A Trial Asks: If Grocery Rivals Merge, Do Workers Suffer?

Back in 2015, Leonard De Monte was feeling settled. At 31, he had health insurance and was making a union wage at the Vons grocery store in Woodland Hills, Calif., where he had worked for more than a decade. A familiar face in the bakery section, he knew dozens of frequent shoppers’ orders by heart.

Then came a corporate merger: Albertsons, Vons’s parent company, acquired its rival Safeway. Mr. De Monte’s store was sold to a third chain as part of the deal, and within months of the change, the store’s new owner declared bankruptcy. Mr. De Monte found himself out of work.

Former customers vouched for him, and he found a new job at a local Pavilions, part of another grocery chain owned by Albertsons. But he had lost his seniority and was demoted to minimum wage.

“All my hard work was flushed down the toilet,” Mr. De Monte said.

Now, nearly 10 years older and having finally worked his way up to a wage of nearly $27 per hour, he’s experiencing déjà vu: Albertsons is trying to merge with Kroger in a $24.6 billion deal that will be the biggest grocery combination in history if it goes through. The two chains have agreed to sell 579 stores — out of about 5,000 — to a third company in an effort to satisfy antitrust regulators. The Pavilions where Mr. De Monte works is on that list.

Mergers often create anxiety for workers who stand to lose jobs or benefits when companies combine. The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, or U.F.C.W., which represents most in-store workers at Kroger and Albertsons, has spoken out against the proposed deal, though it doesn’t have much ability to stop it.

But the union does have a powerful ally: the Federal Trade Commission. The agency sued to block the combination, and a trial that will decide whether the two chains can join forces is scheduled to start in federal court in Oregon on Monday.