Randall Kennedy: Thank you.

JW: One of the first things Trump did when he began his second term was to go after elite universities. And that’s in part because universities are a key base for criticizing Trump and his agenda. Trump also went after law firms that had represented people who were suing him. He’s been going after non-profits that fund activist groups. So it’s one part of a broad attempt to bring everybody into a, what should we call it—an authoritarian system?

RK: Absolutely. The attack on the news media, the attack on labor unions, the attack on the civil service. It goes on and on. Any place where there is some hint of independent power, especially a hint of independent power that has not thrown down with the Trump regime, can expect to be attacked. And that’s what we’re seeing.

JW: Return with us now to April 2025. Trump had pressured Columbia into submitting to his demands, and then he turned to Harvard. There was a letter that called on Harvard to provide for what the Trump administration called “viewpoint diversity”: to audit the student body, faculty, staff and administration for what they called viewpoint diversity, and require that each department would have to be individually viewpoint diverse. Other directives included requiring that Harvard report foreign students to federal authorities if they violated conduct codes, that Harvard conduct plagiarism reviews of current and future faculty members, and that they turn over admissions data showing race and test scores.
Let’s start with viewpoint diversity. Trump’s demands were that Harvard’s departments lacked what the administration called–what the Trump administration called—”a critical mass” and needed to correct this by hiring more conservative professors. Now, it is true that Harvard is mostly liberal, that there aren’t very many Republicans or Trump supporters on the Harvard faculty. What do you think about that? Is that a problem that needs to be solved?

RK: Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there are various problems at Harvard University. And there are, I mean, as at any university, as in any, you know, human institution, there are going to be problems. So let’s assume that there are problems. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that at Harvard University, there are, you know, vanishingly few Trump supporters. Let’s assume that to be the case. The question is, does the government of the United States get to dictate who teaches or what is taught at Harvard University? Even if you think that the teachers at Harvard University are ignorant that they teach badly, that the curriculum is distorted in this way or that? Let’s suppose, let’s assume that that’s true for a moment. Question: does the government of the United States get to step in and dictate, you know, who teaches and what is taught?
And the answer is no, the government does not get to dictate. So that’s number one. And that’s the first point that we really need to make clear.
Second, on the question of, you know, these deficiencies, apart from the question of, you know, of viewpoint diversity, I think we need to focus very carefully on the primary claim that the administration used to attack Harvard and that it is using to attack other universities. The primary claim is that Harvard is a den of uninhibited, out of control anti-Semitism–anti-Semitism that involves harassment, anti-Semitism that involves violence against Jewish students and against Israelis. That claim has been made. It’s been made by Republicans in Congress. It has even been picked up by Democrats. It’s been it’s been widely alleged that that is the case.
It is not. So it is not. So this is vilification. It is vilification that has unfortunately attained traction, so much so that in many very respectable, reputable newspapers, it is now a, quote, fact, end quote, that Harvard had a big antisemitism problem. I would argue that it did not. Was is there antisemitism at Harvard? Yes, there’s anti-Semitism at Harvard, just like there’s anti-Semitism, you know, it probably any major university. We’re talking about a university that has over 20,000 students. We’re talking about a university that employs thousands of professors, thousands of staff in the United States of America, and in an institution that large, are there going to be instances of antisemitism? Yes. But the portrayal that the Trump administration has set forth, this idea that there’s, you know, rampant, widespread, institutionalized antisemitism that is tolerated by Harvard University, that is false. And we need to say that, too.

JW: So Trump made these demands of Harvard.  O April 14^th, you and everybody else at Harvard got an email from the president, Allan Garber. Tell us about that email.

RK: I remember that email well. It was April 14th, 2025. And in the afternoon, I clearly recall being at my computer. Didn’t know that the email was coming. I saw that there was an email from the president, and I’ve got to tell you, my heart jumped into my throat — because I was very afraid at that moment that we were going to get an email saying that the that the leadership had agreed to capitulate. That’s what I thought the email was going to say.
And when I opened up the email and saw that the email was the leadership saying, no, we refuse to go along with this ultimatum, I shouted. I absolutely shouted. I’m very happy with that decision. I’m very proud of that decision. I simply hope that the university leadership will stick by that decision.

