As grocery store workers at the food retail giant Loblaws contend with the COVID-19 pandemic, low-wages and precarious employment, the company that controls Canada’s largest grocery store chain is making money hand over fist. On Wednesday, Loblaws reported first quarter profits for 2021 were up by a massive 30 percent compared to the first quarter of 2020.
The lavish payments made to company executives for 2020 were also recently announced. With overall food purchases slightly up due to an increase in at-home cooking during the pandemic, top executives met 90 percent of their personal compensation targets and were rewarded with bonus payments across the board. This included total compensation packages of $3.55 million for Loblaws Executive Chairman Galen G. Weston Jr. and $6.4 million for departing company President Sarah Davis.
As if intentionally seeking to add insult to injury, Loblaws unveiled an “appreciation bonus” for workers, which ranged from a risible $25 for part-time workers—the vast majority of the company’s store workforce—to $175 for full-time staff.
The Loblaws conglomerate is the largest retail food distributor in Canada, employing some 200,000 workers. It is owned by the Weston dynasty, the third richest family in Canada. Aging company oligarch Galen Weston Sr., who died last month, oversaw a family empire worth C$13 billion. The patriarch liked to split his time between a spacious downtown Toronto residence, a private island in Georgian Bay, holdings in London, England and family compounds in Florida and the Bahamas.
The lavish compensation of the Weston executive team was not an unusual occurrence. In one snapshot of corporate fortunes taken between March and September 2020, Canada’s billionaires got $37 billion richer during the pandemic’s first 6 months.
Canada’s three main grocery outlets drew the ire of grocery workers across the country, when in a highly provocative and apparently coordinated move, they announced that they were scrapping a $2 per hour COVID-19 pandemic “premium” or bonus last June. Loblaws, the Metro supermarket chain and Empire, the parent company of Sobeys, IGA, Safeway and other chains, introduced the bonus in late March 2020. They did so to dampen worker anger and anxiety about being exposed to the highly contagious and potentially lethal coronavirus in their workplaces while the country was in near total lockdown. Additionally, it was recognized that if the bonus was not introduced, grocery stores would struggle to get workers to show up because they would have been able to earn more on the government’s poverty-level Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).
The worker bonus was touted by corporate bosses and the mainstream media alike as an example of the ruling elite’s recognition of supermarket workers as “heroes.” This was a crucial element in the fraudulent narrative that everyone was pulling together in the face of the pandemic—a narrative that has been promoted by the trade unions, as they herd workers back into unsafe nonessential workplaces. Indeed, across the top of the homepage of the Canadian Labour Congress there is a banner that reads: “In Canada, we’ve weathered the pandemic by sticking together and supporting each other.”
In reality, while workers received a few crumbs in emergency support, the federal Liberal government and Bank of Canada handed over more than $650 billion to the financial markets, banks and big business.
Last summer, Weston management worked to impose further givebacks on grocery workers. 1,400 grocery workers at the conglomerate’s Dominion stores network in Newfoundland and Labrador rejected a rotten contract that their union, Unifor, had endorsed and went out on strike in August. The rejected tentative deal only provided for a $1 per hour raise, gradually dispersed over the life of a proposed three-year contract.
When the strike began, 83 percent of the…
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