As Metro workers at 27 Toronto-area grocery stores return to work after a month-long strike, experts and union representatives say their new collective agreement raises the bar for grocery store workers across the country. “It's the workers' time to be recognized for what they've given to these companies,” said Kim Novak, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union Local 1518 in British Columbia. More than 3,700 Metro workers went on strike at the end of July after rejecting
As Metro workers at 27 Toronto-area grocery stores return to work after a month-long strike, experts and union representatives say their new collective agreement raises the bar for grocery store workers across the country.
The Unifor-Metro deal helps set a floor for future agreements, though they won’t be identical, said Stephanie Ross, an associate professor in the school of labour studies at McMaster University.Unifor has made it clear that it intends to use the Metro agreement to pattern bargain, meaning it will try to seek similar gains in upcoming negotiations with grocers.
The UFCW calls itself the union for grocery store workers, representing around 140,000 people in food retail countrywide. In B.C., Novak's Local 1518 represents around 18,000 grocery workers, and in 2023 its two biggest contracts were up for negotiations. Working at a grocery store once offered a decent job with good pay, but that’s changed, said York University associate professor of labour geography Steven Tufts. Unions took concessions at the bargaining table over the 1990s and 2000s as grocers tried to compete with Walmart.
Unions need to scale up bargaining, he said, so that they can negotiate with employers at a higher level — like the UFCW’s B.C.-wide contracts with Save-On-Foods and Safeway.
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