Last week, after Safeway’s General Counsel and Senior VP Robert Gordon launched the company’s shareholder meeting with a joke that slammed two high ranking female political figures, it seemed like the rest of the meeting was pretty uneventful. Take a look at a story about his sexist joke on the Daily Kos website. It’s a story that’s starting to spread across the internet like wildfire. We’ll leave it up to you to weigh in with what you think and we’ll be interested to see if the company issues a response to this matter. We’ve waited to post this because we were curious to see if the company would issue a statement and to date, we haven’t seen one.
In other news related to the business itself, the company discussed their proposal for “say on pay” that included some increases in compensation for members of the company’s board. The resolutions that were part of the say on pay proposals did pass by 51% which is a slim margin but enough to ensure that the board achieved their desired outcome. There was a lengthy presentation about the “just for U” program that Safeway has launched as part of a consumer savings and loyalty program. You can read more about the program on the company’s website. It turns out that in some areas you can even get free eggs for signing up. We’d like to say that this is exciting for us as workers but it wasn’t given what we are facing on a daily basis on our shop floors. Of course, having customers that are loyal is important to us but we think that doesn’t happen through a discount program as much as it does through the relationship that the workers in the stores build with them. Continue reading
