The fight for a rank-and-file union
By Hamilton Nolan
On February 6, 1919, 25,000 Seattle workers from more than 100 different unions walked out in support of 35,000 striking shipyard workers. It was global news. The city was momentarily paralyzed by the most comprehensive display of labor power that post-WWI America had seen.
On the wall of an exhibit about the strike at the Seattle Museum of History and Industry, a small label channels the thinking of the strikers: “Where will this lead? To revolution? Power for workers? The truth is: Nobody knows where!”
A century later, the electrifying heart of Washington’s labor movement can be found in a three-story office building, next to a chiropractor and a Mexican restaurant, in the town of Des Moines, which lies along the bay about 15 miles south of downtown Seattle. There, in the lobby, “educate, agitate, organize” is spelled out in neon blue cursive on the wall. A novelty claw machine holds little plastic bubbles containing bright yellow union T-shirts and beanies. This is the headquarters of United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) 3000.
With more than 50,000 members in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho — mostly grocery and healthcare workers, along with several thousand more in retail, meatpacking and public service — UFCW 3000 is the largest local in the million-member UFCW International. It is the model of an energetic, pugnacious, organizing union, growing labor’s influence steadily in one of America’s most concentrated areas of corporate power. But it is also — and, really, this is why I’m here — the epicenter of a great plot to root out the rotten elements holding back the UFCW, overthrow them, and revolutionize one of the biggest private-sector unions in the country, along with the labor movement itself. If you like scrappy bands of righteous pirates setting out on a grand caper with uncertain chances of success, well, here is the union world’s version.
The driving force behind UFCW 3000’s grand plans is Faye Guenther, the local’s 47-year-old president. She is mounting a 2028 run for UFCW International president. That will, ideally, be the culmination of a multiyear strategy of rallying member support across the country to build a mighty internal caucus that wants to sweep away long-entrenched leadership and make the union more democratic, more committed to new organizing, and more willing to strike — to make one of America’s biggest unions as ambitious to win the class war as Faye Guenther herself.
For the entire time that Guenther has been working for unions — more than two decades — she has been conscious of the ways her union was failing. She and her fellow organizers would go out for beers and grumble about the UFCW’s failure to invest in organizing and its disconnected international leadership.
Her own relationship with the leadership — particularly with Marc Perrone, the UFCW International’s president since 2014 — deteriorated. In 2020, when Covid-19 struck, UFCW found itself right in the middle of the crisis. Grocery workers were being pressured to continue working as the pandemic spread, and nurses who were UFCW 3000 members were forced to wear garbage bags and unsafe masks in the early days of the pandemic, because their hospital lacked sufficient PPE.
“I got onto a phone call with Marc Perrone — he had these regional meetings — and I said, ‘We need face masks, we need PPE, and we need it fast. Or 200,000 people could die by August.’ He said, ‘Faye, let’s not be overly dramatic,’” Guenther remembers. “I knew immediately that this person was completely out of touch.” By the end of August 2020, more than 183,000 Americans would die of Covid.
In 2022, Kroger and Albertsons announced their plan to merge, which would form the largest grocery chain in America. Such megamergers are almost always bad for workers, leading to layoffs, store closures and more monopoly-type power for the corporation. The UFCW represented more than 300,000 workers at the two companies, but the union’s international leadership pointedly declined to announce its opposition to the merger, releasing only a mealy-mouthed statement of concern, which indicated they thought there might be some opportunity for a deal with the companies.
Alarmed, Guenther and her team at UFCW 3000 pulled together a “Stop the Merger” coalition of six other locals, along with dozens of community and labor groups, to agitate and lobby against the deal. The international did not decide to formally oppose the merger until May 2023, after a great deal of internal pressure. It marked yet another public schism between the Marc Perrone and Faye Guenther wings of the union.
The internal politics of labor unions, though they often remain out of view, can be every bit as dramatic as any episode of Game of Thrones. By 2022, Guenther and her allies at UFCW 3000 had resolved to launch a reform effort inside UFCW, with an eye on pushing a slate of reforms at the union’s international convention in 2023.
The atmosphere was tense — Guenther describes it as “open war.” The international union ended the $24,000 monthly subsidy that it had been giving to support the local’s organizing efforts, which Guenther interpreted as direct retaliation against her for her years of being a thorn in their side. On Aug. 1, 2022, the local’s office in Seattle was broken into. The local later moved to its current office out in Des Moines, Wash., where Guenther arrived one day to find a bullet hole in her office window. Even if all of these things were coincidences, the atmosphere of tension that Local 3000’s leaders felt was very real.
Faye Guenther is a driven person. She only got involved with the labor movement because she wants to change the world. Her fundamental frustration with the way UFCW as a whole was being run was that, despite having access to many resources, it seemed totally uninterested in that goal. Perrone boasted about the union’s financial strength, but its organizing budget had been cut under his leadership, and proposals at the 2023 convention to boost organizing spending were resoundingly voted down. Guenther was equally frustrated with other UFCW locals that seemed to exist as sinecures for their officers, rather than democratic, member-focused unions.
“It’s a political inside club,” Guenther says. “You get your regional directors and staff. You have no accountability to the membership.” At many locals, “their boards are filled with staff. They vote themselves their raises. They don’t have organizing departments. They don’t mobilize their members … [and at the international], they’re not leading either. They’re not pulling people together. They’re not speaking out. They’re not exposing the problems. Because they all want to stay in power.”
