Ahold-Delhaize shareholders are determined and have a plan to increase their profits. The staff need an equally determined plan to extend the historic actions of supermarket workers at Delhaize and the huge solidarity among the people into a fight by the whole sector and society to stop the plans of the company completely. If Delhaize’s plan passes, others will follow. The race to the bottom in the retail sector is in full swing. So is the opposition against it. The fight by Delhaize workers is already historic. The question is how to win.
All 128 Delhaize shops that were still under their own management are being franchised. That means each shop officially becomes a separate company, with worse working conditions and wages. Staff would be cheaper as a result, have to work on Sundays more often and be even more flexible. A record profit of 2.5 billion euros is apparently not enough for Ahold-Delhaize’s management. It wants to save another 1 billion euros to give to shareholders in the form of buying its own shares. The company could better change their name to Holdup-Delhaize!
On 7 March, when the terrible news became known, workers at Delhaize went on spontaneous strike shop after shop. More than 100 shops also closed completely on 8 March. On the international day of action for women’s rights, it shows once again how badly this struggle is needed. Because it is no coincidence that many women and other oppressed people work in this sector. It explains the wage gap and their precarious situation.
The management communicates, “While all employees can join the transition, we understand that emotions can run high with such a change.” This is an additional slap in the face, because who wants to switch to uncertainty where unions are eliminated?
This is how workers from essential sectors are treated. After all, who was on the front line during the pandemic? In De Standaard of 7 March, one of the shop workers expressed it as follows: “In queues hundreds of metres long, customers lined up, several street corners away. We easily achieved sales figures of 300,000 euros a day here. Where did that money go? To the shareholders, of course. When things get tough, it is the ordinary worker who has to take the hit first.”
This happens directly or indirectly in all sectors. What happens at Delhaize will be seized upon to hit working conditions elsewhere too. It will also be seen by employers as a way of eliminating trade union presence. We must stand up for Delhaize staff with all workers from different sectors. An attack on their conditions is an attack on everyone!
The market leads to an endless, downward spiral
The arrival of new supermarket chains like Albert Heijn and now Jumbo from the Netherlands, which until today do not pay extra wages for Sunday work, started a downward spiral in terms of working conditions. They put pressure on the other companies to maintain their market share. It is therefore not entirely unexpected that chains like Delhaize are cutting back even harder on working conditions and staff.
Last year, a net 75 department stores were added in Belgium, these investments are not happening because there are too few shops, but to destroy others. Instead of paying their staff living wages, supermarkets prefer to invest in the demise of their competitors. This is what capitalism offers us: more misery and certainly no progress. The market does not work, by now that is clear to most people. Especially when you know that the CEO of Ahold-Delhaize still raised his own annual salary to 6.5 million euros. The owners of Aldi and Lidl are even in the top ten richest Europeans.
Franchising must be completely off the table
Delhaize’s franchising plan is part of a long series of attacks on supermarket workers. In 2008 there was a restructuring at Carrefour, in 2014 at Delhaize, in 2018 there was a long strike at Lidl in protest against the high workload. In 2021, there was another strike there because the 2018 promises were not kept. In 2022, Makro and Metro closed their doors. Today, there is social unrest at Lidl and Aldi due to the unsustainable workload. Carrefour sold 50 shops operated by Mestdagh to Intermarché, leading to social struggles.
All supermarket chains want staff as cheaply as possible, following the model of the Netherlands, among others, where some shops never close and run mainly on student workers. Young people as young as 13 work there at sometimes as little as 5 euros an hour gross (with compensation for holidays and holidays already included). There is an unseen downward spiral of working conditions and wages leading to a society where you need two or three jobs to barely make ends meet even then. At Albert Heijn in Belgium, 15% of working hours are performed by students. At retail chains like Action, this is even higher, sometimes up to half the staff!
If this plan passes at Delhaize, it is an illusion to think that Carrefour will not have another major restructuring before 2026. Moreover, it will be seized upon to worsen conditions and increase workloads elsewhere too.
A sector-wide response is needed to these ongoing attacks. A strategy of accepting franchises under certain conditions will not stop the downward spiral. An action plan is needed that extends the fight to the entire sector. This is also needed to convince the affected workforce that it is possible to stop franchising.