JW: And then Trump responded to Harvard’s refusal by freezing $2.2 billion in research funding. Trump’s position is that the university, “does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars.”. What do you say to that?

RK: And a few days later, the Harvard leadership said, we’re suing, we’re going to court about this.

JW: What was the state of mind of the Harvard faculty, the Harvard students and alumni at this point?

RK: Two things. First of all, I think it’s important to emphasize that the federal government put Harvard University under tremendous pressure by freezing these funds. You know, it was over $2 billion. I mean that’s real money. They did it immediately. And there were researchers who, they need this money. They’re doing important work. And this was putting a lot of pressure on Harvard.  But it didn’t just end there. After Harvard said, we’re going to sue, then the Trump administration raised the ante even more. Remember: the Trump administration said, okay, we’re going to make it so that you cannot any longer host foreign students. You need certain certification. You need certification to do that. We’re going to revoke the certification. So Harvard was under tremendous pressure.
And the upshot of it was that various parts of the Harvard community indicated to the president and the others that they welcomed, they welcomed the leadership’s resistance to the Trump administration. Again, most of the Harvard community rallied behind, rallied around the president, and new organizations were formed, including Crimson Courage.

JW: Crimson Courage, an alumni group that urged the university to resist, to not settle, to continue the litigation defending academic freedom and independence and freedom of speech.

RK: I think it was very important. I said that I remember very clearly April 14th. I also remember very clearly the commencement that year. I always I try to make it to the Harvard Law School commencement every year, but I often skip the university commencement in the morning. I did not in 2025, I wanted to go. And I think there were a lot of people like me who wanted to go. Why? Because they wanted to be there. And when the president was introduced, people jumped to their feet, applauded, and hollered to show our sense of solidarity. Crimson Courage is doing that too. I think that’s very important.
One reason I think it’s important is because we have to be clear here. We have to be clear eyed and realistic: not everybody on Harvard’s campus is rallying around the president of the university. There are people who actually welcome the Trump incursion. There are people who think that Harvard had it coming. And so it’s very important for folks who favor the resistance to let their voices be heard and to tell the administration, hey, you know, we’re paying attention. We’re watching. We like what you’re doing. We’re watching.  Because there is a struggle not only outside of the university, but there’s also a struggle inside the university.

JW: And I want to talk about the struggle in the courts. How would you say Harvard is doing in court?

RK: Harvard thus far has done well. It has won at the federal district court level, the two big lawsuits. Lawsuit number one was the suit to unfreeze the money that was frozen. So far, Harvard’s doing well on that.

JW: You mean Harvard is actually getting the money? Not just the decision; they’re getting the money, too.

RK: Yes they are. They won. They won in court. And most of the money was unfrozen. They’re getting the money. But it is still on appeal. It’s not over yet. The same is true with respect to the issue of basically preventing Harvard from enrolling foreign students. You know, litigation takes a long time. Harvard is doing well. It has won thus far. It has not won completely. However, the cases are still pending. These cases, cases have to go up to higher courts. Litigation is always uncertain. We don’t really know what the outcome is ultimately going to be.
There’s a second point about litigation. Litigation is expensive. Harvard University is a wealthy institution because of its wealth. It has been it is able to fight the Trump administration like it has been fighting. I don’t know for sure how much money Harvard has expended in this litigation thus far.

JW: The Harvard Crimson estimated the cost was over $100 million, just through June 30th, 2025. That’s not counting the last year of litigation.