Guenther told me her own vision for a UFCW that hired hundreds of new organizers and won coordinated national contracts to transform the entire grocery industry. Local 3000’s secretary-treasurer Joe Mizrahi, Guenther’s closest ally and consigliere, can rattle off detailed plans to organize 30,000 cannabis workers and unionize Whole Foods as an entry point to Amazon. To make those ambitions a reality, though, means making the UFCW International act more like Local 3000.
Last year, Mizrahi and Guenther resolved to make reforming the UFCW a reality. They pulled together a reform slate, headed by Guenther, as well as a host of resolutions and constitutional amendments to propose at the convention. Most meaningful was one to institute a “one member, one vote” structure that would shift power at UFCW away from insider delegates and toward members — a reform that has been integral to overthrowing entrenched leadership teams at other unions like the Teamsters and United Auto Workers (UAW) in recent years.
They also proposed limiting the salary of any local officer in the union to $250,000 per year. This measure sounds modest, until you learn that 30 of the UFCW’s 74 local presidents in 2023 were paid more than that, including three who were paid more than half a million dollars.
The reformers made their voices heard — loudly — at the UFCW convention in April, but they were defeated on the floor, as they knew they would be. It was a first step. Now, the same band of true believers are plotting to spend the years leading up to the next convention on a bootstrapped national campaign designed to refashion the entire million-member union in UFCW 3000’s image: democratic, aggressively organizing, and rooted in social justice.
First, Seattle. Next, everywhere.
During the week I spent with them, UFCW 3000 was also preparing for not one, but two, potential strikes. On Monday, Guenther, Mizrahi and several staffers crammed around a laminated table in the back corner of a teriyaki restaurant to talk through a looming strike at Macy’s, where members were fed up with low wages. On Thursday, staffers were camped out in a tiny break room at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, 30 miles north of Seattle, where a thousand nurses were taking a strike vote, which came in at 97 percent yes. (Providence workers ended up striking for five days; Macy’s workers for nine.)
Meanwhile, Guenther and Mizrahi spent Thursday and Friday at an airport motel in the midst of contract negotiations. Mizrahi was also working to arrange another meeting with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan regarding the Kroger merger. (The meetings would pay off: In February, the FTC sued to block the deal.) Rite Aid, where Local 3000 had members, had just declared bankruptcy. On top of those things, and the staff meeting, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza had begun, and Guenther and her staff sat in on a Zoom call of labor activists discussing the issue, then added UFCW 3000’s name to the then very short list of unions demanding a cease-fire.
There was nothing about this river of work that would motivate any normal person to voluntarily undertake, in addition, a years-long project to reform a hostile and intransigent union. The motivation was ideology. The motivation was that Guenther and her allies believe the union must be better, and their work is not done until it is.
After contract negotiations concluded one night, they migrated to that upscale diner by the airport to sketch out their battle plans. Guenther whipped out a piece of paper, sectioned it off into years, and began filling in what needed to be done: 2024, 2025 and 2026 would be for building a national base of support among members of other locals, while 2027 and 2028 would be spent training reform delegates to flood the next UFCW convention. Each year, they planned on picking three or four cities to target — geographically dispersed places with UFCW locals that had members enthusiastic for reform and leaders who were not. Those cities would be the sweet spots, where the evangelistic message of democratic unionism could most easily take root.
Guenther and her allies began kicking around targets for early 2024. Chicago? Phoenix? Boston? Perhaps Kansas, Ohio or New Jersey? And what about Canada? The scale was intimidating. Then there were the logistical concerns. Carrying out this plan would mean everyone involved spent the next several years using their spare time to fly around the country to meet with workers and recruit them. Guenther said anyone who wanted to be on the slate with her could have one week of vacation per year but would be expected to use the rest of their vacation days visiting workers. They needed fundraising. A comms team. These things were briskly ticked off — not as obstacles, but as to-dos. (By early 2024, they had lawyers forming a new organization to house the effort, and they were focused on recruiting dozens of UFCW members to meet up at the Labor Notes convention in April, where they would decide their list of target cities.)
They discussed some more exotic possible tactics as well. One idea was to rally support to call a “special convention,” where they could force a formal consideration of one member, one vote. Even if the international leadership blocked the measure from passing, it could be a good way to draw attention to the fact that those leaders were insulating themselves from the will of the membership.
Another idea, which Mizrahi referred to as the “nuclear option,” would be for Local 3000 to pursue a full disaffiliation from the UFCW — the union equivalent of California seceding from the United States. In this scenario, the local would declare UFCW to be irredeemably broken and ask members to allow them to become a standalone union dedicated to new organizing and union democracy. This is, to be clear, a far-fetched plan, because the UFCW’s constitution makes it difficult, but introducing it as a possibility could give the reformers leverage.
It is not hard to see its appeal. Among other things, Mizrahi said, Local 3000 could stop sending $800,000 per month to the UFCW International. “We could have another 80 staff,” he said. “Picture that we had the staff that you saw in that meeting, plus 80 organizers. What would that look like?”
It would look like the labor movement’s dream fully unleashed. What makes UFCW 3000 so remarkable is that it combines all of the real, existing, hard-won characteristics of a strong democratic union — a member-led board, national political influence, a willingness to tangle with multibillion-dollar corporations — with an additional, exceedingly rare determination to follow a purist ideology of labor solidarity wherever it leads.
Usually, it leads into new and bigger battles.
“Being an island does not build power,” Guenther says. “You’re always on the defense. We need to go on the offense. We need to go.”
Hamilton Nolan covers labor, politics, and power for In These Times and other publications. He also runs a Substack newsletter called How Things Work.
Source: inthesetimes.com, April 9, 2024