Franchising means that not only Ahold-Delhaize but also the so-called ‘independent’ operator of the shop has to make a profit. That extra profit will have to come from somewhere: both staff and customers will feel it. Incidentally, these are not small grocers, but groups that buy up the most profitable shops. Peeters-Goovers, for example, operates 14 independent Albert Heijn shops in Antwerp. Delhaize introduced itself in an advertising campaign as follows: “We are grocers and have been for 150 years”. The truth is that the big chains have competed away most small convenience stores to boost profits. If Delhaize now relies on self-employed people to run its shops, it is to save on staff, pass on shop risk and eliminate union presence. It is doing so because 2.5 billion euros of profit is not enough for Ahold-Delhaize’s shareholders. 1 billion euros must be saved to buy up its own shares for the same amount, another gift to shareholders.
We must stop the downward spiral. With demands for the staff of the whole sector and for improving conditions in the already franchised shops, we can bring those colleagues into the fray and stop the many attempts to divide the staff in a competitive battle in which all shop workers will eventually lose. Such demands are also important to build union presence in the entire sector. National trade union strength must be harnessed to enforce elections of workplace representatives in companies from 20 employees upwards, as in companies from 50 employees at the moment.
Delhaize goes on the offensive, the resistance must do the same
After several weeks of strike action, there will inevitably be a reduction in the number of shops remaining closed every day. Delhaize management is also going on a counter-offensive with repression against pickets and blockades. It immediately found willing judges for this. In addition, the company had full-page advertisements placed in newspapers in the battle for public opinion. Meanwhile, negotiations were launched in which the management firmly stuck to the original plan while hoping to exhaust the protest. Delhaize may not want to go beyond the legal rule that existing workers have be offered their existing conditions when a company is taken over by a different employer. That opens the way for layoffs and two categories of staff in these shops with new colleagues working on worse terms and older conditions gradually dying out.
Besides the strikes in the affected shops, there were excellent initiatives such as the demonstration in Liège on 7 April with 1.500 participants. This came on the initiative of the CNE (Christian union), but also attracted the other unions when they saw that it would be a success. On 17 April, there was a national action by the whole sector in Brussels with 2,500 participants. That was followed by a spontaneous and militant demonstration that attracted a lot of support from bystanders. The demonstration was led by militants from the CNE, which organised assemblies in several regions. There were also militants from the FGTB/ABVV (socialist union), including from the public service workers union CGSP ALR in Brussels and from a shop of Albert Heijn in Ghent, where workers went on strike to participate in the protest.
The 17 April demonstration went to the offices of the FEB, the Belgian employers’ organisation. Indeed, the attacks on Delhaize staff are part of a general offensive by the employers in the sector and the bosses in general for more flexibility and lower wages. The employers screaming that blocking shops should not be allowed had set up a police blockade in front of their offices for the occasion.
The 7 and 17 April demonstrations were excellent initiatives. A plan of action involving local demonstrations, launched by one union if necessary, can offer prospects for extending the struggle further into a strike of the entire sector. A local demonstration can be prepared by staff meetings in the sector and general union assemblies for workers of all sectors at which the struggle at Delhaize and its importance for all workers is explained. Combative union delegations can invite someone from Delhaize to give an explanation at an assembly of all workers or at a shop stewards meeting. Shops can become action centres from which flyers, posters and petitions are distributed. This is how we turn our work resources into a tool for the struggle.
This is the way the steel workers of Forges de Clabecq reacted to the threat of closure in 1997. They mobilised in all corners of the country among workers and young people. They held regular assemblies of all the workers to which they invited all sympathisers, and after the assembly there was another meeting of those sympathisers each time to discuss how solidarity could be organised. Shop stewards of Forges de Clabecq went to universities to speak to students, to markets to distribute leaflets together with sympathisers, to meetings of trade union delegations … In this way they managed to mobilise 70,000 people in Tubize in February 1997. Imagine tens of thousands demonstrating at the Delhaize depots in Zellik, near Brussels. Bailiffs to stop us wouldn’t be seen there in any case….
If we do not organise broad support, the management will do everything in its power to undermine it to continue the offensive. With local demonstrations, it is possible to activate broad solidarity in society and build up to a strike of the entire sector and larger national actions. Only through a mass movement can we stop this onslaught! That is why we are calling for the announced national demonstration on 22 May to be as successful as possible.
If the management continues with franchising and the accompanying social breakdown, we put the nationalisation of Delhaize on the table to save jobs and working conditions. This means the community structurally and collectively taking control and throwing out the shareholders, who have already profited enough.
