
DENVER—For the first time in a generation, Safeway/Albertsons workers are out on the picket lines in Colorado. With over 98% of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 members approving strike votes over the last few weeks, a cascade of pickets is rising across the Boulder State daily—a strike action not seen at Safeway for 29 years. This action is yet another instance of grocery workers taking the fight straight to Big Grocery.
“It’s gonna be a slow burn,” one UFCW Local 7 business agent told People’s World on the picket line at the Distribution Center in Denver. Starting with a few retail locations in Estes Park, Fountain, and Pueblo, plus the regional distribution center, the strike has since grown day-by-day to include outlets in Colorado Springs, Greeley, Fort Collins, Boulder, and now the greater Denver-Aurora metro. Each day, new locations walk out, keeping the company on edge and scrambling to deploy scabs.
Emulating the United Auto Workers “stand up” strike from the summer of 2023, Local 7 is tight-lipped about which locations will strike next—until organizers announce walkouts over the loudspeakers in the store. With a high level of discipline, workers hit the bricks to shut down their stores and set up their pickets. “Everybody was out in a matter of minutes,” said Jackson, a strike captain and pharmacy technician in Denver.

Inside the store, deli and cafe services are down, plus seafood and other critical departments. Some customers who cross the picket lines are finding that the products they seek are not available.
Teamsters truck drivers are honoring the picket lines across the state in solidarity with the grocery workers and are depriving picketed stores of essential deliveries.
Understaffing is a major issue for striking workers. “There’s supposed to be four of us pharmacy techs working at any given time, but they’ll have us down to two or three,” Dawson, a pharmacist on the picket line, told People’s World.
Besides chronic understaffing, workers are striking over the company’s proposed deep cuts to healthcare and retirement benefits. This is reflective of an aggressive bargaining strategy that the big grocery corporations employ to boost their already bloated profits off the backs of workers’ well-being.
Safeway/Albertsons workers are also taking action against illegal conduct by the employer—a series of unfair labor practices including threats, unilateral changes to the contract, and illegal non-compliance with agreements to provide retroactive pay and benefits adjustments.
Leaflets distributed by striking workers keep the heat squarely on corporate mega-profits, asking customers: “What’s causing grocery prices to soar? Hint: It’s not workers’ wages.”
Drawing from research conducted by the Groundwork Collaborative, the union highlights the eye-popping $989,000,000 profits brought in by Safeway/Albertsons in 2024, up 112% compared to the same period pre-pandemic. The study demonstrates that while corporate profits historically accounted for just 11% of price growth over the last 40 years, profit-gouging drove 53% of price inflation during the second and third quarters of 2023 and more than a third since the start of the pandemic.
These figures help underline for consumers that it’s not the union grocery workers forcing them to pinch pennies—it’s the corporate shareholders. After reading the union’s leaflet, People’s World witnessed many customers who turned away to shop elsewhere.
Rather than seeing their fight as against their employer alone, striking Safeway workers underline the duopoly collusion factor, as Kroger subsidiaries like King Soopers hedge their bets on Safeway to prevail over their workers’ demands—thus reducing the bargaining power of their own workers who are currently in negotiations that stalled out during a strike last winter.
The two conglomerates are “working together,” said Gabriel, a Denver grocer on strike. “You can’t just team up like that to keep your workers down!”
Following the defeat of a potential merger between Kroger and Albertsons, the two grocery giants have superficially remained in “competition,” including issuing dueling lawsuits for claims on the failure of the merger. In reality, the conglomerates are hand-in-hand in their mission to squeeze more profit from workers and customers alike with deeply concessionary proposals and price gouging.
Although the Big Grocers gain from collusion, the union grocery workers are standing on cooperation. For the first time ever, workers at both conglomerates are building towards coordinated bargaining across state lines—a major breakthrough for these formerly separated struggles. In late May and early June, UFCW grocery workers in Western Washington, Colorado, and Southern California coordinated strike votes to put these companies on their heels at their separate bargaining tables.
Besides coordinating their strike votes, the different workforces are also standing on shared proposals around staffing, sending bargaining committee members to each other’s negotiations, information sharing, joint press releases, and reciprocal picket support.
“When workers struggle together, deeper coordination advances,” Todd Crosby, a long-time UFCW organizer involved in the coordinated bargaining campaign, told People’s World.
Previously, King Soopers workers had generally set the industry standards in Colorado with their strikes, and other chains followed the pattern they set. Now, with workers at both corporations actively striking or threatening to strike in lockstep, workers have achieved a higher level of unity necessary for this new phase, facing down Big Grocery.
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