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

The lawsuit filed Monday takes aim at the same so-called no-poach deal that Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said Kroger and Albertsons Cos. agreed 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 of Albertsons and Kroger, owner of King Soopers and City Market in Colorado, that emails between the two chains show Albertsons agreed not to hire King Soopers employees to hire or recruit the company’s pharmacy customers during the strike. Weiser is seeking a $1 million civil penalty from each company for what he calls an unlawful restraint of trade.

The lawsuit from King Soopers employee Valarie Morgan seeks higher wages, benefits and damages for thousands of supermarket workers whose bargaining rights he says were undermined by a deal between Kroger and Albertsons. Attorneys from the nonprofit law firm Towards Justice and Edelson PC have requested that the complaint be certified as a class action.

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

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

Kim Cordova, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 7, said while progress was being made on the 2022 contract, she felt it could have been better. The contract approved shortly afterwards with Albertsons was similar to the King Soopers agreement.

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

The union may have changed its strategies, Cordova added.

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

But the lawsuit filed by Morgan in state court in Denver alleges that an agreement between the two supermarket chains artificially reduced the union’s bargaining power while increasing Kroger’s influence. The complaint said a company facing a strike could come under pressure as competitors hire workers and lure away 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 said.

In the case of the strike against King Soopers, however, the “anti-competitive agreement” resulted in pay scales that were lower than they would have been if the conspiracy had not occurred, the lawsuit said.

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

Albertsons knew that King Soopers’ contract would be the basis for its own upcoming negotiations with the union, the lawsuit alleged.

And the impact went beyond union members, because the companies in practice based the wages of non-union employees on the pay scales in collective bargaining agreements, the lawsuit shows.

“We certainly think there is strong prima facie evidence that workers would have gotten a much better deal if their bargaining power had not been artificially and in an anticompetitive way undermined,” David Seligman, executive director of Towards Justice, told The Denver . After.

Seligman said the goal is to determine from testimony from people involved in the negotiations and labor economists what kind of contract union members could have reached if their bargaining power had not been undermined.