S5.E1: Safety First | The Dollar General Dilemma

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In May, I struck out from New Orleans to Nashville on a bus with Dollar General employees from 9 states. Jordan, our producer, and I sat in the second row from the front with a view of the sun peeking out over the horizon. We passed back Styrofoam takeout cartons with grits and sausage as the bus hummed outside a church parking lot. Once everyone boarded, the bus pulled around a residential street, up a highway ramp, and kept going. We were on a 500-mile road trip to rally for fair pay and safety improvements at Dollar General's headquarters. Last spring, CNN reported that since 2014, 49 people have been killed and 172 injured at Dollar General stores. I was astounded. Then I got to digging around to see if anyone was doing anything about it. That's when I found Step Up Louisiana. This grassroots membership organization was organizing to stand with Dollar General workers to demand a safe place to work. The hotel ballroom was buzzing with activity the morning of the protest. Organizers and Dollar General employees practiced chants and made posters. They'd been preparing for months to march and protest at Dollar General's annual shareholder meeting in Goodlettsville, Tennessee.

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Kenya Coleman was there.

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I'm originally from Texas, but I've been in Nashville 2.5 years and been with Dollar General 2 years as a key holder. A key holder is a person that comes in, open or close the store, get the register ready.

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Kenya's safety is compromised every time she clocks into work at Dollar General.

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When you get to store, if you're by yourself, you think anything could happen. Even if you're by yourself 30 minutes, an hour, The work is often dangerous.

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Fire exits blocked, store aisles clogged with merchandise, sparsely staffed with no security.

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Kenya says Dollar General stores are easy targets for robberies, in part because of how they're organized.

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I'm always worried that I had to confront somebody, and I've been put in that position. I've taken totes away from customers. I've stopped carts. I've got out in people's faces trying to keep them from stealing.

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Dollar General and other dollar stores are vulnerable to violent crime. Between 2014 and 2023, 12 people died from gun violence and 14 people were injured in shootings at Dollar General stores across the country. That's according to data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archives.

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I'm afraid that I'm not going to come back to her. Who's going to take care of my daughter? They put me in a position where I got to pick and choose. Like, I got to leave before she get on her school bus, get home after she get home, worried that my daughter's in the house and that when I go to work, somebody could jump on me, shoot me, rob me, and nobody's there to raise my daughter.

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Kenya and other Dollar General employees put their lives on the line. Sometimes for less than $10 an hour. The median salary for a Dollar General employee last year was $18,657. In contrast, the company's CEO, Todd Vasos, received nearly $183 million in compensation from 2015 to 2021. One of the ways Dollar General squeezes margins is by cutting labor costs. And because the stores are notoriously understaffed, employees are often tasked with being security guards, janitors, on top of their actual job.

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You want to be able to represent your store and work it like in a job description you applied for. And you want to make sure that you're getting paid well to take care of what you need to take care of your family. And then you want to make sure that you feel good about what you're doing and want to return the next day.

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Dollar General is one of the country's most profitable retail chains, and despite repeated safety issues, the company keeps expanding. The company, which operates about 19,000 stores across the country, plans to open an additional 800 this year. Crowe, a dollar store organizer in Nashville, says the store's employees, customers, and communities deserve better.

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Dollar General drops these stores into our communities and says, "You have to live with this magnet of crime and chaos in your neighborhood. And, you know, not only that, but we're also going to suck out all of the money and overcharge you." This isn't the first time Dollar General employees are making this walk to the company's headquarters.

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Many were here last year demanding the same things. Safe staffing and store infrastructure, paid time off and mental health compensation after experiencing a robbery or other violent incidents in the store, and ensuring workers have a say in all safety policies. They were back to increase pressure on Dollar General. It was time for a change. 1, 2, 3, 4, better pay, safer It's a sunny morning, and despite the mild heat, everyone seems to be in good spirits. So it was divide and conquer. I head off to a worker action at a Dollar General store in Nashville, and Jordan heads to the corporate headquarters in Goodsville. As we climb off the bus, we are greeted by a snappy New Orleans-style band ready to lead our procession through a neighborhood to a Dollar General store in Nashville. These activist workers were coming to show solidarity with the workers inside the store, but the managers locked the door, barricaded the entrance with a delivery truck, and called the police.

