Robin White has worked at Kroger supermarkets in Southern California for seven years and hopes for a promotion to manager, which would raise her pay from $16.65 an hour to $23 and increase her weekly hours from 28 to 40. With the extra income, she said, she and her 9-year-old son would be able to move into their own place, and she’d start saving up to go back to school and become a licensed nursing assistant.
Through parts of the first two years of the pandemic, they lived in their car, spending nights in the store’s parking garage. Whatever White could spare went toward the occasional luxury of a motel room.
“It wasn’t really often, but I would have to neglect certain bills, car note, just to be able to shower and have somewhere to lay down,” said White, who is 35 and has been a cashier at Ralphs branches in Los Angeles and Riverside, among the 2,800 grocery stores Kroger owns across the country under around 20 brand names. “Once they took the hazard pay, and they started cutting hours again, it was really bad.”
The pandemic brought renewed attention to the conditions of hourly laborers who keep America fed, and has led to wage increases in some sectors for the first time in years. Yet while the vaccine rollout reduced the risk of becoming severely ill from an on-the-job COVID infection for many essential workers, it also led to a rollback of company policies and government programs that helped them make ends meet in the early months of the crisis. As a result, many...
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