Soon after the court decision that ruled Dollar General must recognize the union at the store, the company announced plans to close the store, claiming future profitability concerns. Dollar General disputed the election results, but lost their appeals in court. In December 2017, a Dollar General store voted four to two to unionize, the first store to do so. In May last year, a market planning analyst at Dollar General’s corporate headquarters in Tennessee was terminated after sending emails to his superiors with concerns about the poor Covid response from the company.
Our store teams become more of a family than anything because we’re really all we have, so that’s why we felt like we needed to take these steps to get a union.”ĭollar General has a record of retaliating against employees for organizing or speaking out. They’re worth nearly $50bn and our infrastructure is terrible, our corporate management is terrible.
“People are fed up with working for the company. “I was terminated with absolutely no warning – under false pretenses,” added the worker. The union has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board over the firing and will be challenging for his union election ballot to be counted in the vote. The worker affirmed in the five months working at the Dollar General that he had no write-ups, was never late and was a model employee. “It’s no secret that I was more likely than not a yes voter for the union, and he basically just kind of took advantage of me in a vulnerable moment.” About an hour to two hours after my shift, I had been notified by my manager that all of his bosses had told him to terminate me,” said the worker. “After that I just continued with my day-to-day activities. While they were stocking refrigerated products, they were confronted by one of the corporate-level managers – who has descended on the store since the union election petition was filed in late September– who criticized the company’s inventory system that often delivered products to the store they had no room to stock. The worker said they were covering a shift on 8 October when they were not originally scheduled. They requested to remain anonymous for fear of risking other job prospects. Yet a handful of workers at a Dollar General store in Barkhamsted, Connecticut, are pushing to change that, with a union election scheduled for 22 October to join the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW).įive workers at the store are currently eligible to vote in the election, as a sixth employee was abruptly fired just a day before a 9 October cut-off to be eligible. All that business generates dizzying revenue too: the company reported $33.7bn in sales last fiscal year.Ĭurrently, none of the thousands of Dollar General retail stores are unionized, as the company is aggressively opposed to unions with a company philosophy of remaining “union free”. The company’s rapid footprint is continuing to grow, as a staggering nearly one out of every three retail stores opening in America this year is now a Dollar General.