“After more than a week of strikes, 31,000 workers at Stop & Shop, a major supermarket chain in the northeastern United States, will go back to work thanks to a tentative new contractwith their employer. The United Food and Commercial Workers announced that the proposed contract — which still requires a vote from union members to be ratified — ‘preserves health care and retirement benefits, provides wage increases, and maintains time-and-a-half pay on Sunday for current members.’

When the Dutch company Ahold completed its merger with the Belgian Delhaize Group in 2016, the resulting $29 billion company became one of the biggest supermarket chains across the entire United States. In addition to Stop & Shop, the company owns grocery stores like Giant and Food Lion, as well as grocery delivery services like Peapod.

Ahold-Delhaize boasted of massive savings to come from the merger, in addition to more than $200 million in savings last year alone from the 2017 Republican tax cuts. But rather than share that wealth with its workers, the company has returned roughly $4 billion in stock buybacks to enrich shareholders over the last few years.

Ahold-Delhaize itself said that the ‘best talent is key’ to its financial success in a media release of its 2018 earnings. And workers know that, too. ‘This is not a company in financial trouble,’ the UFCW said in a statement, pointing to Ahold-Delhaize’s $2 billion in profits last year.”

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