Dollar General workers protest shareholder meeting over low pay and safety issues

Kenya Slaughter has worked at Dollar General for about four years in Alexandria, Louisiana. Early in the pandemic, Slaughter publicly criticized the lack of support and protections for workers provided by the company even as demand soared. 

She is one of the workers who attended a rally to protest Dollar General’s low pay of workers and unsafe working conditions during the company shareholder meeting on 25 May in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, led by labor and advocacy groups including Step Up Louisiana, United for Respect and Fight for $15 and a Union. 

Ahead of the rally, Slaughter criticized the low wages she and other workers are paid at Dollar General around the US, citing caps on hourly rates and a lack of pay rates commensurate with seniority, with pay starting at $8 an hour, though she started at $11 an hour because she came in with experience. 

“They only give a store a certain amount of hours for incredible workloads. When you’re in a high volume store like the one I work in, very fast paced and constantly have customers, you don’t have time to go to the restroom,” said Slaughter. “You have to stock, clean the restrooms, help the customers, work the register, be able to do paperwork, we have to do it all.” 

She argued there is significant understaffing in her store, where there often isn’t enough staff to help customers or handle the workloads, which poses a safety issue as well, and that many stores operate without air conditioning. 

“We want to bring awareness to the shareholders, because I’m sure there are some of them who have never set foot in a Dollar General,” added Slaughter. “Financially, being a ‘team player’ isn’t helping me because I’m putting in extra hours and extra work for something that’s not actually my position and not being compensated for it, and it’s not fair.” 

Dollar General, which has the most retail store locations of any company in the US with over 18,000 locations in 47 states and continues to rapidly expand, has faced recent criticisms over its treatment of workers and safety violations.

In April 2022, a Dollar General store manager in Tampa, Florida, Mary Gundel, was fired after she posted a series of Tik-Tok videos that went viral where she reported poor working conditions; underfunding stores, understaffing where she was often left to run the store by herself, shipments delivered