Sorry, but who exactly is in the spotlight?
These are faces that the consumer never sees when he strolls through the aisles of the supermarket with his shopping basket. Workers who drag crates of bananas, boxes full of rice and bulk soft drinks day and night, so that the customer in the store sees a nicely filled shelf every day. Until the end of last month, when Albert Heijn distribution employees went on strike because the country’s largest supermarket chain did not want to meet their wage demands. They took action in five of the six distribution centers, and their number grew daily. At its peak, almost 1,500 workers were registered as strikers, a quarter of all personnel in Albert Heijn’s logistics centers.
The consequences of these actions became more visible every day: photos of empty store shelves surfaced from all over the country. Last Thursday, Albert Heijn succumbed to that pressure and the company showed its willingness to increase wages for logistics employees by 10 percent. The supermarket chain also agreed to the other demands of the unions, such as the retention of the Sunday allowance and better planning for flexible workers. A formal agreement has not yet been reached, but according to the unions it is simply a matter of time.
Strikes in shops rarely get off the ground, do they?
Retail is a difficult sector for trade unions. Only a very small proportion of employees are members, which means that turnout for actions is often disappointing. Only: the strikes at Albert Heijn did not take place in the stores, but in the distribution centers, which have a separate collective labor agreement. Yet that too is often a difficult industry to take action. Because the staff in such sheet metal halls is not always employed. Due to a lack of staff, distribution centers often rely largely on temporary workers, many of whom come from Eastern Europe. This is also the case at Albert Heijn, where about half of the distribution employees work through an employment agency.
Those flexible forces are difficult for unions to mobilize. To begin with, they are not covered by the collective labor agreement for which the strike is taking place, but they also have a lot to lose: not only their job, but also their home, which in many cases is also arranged through the temporary employment agency.
Did they participate at Albert Heijn?
In the centers of Albert Heijn, employees and temporary workers fought side by side. At the location in Pijnacker, a small group of foreign flex workers even took the first initiative, say those involved. They were not only dissatisfied with Albert Heijn’s limited wage increase, but also with the high workload and the lack of clarity about schedules. In their own words, they often only know when they have to work a week in advance.
This help came as a surprise to both their ‘permanent’ colleagues and the unions. “I have never experienced this before, and I have been working here for almost 31 years,” said a permanent employee of the Tilburg distribution center this week in NRC. CNV director Roel van Riezen also cannot remember that so many temporary workers participated in a strike. “Without them we would never have been able to exert the massive pressure as we do now,” he wrote on Thursday in response to Albert Heijn’s higher wage offer.
In the absence of columnist Marike Stellinga, who is on writing leave, NRC chooses a person of the week every Saturday.