A grocery store worker filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Kroger and Albertsons in Colorado state court on Monday, accusing the two supermarket giants of colluding against striking employees to keep pay and benefits down.
Valarie Morgan, who works at a Kroger-owned King Soopers store, alleges the two competitors reached an illicit agreement not to poach employees or customers during a 2022 work stoppage. Doing so, she claims, gave Kroger an upper hand against its employees’ union during contract talks.
As a result, Morgan says, Kroger workers ended up with a worse deal than they should have.
“The anticompetitive agreement was successful,” she alleges. “It artificially reduced the union’s bargaining power during negotiations, while increasing the leverage of Kroger’s management.”
The suit alleges that this ultimately benefited Albertsons as well, since the terms of the Kroger deal would impact the contracts Albertsons would later negotiate with the same union.
“These companies rigged the system against us, undermining our right to fight for better pay and fair treatment through our unions.”
– Kroger employee Valarie Morgan
Kroger and Albertsons did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Morgan said in a statement through Towards Justice, the workers’ legal aid group representing her, that she wanted to “stand up for all the workers who were harmed by this corporate abuse.”
“These companies rigged the system against us, undermining our right to fight for better pay and fair treatment through our unions,” she said. “Hardworking Coloradans deserve better.”
Colorado’s attorney general filed a lawsuit earlier this year with similar allegations, citing emails between Kroger and Albertsons officials just ahead of the King Soopers strike that hit 78 stores and involved thousands of workers.
“We don’t intend to hire any King Soupers [sic] employees, and we have already advised the Safeway division of our position, and the division agrees,” Albertsons’ senior vice president of labor relations was quoted writing in an email to a Kroger official.
That email is cited in Morgan’s lawsuit, along with others suggesting Albertsons agreed not to solicit Kroger customers to switch their prescriptions to Albertsons during the strike. Such an agreement could have helped Kroger hang onto shoppers through the work stoppage.
Kroger and Albertsons are two of the largest grocery companies in the U.S., and now they are trying to merge in a $25 billion deal. Opponents have held up the alleged collusion during the strike as evidence the merger would hurt workers and consumers by pushing pay down and prices up.
The Federal Trade Commission, joined by several state attorneys general, went to court in hopes of blocking the merger from moving forward earlier this year.
The antitrust case is now in federal court, though it faces an uncertain future following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory. Trump will have the opportunity to reshape the FTC following an aggressive antitrust agenda under President Joe Biden.
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Both Kroger and Albertsons have defended the proposed merger and claimed it would lead to lower prices for shoppers. Kroger has also disputed the collusion allegations, telling HuffPost in February that “there was not then, and there is not now, non-solicitation or so-called no-poach agreements between Kroger and Albertsons.”
Unionized Kroger and Albertsons employees in Colorado are represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, which has come out in opposition to the merger. Its president, Kim Cordova, previously told HuffPost she believed the union was harmed by the alleged no-poach agreement.
“We will never know what concessions we could have got from these employers,” Cordova said. “We did well [with our contracts] but we could have done even better.”