Hundreds of Dollar General workers gathered on May 31 during the general stockholders meeting at the company’s headquarters in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, to demand better working conditions. Through their activism, they won a victory for workplace safety after shareholders voted for an independent audit to review the company’s health and safety policies.
The workers had arrived from Louisiana, South Carolina, and other parts of the country. They were joined by Step Up Louisiana, Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), United for Respect, and other pro-union allies from various labor and community organizations.
Their collective message to Dollar General executives centered around dignity and safety. As TyBrianna Shaw, a former Dollar General worker, summarized the group’s demands in a statement to The Progressive, “Listen to your workers, respect their voices, and make your stores safe to work.”
Shaw says that every day she walked into work, dangers lurked around every corner.
Dollar General, the fastest-growing retail chain in the United States, opens an average of 1,000 new stores each year. The discount chain reached 19,000 stores in January, and currently employs more than 140,000 workers. Dollar General survived the Great Recession of 2009, and continues to thrive even in a post-pandemic economy with net sales increasing to $37.8 billion in 2022, a more than 10 percent increase from $34.2 billion in 2021.
Impressive sales figures and profit margins, however, cannot overshadow mounting evidence of worker mistreatment and general disregard for worker safety by the company.
Since 2017, Dollar General has been fined more than $21 million by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for “numerous willful, repeated, and serious workplace safety violations.” In 2022, they became the first major company to be included in the agency’s “Severe Violator Enforcement Program” with at least 111 citations and counting. Earlier this year, OSHA inspectors found that workers at one store in West Lafayette, Ohio were “exposed to fire, [and] other hazards.” An inspection at a store in Cincinnati, Ohio found “blocked exit routes” and inadequate access to fire extinguishers.
“I went to the shareholders meeting to stand with other workers,” says Shaw, a former assistant manager who worked at the Irmo, South Carolina store for almost three years until quitting due to dangerous conditions, unfair scheduling, low pay, and stress.
Shaw says that every day she walked into work, dangers lurked around every corner: “We had rolltainers of merchandise stacked to the ceiling. They blocked the aisles, and they could fall on us. The back fire exit was usually blocked by inventory. If there was a fire, we would be trapped. I had to clean up chemicals with no gloves. We had no eyewash stations. And they never gave us any training on how to deal with chemicals, we just had to figure it out.”
Conditions were so bad at the store that, by January, Shaw started organizing with the Union of Southern Service Workers. She and a coworker organized a strike demanding that Dollar General respect their right to organize and make their store a safe place to work. While there were only two people on strike, they made up the store’s entire full-time staff at that time. “I did not feel safe or respected while I was working at Dollar General,” Shaw says.
Various media outlets have reported at least forty-nine Dollar General workers have been killed on the job and another 172 have been injured either by gun violence or workplace accidents since 2014. A recent tragedy has once again spotlighted what is sadly becoming an occupational hazard for workers at dollar stores across the country.
On the eve of the rally, a Family Dollar store in Nashville—another popular dollar store chain—became part of a crime scene that authorities call a “targeted” shooting, resulting in the death of a four-year-old child and injuries sustained by two others.
The threat or possibility of violence is not limited to Dollar General or any single chain. Rival businesses such as Family Dollar and Dollar Tree have long been “magnets of violence,” according to a ProPublica article from 2020, which reported, “Robberies and killings that have taken place at dollar store chains would not have necessarily happened elsewhere.”
The Family Dollar shooting, as noted by Step Up Louisiana in a statement, “was another somber reminder of the continued violence that dollar store employees at the country’s two dominant dollar store chains face on a daily basis.”
Shaw says her store was “dangerously understaffed,” adding that, “I got left alone in the store, even at closing shift. There were no working lights in the parking lot—I had to walk out into pitch black. I could have been robbed or attacked anytime. Dollar General refused to repair the outdoor lighting or install additional security cameras.”
Tivia Coleman, a sales associate at Dollar General in New Orleans, attended the rally to call for improved security measures and safer working conditions. “That’s one of the main reasons I joined Step Up in Nashville,” Coleman said in an email to The Progressive. “One of the stores that I work at especially needs better safety, and I feel very passionate about it.”
The lack of security described by multiple employees is a cause of grief and alarm. As part of the list of collective demands, the workers are calling for: stores designed with layouts and infrastructure based on safety, improving store visibility, limiting cash availability, promptly fixing property damage, properly maintaining the property, and hiring of community safety managers who are trained in de-escalation and self-defense as opposed to private security or police personnel.
It is perhaps unsurprising to many to learn the Dollar General board advised against the resolution for a third-party audit. But it was unexpected that stockholders not only approved the resolution, but passed it by a majority.
As the shareholders meeting is an annual event, this year’s rally occurred just a little more than a year since employees and supporters first gathered to express their grievances to the Dollar General shareholders outside the Goodlettsville City Hall, which hosted the 2022 meeting. They were joined at the time by Civil Rights leader and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign the Reverend William J. Barber II. They were denied entry into the meeting, and even those who were authorized as shareholder proxies were denied access.
Since The Progressive’s coverage last year, Todd Vasos, then CEO of Dollar General, announced on July 12, 2022 that he was stepping down. Jeff Owen, Dollar General’s Chief Operations Officer since 2019, was promoted as CEO following Vasos’s departure.
The changing of the executive guard did not alter the course of the company’s policies, so their employees kept organizing.
Safety in the workplace is paramount to Dollar General workers, but so are decent hours, living wages, and worker protections.
Coleman became involved with organizing after she was approached by a representative from Step Up Louisiana while she was working at a different store.
“She got me interested because she was telling me that the stuff that we go through in the store was not okay,” Coleman writes. “Workers have rights and they have voices that need to be heard. I would like to see around the clock security, better organization, and better pay. And overall just some humanity in this place, because nobody has it for some reason.”
It is still unclear whether the newly approved audit will be successfully carried out, or carried out at all. Safety in the workplace is paramount to Dollar General workers, but so are decent hours, living wages, worker protections, and other rights being challenged by the likes of other corporations such as Starbucks, which has made headlines for their aggressive attacks on the rights of their employees.
“Organizing and demanding a seat at the table to set workplace safety conditions is the only way workers can really protect ourselves,” Shaw says. “If no one stands up, it’ll be an endless cycle. I’m going to keep on organizing to break the cycle, so workers like me can finally be safe.”