RK: Now, a lot of institutions simply could not afford to foot that sort of bill. And of course, the litigation is still on going.
Furthermore, again, let’s just think about this. Even if Harvard prevails fully, let’s suppose for the sake of discussion, that Harvard wins from here on out, it wins in the appellate litigation. Are we then going to say that Harvard has had no harm?
Harvard has suffered harm: attorney’s fees.  Is Harvard getting that back? No.
What about the losses in terms of research that has already happened? There are people who have had to shut down laboratories that might have given us new treatments for disease. These laboratories have been shut down. Some have been reopened, but there was a lot of knowledge lst. St some point, maybe we’ll be able to reclaim that knowledge. But litigation is slow. It’s expensive. Whenever the government makes incursions on individuals or institutions, they lose. It’s all a matter of just how much do they lose.

JW: And there’s one other possibility here: a settlement. The newspapers once in a while report that settlement talks are still continuing. There was talk of a $500 million settlement — that Harvard would refuse to pay to Trump, but they would spend on funding vocational education. What do you think the chances that Harvard will settle this eventually, to avoid endless litigation?

RK: I hope that Harvard does not settle. Is it possible? Yeah. It’s possible. I would view that as still an outstanding danger.
I know and respect the leaders of Harvard. I think that they are trying to do their best. I think we need to be a little bit careful about over-moralizing. I mean, after all, people buy their groceries, people pay their rent, people pay their mortgages with the funds that they get from their employment at Harvard. So these people who were leading the institution have to take a lot of different things into account. I understand that. But I certainly hope that they will not capitulate.
And frankly, now I think that they will not. I think that they will not, in part because of organizations like Crimson Courage. I think that the leaders of Harvard recognize that morale counts.  Morale counts. What will we say about Harvard University ten years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now? I think that if Harvard University holds the line, and actually interrupts the Trump suppression, not only will it have done something wonderful for higher education, but it will have done something for all of the free civil institutions in American life. This is a fight not only with higher education. This is a fight for democracy. And when you talked about authoritarianism, you were not exaggerating. What we are facing is an authoritarian incursion on institutions throughout American life. And Harvard University at this moment has an opportunity to interrupt that. And I think that the leaders know that. And frankly, I think that they’re going to hold out. I pray that they do.

JW: “Harvard’s fight is a fight for democracy” — Randall Kennedy teaches at the Harvard Law School. Randy, thanks for talking with us today.

RK: Thank you very much.
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JW:The supermarket is an essential part of our lives, and a familiar one. But it turns out there’s a lot we don’t know about the people who work there and the work they do. For that, we turn to Anne Larson. She writes for The Nation, and her work has also appeared in Jacobin, The New Republic and The LA Times. She’s a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and her new book about working at a supermarket has the wonderful title Cleanup on Aisle Five. We reached her today in Salt Lake City. Anne Larson, welcome to the program.

Ann Larson: Thanks for having me, Jon. It’s a pleasure to be here.

JW: You have a PhD in English from the City University of New York, but your new book is about working at a supermarket in Utah. What happened?

AL: Let me let me try to make this as brief as I can – although I do have to say, I think a lot of people with PhDs will relate to this story.

JW: Yes.

AL: One of the themes of my book is my incredible poor timing in terms of the trajectory of my life. I got my degree in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. So, I was living in New York at the time, and I was unable to find academic work. That job market kind of cratered at that moment. The academic job market in the humanities had hadn’t been good for several decades, I’ll say that, but after 2008, it really crumbled, so I wasn’t able to find work. I spent a lot of time gigging, teaching part time, did some temping, things like that. I got involved in some organizing, and I co-founded a group called The Debt Collective, a nonprofit that was working on lobbying the government for student loan relief for borrowers who had attended these scam-for-profit colleges.

JW: We have talked about them here on this podcast.

