A new lawsuit alleges that grocery chain rivals Kroger and Albertsons colluded during a strike in Colorado in 2022 to reduce the union’s influence at the bargaining table, resulting in lower wages and benefits than workers would otherwise receive would have.

The lawsuit, filed Monday, targets the same alleged “no-poaching” deal that Kroger and Albertsons Cos. according to Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, when members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 went on strike against King Soopers.

Weiser said in a lawsuit challenging a proposed $24.6 billion merger between Albertsons and Kroger, which includes King Soopers and City Market in Colorado, that emails between the two chains show Albertsons agreed not to hire King Soopers employees or recruit the company’s pharmacy customers during the year. Weiser is seeking a $1 million civil penalty from each company for what he says is an unlawful restraint of trade.

King Soopers employee Valarie Morgan’s lawsuit seeks higher wages, benefits and damages for thousands of grocery workers whose bargaining rights were allegedly undermined by a deal between Kroger and Albertsons. Attorneys from the nonprofit law firm Towards Justice and Edelson PC have filed a motion to certify the complaint as a class action lawsuit.

“These companies have rigged the system against us and undermined our right to fight for better pay and fair treatment through our unions,” Morgan said in a statement.

The Colorado attorney general’s office declined to comment on the new lawsuit because the matter is part of the state’s effort to block the Kroger-Albertsons merger on antitrust grounds. A decision in the case is pending from Denver District Judge Andrew J. Luxen.

Kim Cordova, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 7, said that while the contract made progress in 2022, he believes it could have been better. The contract approved soon after with Albertsons was similar to the King Soopers agreement.

“Had we known that the companies were working together in a coordinated effort to harm members, we believe the outcome would have been different,” Cordova said.

The union has changed its strategies, Cordova added.

Kroger and Albertsons, which own Safeway stores in Colorado, have previously denied making any deals. Requests for comment were left with the companies on Monday.

However, the lawsuit filed by Morgan in Denver District Court alleges that an agreement between the two grocery chains artificially reduced the union’s bargaining power while increasing Kroger’s influence. The complaint states that a company struggling with a strike could find itself under pressure as competitors poach workers and poach customers.

“This competition puts pressure on an employer to end a strike, including by making more concessions to workers at the bargaining table,” the lawsuit says.

However, in the case of the King Soopers strike, the “anti-competitive agreement” resulted in lower wage rates than they would have been without the agreement, the lawsuit says.

“The Kroger-Albertsons agreement reduced Local 7’s bargaining power while increasing Kroger’s and Albertsons’ bargaining power because it helped Kroger mitigate the competitive and financial pressures it would normally face during a strike,” it said of the lawsuit.

Albertsons knew that King Soopers’ contract would form the basis for its upcoming negotiations with the union, the lawsuit says.

And the impact extended beyond union members because, in practice, companies set non-union workers’ wages based on pay scales in collective bargaining agreements, the lawsuit says.

“We certainly believe there is strong evidence on the face of it that workers would have gotten a much better deal if their bargaining power had not been artificially undermined in an anti-competitive manner,” said David Seligman, executive director of Towards Justice, told The Denver Post.

Seligman said the goal is to determine, based on the testimony of people involved in the negotiations and labor economists, what kind of collective agreement union members could have achieved if their bargaining power had not been undermined.