Trader Joe’s quietly imposed a severe cut to retirement benefits for workers during the pandemic. The standard 10 percent contribution was slashed to 5 percent for most workers, taking thousands of dollars from employees.
(AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)
Three months after increasing thank-you pay for its employees, Trader Joe’s will slash the extra pay by half. The pay was temporarily raised by $4 for hourly workers in February. Now $2 is being taken away.
That was quite a bump in hourly wages in February. Hourly workers do not usually see $4 per hour increases in pay. Since the pandemic has entered a new phase with the availability of vaccines for those who want them, the hourly workers will be thanked a little less, apparently. Back in March 2020, Trader Joe’s gave its employees an additional $2 per hour in “thank you” pay for working during the COVID-19 pandemic. That was followed by the additional hourly pay in February. These increases in pay fell in line with some cities that were passing “hazard pay” ordinances for grocery workers. The kicker for Trader Joe’s employees is that the hazard pay ordinances applied to large grocery store chains. Trader Joe’s doesn’t fall into tha
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Trader Joe s increased thank you pay to $4 in February. Now it wants to cut that by half.
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Trader Joe s told its crew members that it plans to reduce its $4 thank you pay by half.Diane Macdonald/Moment Editorial/Getty Images
Just months after Trader Joe’s announced that it would temporarily increase its “thank you” pay to hourly crew members to $4, the grocery chain is purportedly cutting that bonus by half. After only three months, the company announced that on May 1st they will take away our additional two dollars, and we fear the rest of the ‘Thank You Pay’ is soon to follow, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee wrote on coworker.org. The online petition is asking that the $4 “thank you” pay remain permanent.