AL: I’m sure you have. So, I was involved in that for a few years. But the funding for that organization kind of became harder to come by and I ended up around 2020 finding myself unemployed. And then what happened was the pandemic started, around that time. So again, more poor timing on my part. I moved back to my home state of Utah to try to regroup, to make a new start, to figure out what was next for me. But with the lockdowns and the pandemic, I couldn’t, I needed work, I didn’t have an income, I didn’t have health insurance, any of that. But supermarkets were very they were, they were hiring, they were doing robust business at the start of the pandemic. And so, I thought, I’m just going to apply for a job at the store near my house, it’ll give me some income as I make my way through the pandemic, figure out what’s next, and I’ll regroup from there. And so, 13 months later, I left that job, and what I had seen and experienced was so enlightening and troubling that I wanted to write a book about it.

JW: Well, they started you as a supervisor rather than a checkout clerk. You say it was intimidating to be a supervisor.

AL: I was very intimidated. The work was extremely – it was hard for me to learn how to do the job. Cashiering is skilled labor, like all labor. Learning how to run the register — I have a whole chapter in my book devoted to the mistakes that I made and learning how to run the register. And you’ve got to develop these technical skills while you’re — cashiers have a lot of communication skills that they need to develop: talking to customers, product knowledge, knowing where things are in the store — a lot of multitasking, doing all of this at once. It really did take me quite a long time to just become proficient in the job. I didn’t expect cashiering to be easy. I didn’t go in thinking, “oh, this is not going to be a problem.” But it was even harder than I had anticipated.

JW: And let me emphasize, you started this job during the pandemic when millions of people didn’t go to work at all. But there were some essential workers we called them, which included people like you, the supermarket workers. It must have been scary to face lots of strangers every day when the Covid virus was killing thousands of people.

AL: It was, it was scary, especially at the beginning. We didn’t know at that point, you know, how bad was this going to get? Are we all going to die? I will admit it was it was frightening. There were protections in the store. There was a mask mandate, as people will remember, the aisles. They had the decals on the floor, so, you could only go one direction down the aisles. I mean, it it’s not really possible to socially distance in a, in a supermarket. But they did have a hand washing station at the front of the store so we could wash our hands. One of the things that happened too during that time is I think the general public realized the importance and essential work that supermarket employees do, along with nurses and doctors and health care workers and some others, meatpackers, factory workers here were supermarket workers going and punching in, while a lot of white collar laptop employees just went home and worked from home. And there were a few months during the pandemic when some grocery workers at large chains earned a bonus, and it was called hero pay.
This is sort of this amazing moment. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is, I don’t want us to forget that. I don’t want us to forget as a society that we recognize for a brief moment how essential and skilled these workers are.

JW: One of the things you learned at the beginning was “front end jobs are the worst.” What does that mean, and why is that?

AL: The department called “the front end” is where the where you check out. And in the supermarket hierarchy, those jobs have the lowest status and also often the lowest pay. And they are just cashier jobs that are disproportionately held by women, understandable, given the low status of the job. One of the reasons cashier jobs are so low paid is because it’s associated with femininity. And that’s connected to the customer idea of customer service. Cashiers work with customers all day long. And so that’s considered a feminine occupation, you have to be caring, you have to be kind, you have to be attentive. And that’s one of the one of the things that explains the low wages. Workers that stock shelves, that work in the back, that manage departments, that don’t interact with customers, have a higher status in the store because they don’t have to take care of customers the way the cashiers do.

JW: Well, really, the biggest problem for supermarket workers is the low wages, making enough money to live on. You say you earned $15.80, which was more than the people on the check stands. How do people live on those that level of wages — even in Salt Lake City, which is a lot cheaper than where I live, Los Angeles?

AL: That’s right, that’s right. The wages are abysmal. The living conditions that we expect, the people that sell our food to live in are should absolutely shock the conscience. I worked with many people who were starving who couldn’t afford food. There was a study a few years ago. It looked at surveyed workers in the second largest grocery chain in the nation, Kroger and three-quarters of those workers had been food, what they called food insecure in the past. So, we need to really sit with this as a society, that we have a retail food system where the people who sell food cannot afford to buy it. I worked with many people that couldn’t afford lunch. We absolutely have to raise wages of retail workers. The way to do that is through unionization. But what I really want shoppers to understand is that when you walk into a store to buy your dinner, you are being served by people who might not be able to afford to eat that day.

