Members
seeking to transform the United Food and
Commercial Workers have added a new weapon to
their arsenal: legal action.
Grocery
workers Kyong Barry (Local 3000 in Washington)
and Iris Scott (Local 1459 in
Massachusetts) sued
the UFCW April
19 over the undemocratic representation of
members at the UFCW Convention, which takes
place every five years.
There
are several charges, but the crux of the lawsuit
is that delegates are apportioned across locals
in such a way as to deny members equal voice. A
favorable ruling would enable reformers in other
unions to sue on the same basis.
The
UFCW is the fifth-largest union in the U.S.
after the NEA, SEIU, AFSCME, and the Teamsters.
It represents 1.2 million members, who are
largely in grocery, meatpacking, retail, and
health care. As in most large unions, the
convention is its highest governing body. There,
delegates from each local elect the top
officers, and vote on changes to the
constitution and the direction of the union
every five years.
UNION
DEMOCRACY LAW
The
Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of
1959 is the main law governing union democracy
in the U.S., and union members like Barry and
Scott have legal standing to sue under Title I,
also known as the Members’
Bill of Rights.
Their
lawsuit charges
the UFCW with
violating the LMRDA in four ways:
§ Using
a formula that disproportionately
and
unequally allocates delegates across
locals. In
the UFCW, members from
larger
locals are underrepresented
relative
to those from smaller locals. For
example,
a local with 1,000 members is
allocated
two delegates (0.20 percent),
while
a local with 55,000 members is
allocated
30 delegates (0.05 percent), a
four-fold
difference.
§ Ex
officio delegates
serving in
preference
to elected delegates. In
each
local, the union president and
secretary-treasurer
are automatically
delegates,
reducing the fraction of the
delegation
selected through elections in
which
rank-and-file members may run.
In
smaller locals with two or fewer
delegates,
there are no separate
delegate
elections.
§ Allowing
locals not to hold delegate
elections,
as well as to refuse to send
elected
delegates to the convention. The
UFCW
does not prevent local officers
from
deciding not to hold delegate
elections
at all, or refusing to send
delegates
once they are elected, usually
citing
financial reasons.
§ Allowing
locals to give inadequate notice
of
delegate elections. The UFCW does
not
ensure that locals inform members
of
delegate nominations and elections.
If
the lawsuit succeeds, members of other unions
with similar complaints might successfully sue
their unions (and likely recoup the cost of
their legal fees as well). SEIU, for instance,
also uses ex
officio selection
of delegates. Unfair delegate
systems in
major unions have been criticized as an
obstacle to change.
Notably,
the UFCW does not have direct elections for its
top officers, also known as One Member, One Vote
(1M1V). Barry and Scott are not necessarily
calling for 1M1V as a remedy, and the court is
unlikely to impose 1M1V when it rules on the
case, due to the weakness of the LMRDA. However,
direct elections are an important goal for UFCW
reformers, and more equal representation would
make it easier to pass 1M1V as well as other
reforms at a future UFCW convention.
For
the UFCW, winning 1M1V would mark a return to
the union’s roots. Members of the former Retail
Clerks International Association, which merged
with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters to form the
UFCW in 1979, had the
right to vote for
their top officers. The Teamsters and the Auto
Workers both have 1M1V for top officers.
SLEEPING
GIANT
The
lawsuit is funded by Essential
Workers for Democracy which
hopes to build the UFCW into a more democratic
and fighting union and, as EWD puts it on its
website, reawaken “the sleeping union giant.”
Barry is on EWD’s board, and Scott began
organizing with the group shortly after it
formed in 2023.
Both
were elected delegates at the 2023 UFCW
Convention, and helped put forward a set
of pro-democracy
and pro-organizing resolutions,
including for 1M1V, coordinated bargaining,
making it easier for locals to authorize a
strike and improving strike benefits, more
resources for new organizing, and capping union
salaries at $250,000 a year. One resolution
called for a more equal allocation of delegates,
the subject of the current lawsuit.
