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Shelved: How wages and working conditions for California’s food retail workers have declined as the industry has thrived
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.
