Business

What y'all need to know about the Cease & Shop strike

The Quincy-based grocery chain is trying to keep things "business as usual" during the piece of work stoppage. Union leaders desire customers to have their business elsewhere.

Stop & Shop employee Luis Medina holds a strike placard while waving to traffic Thursday exterior the grocery store in Dorchester. Craig F. Walker / The Boston Globe

At one p.m. Thursday, more 31,000 Terminate & Shop workers beyond New England walked off the job.

"We are officially out on strike," Jeff Bollen, the president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1445, one of the 5 local unions representing the Quincy-based grocery chain's New England workers, said in a video message.

The piece of work stoppage Th comes after most iii months of negotiations between the company and UFCW leaders failed to produce an agreement on a new work contract. End & Shop's contract with the union officially expired on Feb. 23, and the two sides have remained divided over wage levels, take-home pay, and retirement benefits.

As workers begin picketing outside the stores, union leaders are asking Terminate & Shop customers to assist them apply pressure on the company — by taking their business elsewhere.

"We're asking y'all to help us out, and shop some identify until the strike is over," Bollen said Thursday. "Delight support these hard workers who expect on yous every twenty-four hour period when you lot come into those Cease & Shops. We've gotten tremendous support from you so far, and nosotros would appreciate future support during this dispute, just until the dispute is over, then you're welcome to come up back."

OVER 31,000 workers from Stop & SHOP On STRIKE. This is S BAY BOSTON

Posted by UFCW Local 1445 on Thursday, April eleven, 2019

Co-ordinate to its website, Stop & Shop has 134 locations in Massachusetts, 92 in Connecticut, and 27 in Rhode Island — roughly a 21 percentage share of the region's food retail market. The company has noted that it is the simply large grocery concatenation in New England with a fully-unionized store workforce.

"We are disappointed that the UFCW chose to social club a piece of work stoppage in an attempt to disrupt service at our stores," Stop & Shop said in a argument Th in response to the strike, adding that information technology has "contingency plans in place to minimize disruption."

Those plans include deploying the visitor's corporate personnel, also as temporary replacement workers, to continue stores open.

Still, a number of stores were forced to temporarily close in the immediate aftermath of the strike Thursday afternoon, "to ensure the rubber of our customers and associates," according to Stop & Shop spokeswoman Jen Brogan. All the same, Brogan said the company was working "equally quickly as possible" to reopen them. A number of Boston-area Stop & Shop locations — including in Boston's S Bay, Brookline, Eastward Somerville, Malden and both stores in Quincy — reopened Th afternoon later briefly closing.

Brogan said the company was hoping to proceed it "business as usual" for customers who decide to visit their stores during the dispute.

However, the local Teamsters union, which represents Stop & Store's warehouse workers and truck drivers, has also directed its members to honor the strike.

"DO Not CROSS PICKETLINES," the union's social media accounts wrote Th afternoon.

Peapod, the online delivery company that partners with Stop & Shop, told customers Thursday that the strike should not affects its services, but would inform them "if for some reason an issue arises." Peapod is owned by the same parent company as Stop & Store, Dutch grocery giant Ahold Delhaize.

Stop & Shop officials say they will continue to negotiate in "skillful faith" with the UFCW and have published their most contempo contract proposals to each of the five unions on its website. According to the company, their proposals include "beyond-the-lath" pay increases and continued generous health intendance and pension benefits.

"The unions proposed a contract that would increase the company's costs," Stop & Shop officials said Th. "This would make our company less competitive in the mostly not-union New England food retail market."

The spousal relationship has a unlike view.

They say the company'south latest contract proposal includes "unreasonable wage and benefit cuts" that would diminish customer service. Noting that Ahold Delhaize earned $two billion in profits terminal year and approved a eleven.1 per centum shareholder dividend increase just this week, UFCW leaders say their requests for more than are "completely reasonable."

According to the union, Stop & Store as well plans to reduce the number of cashiers and rely more on cocky-checkout lanes.

"Protecting wellness care coverage so you tin can continue your family salubrious, adjusting wages to keep stride with regional cost-of-living increases, and maintaining pension contributions so you tin retire with dignity is not as well much to ask," UFCW leaders wrote to members Wednesday. "It is what you have earned and deserve."