Saru Jayaraman and the Food Labor Research Center
2014
This report shows that while California’s food retail industry has enjoyed consistent growth over the past two decades, the expansion of a low-price, low-cost business model – and the choices that traditional, unionized grocers have made in the face of it – have produced a dramatic wage decline, with high rates of poverty and hunger among workers in a sector that once enjoyed relatively high wages and unionization rates. The report calls for a two-pronged strategy to arrest and reverse these trends: support for unionization, and public policies that support livable wages and benefits.