Setting the Record Straight

Fact

We are, in fact, paying above the industry standard. What Minneapolis-based Union leaders are demanding is that we pay Metro Area wages here in northern Minnesota. That would make it far harder for us to compete and makes no sense. Our total wages and benefits package is more than competitive based on our communities’ cost of living.

Fact

Our final offer was a historically large wage increase of 15% over two years and we agreed to the Union’s most important proposals regarding health insurance and pension benefits. In fact, our offer ensures that no employee faces an increase in their health insurance costs during the life of our proposed contracts. Moreover, we agreed to costly union proposals to help them shore up a badly underfunded pension plan. But instead of working with us, Union leadership walked out.

Fact

Currently the minimum starting wage is $12.75 for part-time and $10.79 for custodial.

Our offer is to increase that to $14.25 for part-time and $12.00 for custodial.

Often, we pay above scale to an employee that shows initiative and takes on additional responsibilities. Our employees also get raises along the way for time worked or employed.

In addition, our entry-level, part-time positions provide workers, who are often high school students and people with disabilities, with flexible schedules to accommodate academic and other responsibilities outside of work. We also provide training and opportunities for advancement, higher wages and benefits as part of our commitment to promoting from within.

As for turnover, it is the opposite of high. At Quisberg stores alone, 77% of our full-time employees have been with us at least five years; 57% of them have been with us for 10 years or more, and 30% are at 20 years or more with the company.

Fact

We disagree with these allegations, and we will be limiting our comments here given the pending legal proceedings.

What we can say is that we have absolutely bargained in good faith. We have agreed to the Union’s most important proposals regarding Health and Welfare and Pension benefits and have offered historical wage increases – 15% over two years that are far beyond anything that has ever been offered in our history.

The Union, by contrast, walked out in the middle of negotiations to protest the negotiations while they were still going on, instead of focusing its energies at the bargaining table. Moreover, the Union has engaged in a variety of unlawful tactics and has engaged in its own campaign of intimidation toward any employees who might support the Company.

Fact

Store management learned of plans to stage repeated 15-minute walk outs directly from employees who came forward to volunteer this information, not through any kind of monitoring, either physical or digital.

During these 15-minute walkouts, it was volunteers from our community – not replacement workers – who came forward to assist customers until our employees returned.

Fact

We agree with the Union that workers should be paid competitive wages and benefits – no matter where they live. What they don’t say is that here in our Brainerd Lakes Area, the cost of living for a single adult is six- to seven-thousand dollars a year less than it is in the Twin Cities; and up to $17,000 less a year for a family of two adults and one child. Our total wages and benefits package is more than competitive based on our communities’ cost of living.

Union leadership is attempting to apply flawed economics. They want to apply pay scales based on Twin Cities’ cost of living to stores in the Brainerd Lakes Area. Grocery retailing is an intensely competitive business where we need to balance our commitment to our workers along with our obligation to provide competitive food prices to our customers, while still investing in our stores and our community so customers enjoy coming to shop. Applying “Big-Metro” economics to our portion of the state would erode our ability to compete against the large national retailers in our market and we believe would not be good for the long-term financial health of our operations.

Just because a Company can “afford” to pay more doesn’t make it a responsible business decision to do so. The Company has not altered its economic offer because it genuinely believes the offer is more than fair, and no amount of Union propaganda or demonstrations will change the Company’s mind in that regard.

Simply put – our offer is the highest ever made by our Companies for any Local Union with whom we do business, and it is the most significant offer ever made in our long and successful history of negotiations with Local 663. All told, it provides for more than a 15% increase in wages and benefits for our employees over the proposed two years of the contract.

Fact

It is unclear how many workers actually voted and whether they were representative of all the workers across all our five stores. We know that some employees at our stores chose not to vote due to concerns about feeling pressured or intimidated by the Union at the remote voting site. We also know that some employees have reported being harassed, including by the Union President, for openly expressing support for the Company’s offer.

Union Leadership has chosen to focus on only one aspect of our offer, hourly wages, completely disregarding the Health & Welfare and Pension benefits we’ve agreed to.

With our offer, employees will not experience ANY increases to their Health & Welfare contribution over the next two years, despite the fact that we all know the costs of healthcare have skyrocketed. In fact, in studies published last fall by a leading healthcare research firm, KFF, healthcare premiums increased by an average of 7%. By agreeing to fully fund employees’ healthcare and protect our employees from the impact of such increases, the economic value of our final offer is even stronger than it already was.

In fact, the last time employees had any increase in their contribution towards Health & Welfare was 2018 and that increase was from $10 per week to $20 per week for full time employees.

Fact

We don’t know what the union’s definition of “up to par” means. We do know that our offer includes a 23.8% increase in starting pay alone for our custodial workers. With our generous benefits package, that increase is closer to 40%. We also know that our competitors have not come close to that offer.

Fact

We asked Union leadership to extend the current contract while negotiations continued, so our employees would not have to work without a contract. Their refusal to extend is why our employees and their membership are forced to work without a contract.