JW: And the second biggest problem goes under the name of scheduling. Tell us why scheduling is such a huge issue for supermarket workers.

AL: Supermarkets are famous for what’s called “just in time scheduling.” They only schedule workers when they’re absolutely needed. So, you will get your schedule a couple of weeks in advance, if you’re lucky.

JW: What do you mean, your schedule? Don’t you work 9 to 5 or something like that.

AL: No. You can work days, nights, the mid shift. What whatever the store wants you to do. One week I would be working nights, I’d be closing the store, and the next day I’d come in and I’d open the store. The worst schedule that you can get, which is very common in the supermarket, is called a “clopen.” And that is when you close the store down at night, but then you’re scheduled to open the next morning, so you’ll get to bed, maybe get a couple hours of sleep, and you have to roll out of bed before dawn the next day so you can open the store. These “clopens” were very, very common across the retail industry and in my store. And this is just one example of how you show up when you are told to show up and you really don’t have any authority over your schedule.

JW: Let’s talk about the time clock and punching in. What if you arrive early? What if you arrive late?

AL: You cannot punch in early. The time clock at a supermarket is a biometric clock, so you put your fingerprint on a scanner to punch in, and it is programed to not allow you to punch in more than — I think in my store it was five minutes early — because that raises the labor costs of the store.  So workers at my store would line up at the clock. Say we ought to get there at 2:00, People would be start lining up at a 1:45, waiting for the clock to tick over and to let them punch in. These biometric systems have a long history. They were first introduced by a company called Identification. That company is now called G4S. And it’s a security firm. It has ties to the private prison industry. And it also, since 2003, G4S has provided security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE. There are these links, right, between policing, immigration enforcement and workplace timekeeping that really are revealing in terms of how big employers like this view their staff and how they try to control their movements through the store.

JW: So, you say you can’t punch in early. What happens if you arrive late?

AL: You can clock in maybe 5 or 10 minutes late, they’ll allow you to do that. In my store, if it was past 15 minutes late, you cannot clock in and you have to go to a manager and explain yourself: “Hey, I was late. I’m sorry.” Whatever happened to cause me to be late.  Aand they have to manually punch you in. So it’s a disciplining mechanism because, you know, there were a hundred people or more working in my store. Managers don’t always know when somebody’s late, but you can’t punch in, you have to go talk to your supervisor. And they reprimand you for being late.

JW: One of the stories in your book that I didn’t know anything about was the sweep buzzer. Tell us about the sweep buzzer.

AL: Yes. So supermarkets have a sweep system where because imagine you walk into a store, your customer, you don’t want to see dirty floors. You want to see them clean and shiny. So, every half hour in my store, the sweep buzzer would go off. And that was an alarm on the front end that alerted us that it was time to sweep the floor. So as a supervisor, my job was to assign a worker to take these big industrial sized brooms with a really long handle and a wide brush and push it through the store. And there’s a device that you hold in your hand. So, you’re pushing with one hand, and you’re holding this digital device in the other, and you go around the store and there are these digital tags. If you’re in a supermarket, you might have seen them digital tags on the shelves that have a number, and you have to go around the store and tap the digital tag with the device, and that logs the sweep into the system. So, it makes sure that management and the corporate office can tell, they can verify that the sweep has been done.

JW: How many tags have to be tapped when you sweep?

AL: There were about 36, I think, in my store all around. It was one of the least desired jobs in the store. Whenever the sweep buzzer would go off on the front end, people would run and hide and try to avoid being asked to sweep. And as a supervisor, you have to think, look, I just asked this person to sweep last hour. I’m going to try to find somebody different. This time. You have to consider, is this person older? Do they have a bad back? You really start to evaluate employees based on their physical capabilities, because you need people who can do that physical labor.

