Bay Area

Large Grocery Stores End Hazard Pay in Oakland, Berkeley

Immediately after Oakland and Berkeley reached the yellow tier of COVID-19 spread, as state restrictions like capacity limits lifted, and as the Delta variant continued to spread, positive cases of the virus began to trend upward. A chart showing data collected by Alameda County shows that when the county entered the yellow tier on June 8, the total cases from the previous 14 days was 455. Toward the end of July, this 14-day total passed 4,000 cases on three consecutive days, which was about a ninefold increase.

Published

4 years ago

August 6, 2021

Isabelle Price

Trader Joe's is one of the large grocery store chains in Oakland and Berkeley that have recently stopped paying their workers COVID-19 related hazard pay. Photo is of the store in the Lakeshore neighborhood of Oakland on August 3 and was taken by Zack Haber.

Workers in four different chain grocery stores in Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville told The Oakland Post that they are not receiving hazard pay related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While Oakland and Berkeley city councils each unanimously passed ordinances last February that required large grocery stores to pay workers an additional $5 per hour due to COVID-19 hazards, both ordinances stated that once the cities reached the yellow tier — that indicating minimal COVID-19 spread — this requirement would end.

Workers in Whole Foods, Grocery Outlet and Trader Joe’s based in either Oakland or Berkeley reported that they received their last hazard paychecks in early July, about a month after these cities reached the yellow tier on June 8.

The Oakland Post contacted Oakland City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas, who wrote The Grocery Store Worker Hazard Pay Emergency Ordinance, to ask about hazard pay ending. Bas’s chief of staff, Miya Saika Chen responded by acknowledging that since the ordinance “was tied to state guidelines determining safe reopening,” and Oakland had reached the yellow tier, the ordinance no longer applies.

In response to questions about hazard pay ending as COVID-19 cases increased, Chen emphasized the impact of vaccination, as vaccines have been effective in preventing serious health effects related to the virus.

“Our top priority must be to ensure everyone has accurate information about the vaccines and safe and equitable access to the vaccines in order to prevent another wave of infections,” she said.

Neither Bas nor any members her staff responded when asked if there was anything council could do or is planning to do to reinstate grocery store hazard pay. The Oakland Post posed the same question to Berkeley City Councilmember Terry Taplin, who wrote Berkeley’s hazard pay ordinance. He responded by saying that to reinstate grocery store hazard pay, Berkeley’s City Council would have to pass a new ordinance.

“The city is currently evaluating several options to respond to the Delta variant,” Taplin said. “I will have to consult with the city team and legal to discuss what can be done around new hazard pay.”

In Oakland and Berkeley, new hazard pay ordinances cannot be passed this month through City Council actions, as council meetings in both cities are on hold through August. But both Oakland and Berkeley City Councils could revisit the issue in September when meetings start up again. The grocery store workers who The Oakland Post spoke to felt they deserved hazard pay due to their hard work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“[The hazard pay] was so helpful,” said a Whole Foods worker in Berkeley. “It’s so expensive to live here and I can barely make it. I was able to put a little money away and not penny-pinch when I was getting it.”

Like all workers interviewed for this article, this worker feared retaliation from their employers for speaking to the press about their pay, and asked not to be named.

Furthermore, with temperature checks suspended, the Berkeley Whole Foods worker said they did not feel safe at work. They also claimed that in May there was an outbreak of the virus in the prepared foods section of their store. Although The Oakland Post contacted Whole Foods to ask about hazard pay, temperature checks, and the alleged COVID-19 outbreak, their media team has not responded.

The City of Emeryville, which borders both Oakland and Berkeley, has never required any grocery stores to offer its employees COVID-19 hazard pay. A worker at a Pak ’N Save in Emeryville, who has been on the job for about a year, said they were being paid Emeryville’s minimum wage, which is currently $17.13, and has never received any hazard pay. They said low pay has hit some of their co-workers with families especially hard. Children sometimes wait in the Pak ’N Save break room during shifts as the pay rates make it impossible for some grocery store workers to afford childcare.

“They are paying us the lowest they are literally allowed to pay us,” the Pak ’N Save worker said. “A lot of people are sick of it. A lot of people are quitting.”

Wendy Gutshall, a spokesperson for Safeway, the company that owns and operates Pak ’N Save, confirmed that the Emeryville store has not been paying hazard pay and that Safeway stores in Oakland and Berkeley stopped paying the $5 hazard pay after those cities reached the yellow tier. Gutshall said Safeway and Pak ’N Save paid workers an extra $2 an hour in hazard pay from March through June 13 of 2020 and gave a bonus to their frontline workers last December.

