Metro grocery workers win major wage gains after month-long strike
Metro grocery workers win major wage gains after month-long strike
TORONTO—Frontline grocery workers at Metro have ratified a historic new collective agreement, ending a month-long strike that started on July 29, 2023.
Full-time and senior part-time workers will receive an unprecedented pay increase of $2.00 per hour within months. With all workers, full and part-time, receiving an immediate, upfront wage hike of $1.50/hour.
The new deal contains an overall wage improvement of $4.50 per hour for full-time and senior part-time workers and $3.20 for non-senior part-time workers, over the duration of the contract. New hourly rates will reach $25.05/hour for full-time clerks and significantly higher wages for part-time clerks —improvements that some frontline grocery workers describe as “life-changing.”
Back-of-the envelope math puts this at over a 20% raise over the lifetime of the agreement, outpacing inflation.
This is a very good deal, huge for the sector and hopefully precedent-setting. Congratulations to Unifor members at Metro. Strikes are hard.
Some credit as well should go to the union leadership, who immediately backed the workers when they rejected their first agreement and instead opted to strike
As I've discussed earlier in on Reddit, Unifor has recently elected new leadership who want to take the union in a more militant direction:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ndp/comments/wl54ld/lana_payne_a_former_journalist_who_built_her/