A grocery store employee filed a proposed class-action lawsuit in Colorado state court on Monday against Kroger and Albertsons, accusing the two supermarket giants of colluding with striking employees to hold down wages and benefits.

Valarie Morgan, who works at a Kroger-owned King Soopers store, claims the two competitors entered into an illegal agreement not to poach employees or customers during a 2022 work stoppage. This, she claims, gave Kroger the upper hand over the employee union in contract negotiations.

As a result, Morgan said, Kroger workers ended up getting a worse deal than they should have.

“The anti-competitive agreement was successful,” she claims. “It artificially reduced the union’s bargaining power during negotiations while increasing Kroger management’s influence.”

The lawsuit alleges that this ultimately benefited Albertsons as well because the terms of the Kroger deal would affect the contracts that Albertsons would later negotiate with the same union.

Albertsons did not respond to a request for comment. Kroger denied the allegations in a statement.

“There were no non-solicitation or so-called no-poaching agreements between Kroger and Albertsons,” a spokesperson said by email.

Morgan said in a statement through Towards Justice, the workers’ legal aid group that represents her, that she wants to “stand up for all workers who have been harmed by this corporate abuse.”

“These companies have rigged the system against us and undermined our right to fight for better pay and fair treatment through our unions,” she said. “Hard-working Coloradans deserve better.”

Colorado’s attorney general filed a lawsuit earlier this year with similar allegations, citing emails between Kroger and Albertsons officials shortly before the King Soopers strike that involved 78 stores and thousands of workers.

“We do not intend to hire employees from King Soupers (sic) and we have already informed the Safeway department of our position and the department agrees,” Albertson’s senior vice president of labor relations was quoted as saying in an email to a Kroger -official.

That email is cited in Morgan’s lawsuit along with other emails noting that Albertsons agreed not to ask Kroger customers to switch their prescriptions to Albertsons during the strike. Such an agreement could have helped Kroger retain customers during the work stoppage.

Kroger and Albertsons are two of the largest grocery companies in the US and are now trying to merge in a $25 billion deal. Opponents have cited the alleged collusion during the strike as evidence that the merger would harm workers and consumers by driving down wages and raising prices.

The Federal Trade Commission, along with several state attorneys general, went to court in hopes of blocking the merger from going ahead earlier this year.

The antitrust case is currently in federal court, although the future is uncertain following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory. Trump will have the opportunity to reshape the FTC following an aggressive antitrust agenda under President Joe Biden.

Both Kroger and Albertsons have defended the proposed merger, claiming it would result in lower prices for shoppers. Kroger has also denied the allegations of collusion, telling HuffPost in February that “there were no non-solicitation or so-called no-poaching agreements between Kroger and Albertsons, then or now.”

The unionized employees of Kroger and Albertsons in Colorado are represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, which has opposed the merger. Its president, Kim Cordova, previously told HuffPost she believes the union was harmed by the alleged non-solicitation agreement.

“We will never know what concessions we could have gotten from these employers,” Cordova said. “We did well (with our contracts), but we could have done better.”

This story has been updated with comment from Kroger.

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