Los Angeles is on its way to being the next city that will mandate higher earnings for grocery store workers, according to NBC News, and could face a federal lawsuit from store owners if it does.
“It happened on Tuesday of last week and it’s basically a committee vote to instruct the staff and the city attorney to study further how they would draft an ordinance,” said Ron Fong, president of the California Grocers Association (CGA). “An ordinance has not been passed yet but we expect for the full city council to hear it again probably in two weeks. We're doing our best to influence the city council not to enact an ordinance but we'll have to see how that goes in a couple of weeks.”
Unlike the city of Long Beach, which enacted an ordinance to pay grocery store workers $4 an hour of additional hero pay, Los Angeles would reportedly hike the pay rate by $5 an hour temporarily. Hero pay is a temporary boost in pay provided to employees who have worked on the front lines since the coronavirus emerged as a health hazard in March 2020.
“It's illegal in our opinion because there's a federal preemption that precludes city councils from doing this and the National Labor Relations Board has strict federal guidelines that say if you're bargaining with your union, you can't have an outside entity tell you to add $4 in income,” Fong told the Southern California Record. “This all has to go through the federal law of negotiating.”
Although the hike in pay in Long Beach lead to Food 4 Less and Ralph's closing one store each, Fong said he is unsure if the same will happen in Los Angeles if the ordinance passes.
“Los Angeles is a much bigger city and there are a lot of grocery stores,” he said. “We are telling the LA city council the same thing that we told Long Beach, which is that we are opposed to these ordinances because there's no way that grocery stores can absorb a 30% across-the-board increase in wages.”
CGA filed a lawsuit last week against the city of Long Beach in the Central District of California federal court alleging violations of the U.S. Constitution and the California Constitution. The court will hear arguments on CGA’s Motion for a Preliminary Injunction on Feb. 19.
“There's an opportunity, if we win, for Long Beach to rescind the ordinance, but we're not counting on that to happen,” Fong said in an interview. “I think this is going to trial.”
As previously reported in the Southern California Record, the "Premium Pay for Grocery Workers Ordinance" requires Long Beach grocery stores, such as Whole Foods, Food 4 Less, Trader Joe’s and Ralph’s, to pay an additional $4 an hour temporarily arguably because workers face greater exposure to COVID-19 infection on the job.
“The city council is uninformed,” Fong said in an interview. “When you read the ordinance, it says they would like to help the safety of essential workers and we're not quite sure how giving people a raise of $4 or $5 an hour ensures their safety. It makes them wealthier but we don’t understand the safety bridge.”