However, most
delegates ended
up voting against these resolutions, siding with
the current leadership, which vigorously opposed
them. In at least one case, supporters of the
status quo prematurely cut
off debate to
prevent rank-and-file members in line to speak
in support of 1M1V from getting to the
microphone. The Constitution Committee, whose
role is to vet submitted amendments, also issued
recommendations in near-perfect lockstep with
UFCW leadership.
Reformers
view the lawsuit as a continuation of their
efforts at the convention, and useful for
continuing to agitate the rank and file. “For
me, it was important to be involved with this
lawsuit because I was at the convention, and I
saw our rank-and-file voices being purposely
suppressed,” said Scott, who is a steward and
shift leader in produce at River Valley Co-op in
Easthampton.
“I understand that the vast
majority of my union siblings, the over 1
million union siblings in the UFCW, haven’t
had the experience to see that… Although there
are many ways for us to go about creating
change, this is one route we realized we could
use.”
Since
the convention, EWD activists have also been
focused on organizing in their workplaces around
their flagship issues of coordinated bargaining,
strike readiness, and democratizing the union.
They
are building up local committees of
reform-minded members, beyond the existing base
that supported the EWD resolutions at the
convention, and mapping key information such as
the many units and contract expiration dates in
each local. This is no small task in locals with
tens of thousands of members, often spread
across hundreds of grocery stores, meatpacking
plants, and other workplaces.
This
organizing received a boost at the 2024 Labor
Notes Conference in Chicago, which 50 EWD
activists attended together; many were meeting
each other in person for the first time. Since
the conference, EWD has begun holding virtual
organizing trainings as well. The lawsuit itself
was announced at a press
conference during
the conference weekend, with a roomful of UFCW
members along with Auto Worker and Teamster
reformers.
On
May 24, the UFCW responded by filing a motion
to dismiss the
lawsuit, arguing that the plaintiffs lack
standing to pursue claims pertaining to the next
convention, which will “occur years in the
future” (in 2028), and that the harms alleged to
them as members are “speculative.” If the
lawsuit proceeds, a ruling is expected in late
2024 or early 2025.
The
UFCW administration has also signaled that it is
ready to retaliate against lawsuit supporters.
In a notice sent to all local union presidents
in May, President Marc Perrone demanded
“respect” for the international union and
suggested that a “third party” was undermining
it, presumably a reference to EWD.
UFCW
AT A CROSSROADS
The
union’s reform wing has been gaining steam.
Among
the most important initiatives is coordinated
bargaining among locals representing Kroger
workers, led by Faye Guenther, the president of
Local 3000, the union’s largest local. A major
effort in 2022 pooled
resources across eight West Coast UFCW
locals and
took on contracts covering 100,000 grocery
workers. Coordinated bargaining is also one of
EWD’s leading demands, as the UFCW has no master
grocery contract and agreements are fractured
across hundreds of locals.
Local
3000 has also anchored a Stop
the Merger coalition
of UFCW locals (and one Teamsters local) aimed
at halting the mega-merger of grocers Kroger and
Albertsons. The coalition’s efforts led to
the FTC
filing for an injunction in
February in an attempt to prevent the deal from
going forward.
The
proposed merger would be the largest in
supermarket history and pit the UFCW against
even greater consolidated corporate power across
the bargaining table.
Another
area in which reformers agree the union is
falling short is new organizing, which is
under-resourced and where the UFCW’s lackluster
reputation also often precedes it. Scott pointed
to workers at Trader Joe’s and Amazon not
wanting to organize with the union, and said,
“At a certain point we have to look in the
mirror and ask why.”
“[The lawsuit] is a tool to
show that you
can still love your union and
also fight to
hold it accountable to the
members,”
Scott said. “You can use it to
reach
workers that have never heard
about any
of this going on within their
unions, and
to pull them into this
movement.”
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