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You are more than welcome to stay and protest, but it must be done from the sidewalk.

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Many people are wearing orange Step Up Louisiana shirts. The New Orleans-based labor advocacy group helped organize the trip. Families and their young children hold posters and chant as they walk along the sidewalk up to the headquarters of Dollar General.

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What do we want? A meeting! When do we want it?

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Now!

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Past the bear statues and the company representatives, waiting for them in front of the entrance doors.

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Can we get y'all's attention? Come here for a second. All y'all, appreciate it. All y'all come on over here.

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They're warned to leave the area, that they've been denied access inside.

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We're out here trying to get workers' rights. You understand?

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Completely.

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I'm not mad.

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Last thing I want to do is see anybody get in trouble, okay?

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I don't want to do no paperwork.

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Then the police come and usher them to a grassy embankment, but beside the company's driveway.

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Out here in the roadway is public access. You have every right to be out there and there's nothing anybody can say to you, okay? But this right here is private property and they've asked y'all to leave.

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That doesn't stop them from voicing their frustrations outside of headquarters and demanding a seat at the table with corporate.

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I never hear anything from anybody.

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But this is Dollar General corporate though, right?

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This is.

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Right.

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And so we have workers from Dollar General corporate here who work at Dollar General.

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And everything else?

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Yep.

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Well, then that's something that they would have to take up.

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I'm just saying, it's like, so do we work here or do we not work here, right? Because everywhere we go, people want to know who we are.

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We are the workers, we are the workers.

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Hours go by. A local news crew comes out to record the protest for that night's show. But Dollar General CEO Todd Bezos remained inside the building. Perhaps to the CEO's surprise, the next day at the shareholder meeting, he would meet two of these employees who had been designated shareholder proxies to attend the meeting.

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We'll be back! We'll be back! We'll be back!

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The annual meeting is the only opportunity all Dollar General shareholders have to meet and talk with corporate management.

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Some employees attended last year when shareholders voted to create an independent audit of the company's safety policies. The results, published this year, found the company was at or above industry standard despite the company's spot on the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's Severe Violators List.

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It is totally rare for a large employer with many work sites to be in the Severe Violator Program, and it is completely rare that a retail store is in this program. OSHA's Severe Violator Enforcement Program allows the agency to focus its resources, inspections, on employers that have demonstrated indifference to complying with the OSHA law, and Dollar General is one.

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That's Debbie Berkowitz, a worker safety and health policy expert and a former official with OSHA. She says since 2017, OSHA has fined Dollar General more than $16 million and issued citations in more than 180 inspections of stores nationwide. This is one of the largest fines in OSHA's history.

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Almost all these inspections were due to workers, managers filing complaints. Workers risk retaliation by the company to ask OSHA to inspect and protect them. These are workers acting alone all over the country, scared they would be seriously hurt at work.

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In July, Dollar General agreed to pay OSHA $12 million in fines and to improve worker safety at its stores.

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In hundreds of inspections, OSHA found violations just like what you heard about today. Violations of the most basic safety hazards that should not be found in any workplace. In some cases, federal inspectors have gone into a store to demand that a hazard be fixed, only to find in a follow-up visit that the problem was still there. Making sure exit routes and doors are unblocked and can be freely accessed is probably the oldest safety standard on the books and one of the most important to save lives.

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If Dollar General doesn't fix for problems, they'll have to pay up to $100,000 per day per violation, capped at $500,000.

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This is a real victory for the workers at Dollar General.

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As we let you go, don't forget to ask yourself: in the work that you do, in the things you buy, and in the investments you make, what does it profit? What Does It Profit is a production of the Solidarity Economy Workshop at Georgetown University. The show is hosted by me, Dr. Dawn Carpenter. Jordan Gasparet is our senior producer. Our engineer and designer is Mark Bush. Thanks to our Season 5 researchers, Fiona Richards and Eden Beach. Music for What Does It Profit? was composed by Nick Pennington. Support for What Does It Profit? is provided by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and the Capital Applied Learning Lab at Georgetown University. You You can learn more at whatdoesitprofitpodcast.com.