JW: And then there’s the case of Felix. Felix had a system which you, as a supervisor, found out about.

AL: Yes. So, one of my colleague’s names was Felix, and he was a he was a college student and he was a musical theater major, which I think was relevant to this story.

JW: Okay.

AL: But one night he, the sweet buzzer went off and I gave him like, okay, he was about 21 years old, nice young guy. Here you go, here’s a sweep buzzer, here’s the broom, go ahead and do the sweep. I look up a few minutes later and I see him in one of the aisles. Well, he was already like a third of the way through the store. And I’m thinking, how did he get there so fast? And then I realized he wasn’t carrying the broom. He was simply walking through the store, tapping the device on the digital tags through the aisles. In other words, he was faking the sweep. I got a call from a manager who had seen him faking the sweep. She called me and she reprimanded me for being a bad supervisor.

JW: Let’s talk about the customers. What was your training about customers?

AL: Customer service was the number one part of the job. I will say that we did not receive a lot of training, except that we were supposed to be very subservient and smile, right. There were a few rules. All cashiers at my store, as well as most supermarkets in this country, have to stand up behind their check stand. I was told the reason that we could not sit during our shifts was that a standing cashier looks more eager to serve. This would be news to cashiers in Europe and other places that do sit down on the job because they have union rights, and so, they’ve demanded this. Another thing you can’t do is chew gum while you’re working because that looks bad. And we also had in our store, as in many stores, a loyalty program where when a customer walked up to the register and put in their phone number or swiped their loyalty card, their name would pop up on my register so I could say, “Hello, Mr. Smith, how are you today? Did you find everything you were looking for?” So, this experience at the cash register is extremely personalized for the customer. But for workers, you know, you’re seeing 100 people a day and it’s, it’s an assembly line of customers. But for the shopper that comes through, it’s an extremely personalized experience where they might even know your name.

JW: And not all customers are nice.

AL: Not all customers are nice. Most are, I have to say. But they’re the few that were rude and abusive can really ruin your day, your week, your month. Anybody who’s worked in customer service has a story about abusive customers. I think that I had a customer who almost tried to headbutt me one day, customers flew off the handle and started yelling when products weren’t available. One customer almost got me fired because he assumed I was responsible for stealing money from a gift card that he had, and he was trying to use the self-checkout machine, I described that scene in the book.

JW: And there’s one other kind of customer that you had to deal with. You describe a woman who had come into the store, get a cup of soup at the soup bar, eat the soup while walking around pushing her cart, and then would abandon her cart and head for the door.

AL: Yeah.

JW: Let’s talk about that.

AL: When you work at a supermarket, as you see a lot of shoplifting. The most common kind of shoplifting was someone coming into the store and eating food right off the shelf and then leaving. In this case, security guards are roaming the store and they’re very aware of these different tactics, so, they were watching her, and they were aware of what she was doing. When she put down the cup and tried to walk away, they confronted her and a security guard said, “I know what you did. And if you come in here again, you’re going to be punished for this behavior,”  kind of giving her a warning. These low wage employees, often hungry themselves, are in the position of having to punish, manage the behavior of other hungry people that come into the store looking for food. And this was a case of that. The security guard told me about this incident, and he said, “it sucks that people have to steal to eat, but we can’t allow theft.”

JW: And you’re the supervisor.

AL: Right.

JW: So what did you do at this point?

