May Day protests highlight retail workers’ pay, scheduling frustrations

May Day protests put a familiar Dollar General pressure point back in view: workers who say low pay, thin staffing and unpredictable schedules never let up, even when the calendar turns into a labor symbol. Organizers behind May Day Strong urged people to skip work, school and shopping on May 1, and marches and rallies across the country turned those complaints about wages and the cost of living into a public show of force.

For Dollar General, the significance was less about whether a specific store saw a picket line than about what the moment said to employees already stretched by the job. The company said it had 20,594 Dollar General, DG Market, DGX and pOpshelf stores as of Jan. 31, 2025, and it reported $40.6 billion in net sales and $1.7 billion in operating profit for fiscal 2024. That scale makes store-level frustrations more than isolated grievances. When associates in one rural or suburban location are juggling freight, register coverage and customer traffic with too few hands, the message can move quickly through the chain.

The labor backdrop at Dollar General is already heavy. On July 11, 2024, the U.S. Department of Labor announced a corporate-wide OSHA settlement requiring the company to pay $12 million and make broad changes, including hiring additional safety managers, reducing inventory to prevent blocked exits, training managers and non-managerial employees, creating a safety and health committee, and fixing certain hazards generally within 48 hours. The agreement also called for annual unannounced audits at covered stores, a Safety Operations Center and an anonymous hotline. For workers, those are not abstract compliance terms; they are the basics of whether a store feels orderly enough to work in safely during a busy shift.

The enforcement history behind that deal is one reason May Day lands with extra force. In July 2023, the Labor Department said Dollar General had been fined more than $21 million since 2017, after OSHA cited the company in 240 inspections. In March 2023, OSHA said it had issued more than $15 million in fines and cited Dollar General in more than 180 inspections nationwide since 2017. The agency also added the retailer to its Severe Violator Enforcement Program in 2022. That record keeps the conversation on a level that goes beyond wages alone, tying pay frustration to physical safety and the daily strain of running lean stores.

Dollar General also faced an open unfair labor practice case filed with the National Labor Relations Board on Dec. 10, 2024, in New Orleans. Against that backdrop, May Day served as a reminder that Dollar General employees are not reacting to one protest or one policy. They are living through a retail economy where schedules, staffing and safety all shape whether the work feels manageable, or like another pressure point that never gets fixed.