Although they have not currently been receiving hazard pay, workers at Pak ’N Save in Emeryville have faced exposure to COVID-19. Emails this Pak ’N Save worker shared with The Oakland Post from a Regional Human Resources Manager indicate that between July 21 and July 28, workers had been exposed to COVID-19 three separate times in the store.

This same worker shared a photo of a letter the store displayed in its break room indicating that one of their co-workers recently filed a complaint with State of California’s Dept. of Industrial Relations accusing the store of making them work for several days after they reported experiencing COVID-19 symptoms due to the store being short staffed.

When asked about the complaint, Gutshall said she could not speak to it directly, stating “For privacy reasons, we cannot provide specifics regarding a [worker’s] situation.” She said workers experiencing COVID-19 symptoms are instructed to go home, that the company is in close contact with such workers to investigate their contacts with other workers and ensure they receive appropriate medical care, and that such workers can access 80 hours of quarantine pay.

According to Gutshall, workers are required to check their temperature when reporting for work at Pak ’N Save and Safeway. The Pak ’N Save worker The Oakland Post interviewed said such temperature checks are optional at the store where they worked.

Both the Pak ’N Save worker and the Whole Foods worker that The Oakland Post interviewed said that as the pandemic has dragged on, increasing numbers of their co-workers have quit, which has caused their workload to intensify and increase.

“Everyone has to do a little bit of everything,” the Pak ’N Save worker said. “We don’t have enough checkers or enough people who walk around the store to help customers and clean up. But [Pak ‘’N Save] is not even willing to increase wages to meet the need for labor.”

“The work is just getting more and more stressful,” said the Whole Foods worker. “We’re running on a skeleton crew. And now we’re back to regular pay.”

Isabelle Price

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Activism

Oakland Post: Week of March 5 – 11, 2025

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of March 5 – 11, 2025

Published

4 days ago

March 7, 2025

Oakland Post

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Activism

Undocumented Workers Are Struggling to Feed Themselves. Slashed Budgets and New Immigration Policies Bring Fresh Challenges

Founded more than 20 years ago, Street Level Health Project started with a handful of nurses and volunteers visiting day laborer sites in East Oakland to provide medical assistance and other resources to newly arrived immigrants. They quickly spotted symptoms common among day laborers: nausea, fatigue, and headaches. Sitting in the sun for hours waiting for work is typical. Once on a job, some men shared incidents of nearly passing out while working. Volunteer nurses also noticed signs of hunger among the men, with some going days without eating a proper meal.

Published

6 days ago

March 4, 2025

Oakland Post

Day laborer zone sites are scattered across several streets in East Oakland, California. The sites allow workers to find temporary jobs in skilled labor such as construction, landscaping, and agriculture. Photo by Magaly Muñoz.

By Magaly Muñoz

Up and down the streets of the Fruitvale neighborhood in Oakland, immigrant workers head to empty parking lots and street corners waiting for a job. Some are as young as 14 and as old as 60.

Diego, a man in his late thirties, is a construction worker who arrived in the United States nine months ago. He, like many of the men standing beside him at the day laborer site, came to the U.S. in the hopes of providing a new life for his family. Now, Diego and other immigrants are worried as threats of deportation increase from the Trump administration.

Also worried are organizations such as Street Level Health Project, an Oakland-based nonprofit dedicated to providing access to health care and basic services to these laborers.

Street Level Health Project’s funding primarily comes from federal and local grants, These are in jeopardy because of city budget constraints and proposed cuts to federal social service dollars.

Already, the nonprofit’s local funding has been cut. The City of Oakland decreased one of the organization’s grants by $35,000 in one of its latest rounds of budget cuts, with city officials citing a looming budget deficit.

“Our primary day laborer program funding right now is secured, but we do have concerns in this next budget cycle if it will continue to be secured, given [the budget shortfall], and the recent cut to 13 community grants across the city,” said Executive Director Gabriela Galicia.

“We’re the safety net to the safety net,” said Galicia. As Oakland’s sole organization devoted to helping undocumented workers, Street Level is often tasked with “picking up the leftovers” for groups that provide resources to the larger immigrant or underserved communities, she added. Now, that mission is under threat.

Level Health Project is a nonprofit organization in East Oakland that provides health and employment resources for immigrant day laborers and their families. The staff upped their efforts to provide information about immigration rights in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency. Photo by Magaly Muñoz.

