The 60 UFCW Officials Making Over $250k/Year (2024)
In 2023, 60 UFCW officials were paid over $250,000 in total compensation — all the way up to $740,892. Altogether, our union spent $20,153,611 in 2023 in combined compensation for the $250k Club.
At EW4D, we believe that union officials deserve to be compensated fairly for the work they do for our union. This report isn’t to criticize any one official — many of the officers on this list work hard for our union and should be paid well for it. But when the average grocery worker in the US brings in an average of just $31,110, there’s no reason our union officials should be making up to 23 times as much.
That’s why EW4D supports capping officer salaries at $250,000. But when we put forward a resolution for this essential finance reform at the 2023 UFCW Convention, only 5 locals voted in favor. You can check how your local voted here.
Members deserve a democratic union that we can hold accountable. And accountability starts with education.
That’s why we’ve compiled this nonpartisan report. By making it easier for members to see top officer salaries, we hope we can increase transparency within the union and reroute some of these funds to organizing for better contracts for the members and new unions for the over 2 million non-union grocery workers across the country.
If you believe the UFCW should belong to the members so we can fight for better contracts and stand up to the boss, fill out this form to get in touch with EW4D and start organizing for change.
UNIONS WIN ON FINANCE REFORM
UFCW isn’t the only union that needs finance reform. Many other union presidents made anywhere between $400,000 and $700,000 in 2023, as Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) writes.
In fact, TDU’s decades of informing, organizing, and uniting members in the Teamsters brought significant changes to officer salaries. How did they win? By publishing reports like this one, winning One Member, One Vote, and finally amending the IBT constitution to cap officer salaries.
In the United Auto Workers (UAW), reformers in Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) pushed for financial transparency in a resolution at their 2022 Convention after officials voted to give themselves a 30% raise at the 2018 Convention amidst a major corruption scandal.
TRANSPARENT UNIONS ARE STRONG UNIONS
EW4D wants to create millions of new union members by growing our unions’ commitments to organizing. But bringing new members into our movements can be hard — especially when union-busting companies have inflated officer salaries to point to and say, “Do you really want to pay dues for that?”
Inflated officer salaries hurt our ability to organize. If we want to reverse the decline of union density and revitalize the labor movement, we’re going to have to start by building more transparent, democratic, and accountable unions from the bottom up.
This report was compiled using information from LM-2s. Every year, local unions are required to disclose their finances with forms called LM-2s. Anyone can access the LM-2 reports for your local and international. To learn how to do it yourself, check out this resource from TDU.