AL: As a supervisor, I learned to live with the level of enforcement against shoplifting that happened in the store. This was during Covid too, so, a lot of people were maybe even more desperate than normal, and there was just shoplifting every day. In one incident, I’ll give you another story, in one incident, this was late at night, a security guard called, he was watching the sales floor, and he said to me, “there’s somebody putting food in their coat and they’re coming towards the front, and can you please let me know when they get there?” Because in a supermarket, right, the front end is the exit. So, everybody who’s stealing has to go through that door. So, we cashiers are kind of the police force of the store, if you will. So this man, he did come through. I saw him, I recognized him and he had a bulge under his coat. And so I responded to the security guard’s call and I said, “he’s here. He’s up at the front.” The man raced to the front to try to walk out, and the security guard came through the door and cut him off and tackled him. There was a scuffle. The security guard had a taser. They weren’t used often in my store, but sometimes, and this, the scuffle, the thief was trying to get up and run away. The security guard tased him, so he sort of seized up, and then collapsed. So, I’m watching this violent scene with my colleagues and other customers in the store. The store kind of, somebody hit the pause button while we were watching this. The security guard called the police who came and arrested the man. But, you know, I now feel guilty that I have participated in the violent capture of a man. It turned out he had donuts and milk under his coat.  That’s what he was trying to steal.

JW: For the workers, there’s no vacations, no paid vacations, no paid time off. But there are employee appreciation programs. My favorites there that you describe were there was one program where a mindfulness expert was brought in to teach meditation to the cashiers, and another day the Humane Society brought two therapy dogs. And there is always the cashier of the month who gets it turns out gets a $10 gift card. How did these programs go over.

AL: Retail workers need unions. They need collective bargaining. They need to join forces with other people in their situation. When you win employee of the month, you are being recognized as an individual. So, it really does kind of undermine any sense of collective, that we’re all in this together and most people don’t win anything. They don’t win employee of the month, right? So that makes people feel a little bad. They’re not being recognized. They’re not being acknowledged. So, it actually has some pretty nefarious effects as well.

JW: You said the solution to the wage problem and the scheduling problem is organizing unions. And where I live in Los Angeles, there are strong unions for the big chains and the grocery strikes that have happened in the last 10 and 20 years are huge, memorable events, this is the UFCW, United Food and Commercial Workers. There was a threatened strike a year ago, June 2025. I looked up the history of this, 45,000 workers voted to authorize an unfair labor practice strike, and it would have affected 100,000 grocery workers, would have been the largest grocery strike in modern history. And the threat worked. The big grocery chains did sign a new contract in July 2025. Let me just tell you what’s in the contract: it covered most LA grocery workers, not Costco or Walmart, but the big chains.  For checkout clerks, the top hourly rate increased from $26 to $30.45 in 2027. But the union said their biggest issue was staffing more than money, and they didn’t win a lot on staffing, even though it was the number one priority of the campaign. What they won was a deal that gave the union a formal role in evaluating safe and inefficient staffing levels. They also got a new supplemental pension plan, expanded health care benefits, faster eligibility for new hires, protections against subcontracting and part time employees were guaranteed 28 hours a week. That’s what you can get with a union. How does that compare with what you had in Salt Lake City?

AL: Well, we had none of that. That sounds like Christmas and my birthday all together to me. What did you say? $26 an hour, I mean, that’s unfathomable.

JW: Going up to $30 in 2027.

AL: This is what a union can do, and that’s why we need them to be in every store. The problem here, one of the main problems, is we have this what’s called these Right to Work states. This is the right wing phrase, right? And this is, I think last time I checked, it was about half the states in the country are subject to these Right to Work laws that make union organizing extremely difficult, there are legal barriers, we need to get rid of right to work states, and we need to empower workers to organize. In my store, I had been an activist and organizer with the Debt Collective, I knew that collective joining forces with the with our fellow workers was the way to solve these problems and to improve our conditions. But I was afraid. I was afraid, given the legal barriers and given the difficulties, I was afraid to even raise the issue with my colleagues because I didn’t want to get anyone fired. I know that it’s illegal to fire workers for talking about unionizing, but I didn’t trust my employer not to just fire people and answer questions about that later. It’s difficult, I don’t know what the answer is, but the main thing is getting rid of these Right to Work laws.

JW: Ann Larsen — her book is Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work Poverty Wages and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register. You can read an excerpt at thenation.com. Ann, thanks for talking with us today.

AL: Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.