Can Grocery Employees Afford Groceries?

A week ago our enlightened leadership in Washington refused to raise the federal minimum wage. Congress is batting nine for nine. That bad news made me even happier that here in L.A. we passed a living wage years ago, and just recently the living wage concept was adopted by Koreatown's largest private supermarket chain.

Living wage laws have spread across the country, but they affect public sector workers only. That's why it's so significant that a few months ago the HK Supermarket in Koreatown signed a living wage agreement with its employees, many of whom had been scraping by on California's minimum wage of $6.75/hour. (That translates into the princely sum of $14,040 for a full-time worker.) HK's 200 employees, many of them first-generation Latino and Asian immigrants, are now making a minimum wage of $8.50/hr with annual increases pegged to the Consumer Price Index. It seems like a small amount on an hourly basis but the agreement represents $1.75 million in annual increased wages for the men and women in the markets.

The other day I was part of a group that met with leaders from Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates, the amazing advocacy organization that helped HK employees win higher wages. It made us all feel good to be shopping someplace where people were earning enough money to cover basic expenses. Somehow it doesn't seem right that men and women working in supermarkets shouldn't be making enough to pay for their own groceries.

To find out more about the deal and efforts to expand it to other markets, go here.