At day laborer sites in East Oakland, several workers said that they often skip buying groceries or meals for themselves in order to save money for rent or other necessities.

Diego, who like others interviewed for this story asked to not share his full name because of his undocumented status, said he’s lucky if he makes $300 a week. He said that is enough to pay for the small room he and his son rent in the Fruitvale – but not enough to feed them both. Diego said that he will sometimes go days without food.

The family Diego rents from is more fortunate, he said, because they’re able to afford meat and rice. At times, Diego said, it’s hard to ignore the savory smell that finds its way to his bedroom. Diego tells his son to look away from his landlord’s table to avoid feeling envious about what they cannot buy themselves.

“It’s hard because I know there’s food at the store, but there’s never enough [money] to buy it,” Diego said. “We barely have enough to pay our rent every month.”

On top of paying for the basics here in the U.S., day laborers also face pressure to support relatives in their home countries.

Pedro, interviewed on his BART ride home after an unsuccessful day of trying to find work in East Oakland, said his family in Guatemala regularly goes days without eating because he can’t make enough money in the Bay Area to send home to them.

“A lot of [day laborers] have their families back in [Latin America], making it harder to keep up with our needs here,” Pedro said. Some days he said the only thing he eats is the fruit that some local organizations hand out to workers like him.

Street Level Health Project is providing weekly grocery bags to immigrant day laborers and their families to address the growing need for food in the community. Photo by Magaly Muñoz.

Bracing for bigger challenges

Before the pandemic, Street Level Health Project had a hot meal lunch program at their central office in the Fruitvale, where the organization provided meals twice a week for over 50 people. The organization also had a hot meal breakfast program where they prepared 50 to 90 meals, three times a week.

Understanding the food insecurity that many day laborers face, the project launched a food distribution program in 2011, distributing nearly 70 bags of groceries weekly. Thanks to additional funding, they were able to increase that to 150 food bags a week during the pandemic.

In recent years, Street Level Health Project reduced its weekly grocery distribution back to 70 bags and cut its hot meal program completely. Galicia, the director, said that’s because of the end of COVID-19 funding and staffing reductions.

Street Level Health Project also receives regular donations from the Alameda County Food Bank, but Galicia said it has not been enough to restore the food distribution program to what it was during the pandemic.

Currently, Street Level has a $100,000 grant from the city of Oakland to provide wrap-around services for day laborers, such as getting jobs for the workers, providing assistance with CalFresh and MediCal applications, and referring people to legal aid or immigration assistance. Galicia said that funding is barely enough to do the amount of work that the city expects.

Meanwhile, the $35,000 cut in funding has impacted the organization’s workers’ rights outreach and education services, she said.

The Oakland Post tried reaching out to city and county officials several times for comment but did not get a response.

Galicia fears city leaders will make even harsher cuts during the upcoming budget cycle this spring to balance a $130 million shortfall. Last year, Oakland cut funding for public safety, arts and culture programs, and 13 other nonprofits that serve the city’s most vulnerable populations.

Yet the budget concerns don’t stop with local government.

In the wake of Trump 2.0, organizations across the country are handing out “red cards” with the rights that immigrants should be aware of when encountering immigration officers. Photo by Magaly Muñoz.

Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, immigrant communities and the organizations that serve them have been in crisis mode.

Trump, who ran on a promise to deport millions of immigrants, has signed executive orders to stop birthright citizenship, shipped migrants to Guantanamo Bay, and attempted to freeze federal funding to social programs. Undocumented residents are increasingly anxious that their families might get separated.

Galicia said this is the time for local and state governments to invest in their organizations’ staff and direct resources, not take them away, from the people on the frontlines.

“I think that it’s just as important that funders are able to give to our teams, not just for the community but because the people doing the work have to be well, and we need ample resources to be able to do this work to support our community,” Galicia said.

For Pedro, the day laborer in Oakland, the combination of less support from nonprofits like Street Level Health Project, along with fear raised by the Trump administration’s deportation threats, has left him fearful. He is not alone, he said. He has noticed fewer day laborers showing up to their usual spots. Pedro said he himself fears encountering an immigration officer on his way to work.

“We don’t want to leave our homes, but at the same time, if we don’t go outside, we don’t work,” he said. “If we don’t work, we can’t afford to live.”

Oakland Post reporter Magaly Muñoz produced this story as part of a series as a 2024 USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism Data Fellow and Engagement Grantee.