Jacobin: No Union Democracy, No Union Revitalization

Photo courtesy of UAW

Not too long ago, the author, Chris Bohner, wrote about democracy in labor leading to more militant unions, but then the UFCW International President got into a conversation with him about it, leading to his next piece that dives more into the numbers and the history. All of this leads him to ask why unions stand up for voting rights protections and against the filibuster, but can’t seem to apply the same values to their own governing bodies for their members.

From Chris Bohner:

Indeed, the UFCW delegate system is analogous to voting for candidates to the Electoral College before knowing the Democratic or Republican nominees for president.

Because of superdelegates and other features of the UFCW constitution, the UFCW reform group Essential Workers for Democracy estimates that up to 60% of the delegates to the 2023 convention were officers or staff. This built-in incumbent bias is a central reason why the top leadership “elections” at the UFCW resemble a dynastic form of succession. Over the last 30 years, there have been only three UFCW International Presidents, none of whom faced competitive or contested elections.

UFCW isn’t the only large union using a superdelegate system to control union conventions. SEIU has an upcoming convention in 2024 to replace Mary Kay Henry, the retiring president of the union. Under the SEIU constitution, not only are the top officers of locals automatically delegates to the convention (even if elected up to three years ago), but the entire slate of local officers are automatically delegates. For example, SEIU’s largest local — 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers, representing some 450,000 members — is apportioned two hundred delegates for the 2024 convention, but seventy-nine of the delegates, or 40 percent, are superdelegates.

Jonah Furman’s Jacobin article “How Democratic Are American Unions?” suggested that one metric to measure whether unions are democratic is to look at union leadership: “Do incumbents ever lose their positions to a challenger? Are there (meaningful) challengers? Obviously, leadership challenges aren’t the source of ‘democracy,’ but the lack of such challenges . . . could very well be morbid symptoms of democracy’s opposite.”

[UFCW] Kamper argues there is no strategic value to democracy. However, one of the primary arguments for democracy is that contested leadership elections with open debate lead to better long-term decision making than autocratic systems. That’s why “one member, one vote” is valuable as a reform — it isn’t a “silver bullet,” but it is an important pressure valve that members can use when local democracy is not working effectively.