ontario will rise to $16.55 per hour in October of this year; according to the Ontario Living Wage Network, living wage in Toronto is $23.15 an hour and in the cheapest part of Ontario, London-Elgin-Oxford, it’s $18.15.

As Unifor president Lana Payne told the Star, “Who can support a family on $16-$17 an hour?” She also pointed out Metro made $922 million in profits in 2022 as part of a trend of rising grocery profits, as food prices have been the most visible sign of inflation for most people. Who has $10 for guacamole?

It’s not that a raise will let grocery workers afford a house; the housing crisis is a backdrop for this, along with a tighter labour market. But union membership in Canada has dropped from 38 per cent in 1981 to about 30 per cent now, and this may be a time of labour unrest. TVO is on strike, and good luck to them. We’ve seen public union sector strikes, from federal employees to port workers to education workers.

RELATED STORIES

‘Revenge of the wage earner’: Metro grocery strike part of larger labour trend, experts say

‘No trucks in, no trucks out.’ Striking Metro grocery workers turn up the heat with picketing at distribution warehouses

In the U.S., the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild and maybe the UAW in Detroit are all striking. The Teamsters just negotiated a contract for American UPS drivers that will see their wages hit $49 an hour (U.S.) in 2028. Inflation has hit a lot of workers hard; collective bargaining is the best way to claw it back.


And it reminded me there used to be a better deal for a lot of workers, and it allowed them to live the kind of lives you can hope for. We went on strike at my Safeway in 1997; the deal eventually grandfathered in the existing workers and started every new hire at bag-boy wages or less, to put B.C. workers more in line with Alberta. We lost, back before the record profits, and inflationary times, and the automated cashiers. I hope the Metro workers win.



Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur.