Reflections on the 2025 Contract Campaign: Colorado
William Anthony Cox is a floral manager at King Soopers (Kroger) in Highlands Ranch, Colo. and a shop steward in UFCW Local 7. Read his takeaways from being a bargaining committee member in 2025, featured in Essential Voice.
Photo courtesy of UFCW Local 7.
Over the course of contract bargaining in Colorado, we have learned broadly the difference between being told, and seeing for yourself. We are often told by our union reps that the company doesn’t care about us or our well being. We are told by the company that the union is corrupt and bargaining in bad faith. We are told that the public is with us. We are told that our brothers and sisters will share solidarity with us.
But seeing is believing.
Three months before bargaining began, I was given the task of going to every member of my bargaining unit and anyone else who I could contact in the union and procure from them proposals they wanted to see at the bargaining table. Nearly every person I interacted with said they wanted us to fix the staffing issues. This would be the theme of bargaining for us for the next year.
The company, however, told everyone after our second bargaining meeting that the union was stalling, unwilling to compromise with the company. This would be the company’s line for the next year. We saw Kroger and Albertsons reject over 114 proposals, each written by a union member. The companies told us that it was too burdensome to consider that many proposals and come to a fair compromise, even while their proposal had no compromises to be seen.
At each meeting, we would present testimony of short staffing, show pictures, provide data, and demand answers. The company would tell the workers that we were delaying and obscuring, while they didn’t need to show any of their data. After three months of bargaining, the contract expired.
The company told us that it is time to vote on the contract – their “last, best, and final.”
We showed them a picket line.
But they hadn’t seen enough yet. After two weeks on strike in the dead of winter, it would be five more months of bargaining before the companies would move in any substantial way in Colorado. During those months the companies called associates, handed out flyers, and had daily huddles to tell us how bargaining was going. The narrative of delay and deadlock was spread in every store, every day, by every means. In other words, the company was organizing the members to believe their version of what happened at bargaining.
But when people came to bargaining, they saw their bargaining committee pressing and pressing the company for more information and to give up on their concessions and poison pills.
They saw the company leave with a supposal for hours and come back with their own proposal again, just with the date slightly changed.
I began to see the anger that had cooled slightly from the strike flare up and burn anew. That’s the power of having a strong rank and file bargaining committee and open bargaining that any member can not only attend but participate in.
And so we struck again, this time against Safeway. When the companies saw that the customers, the employees, and even some of the vendors held in solidarity with us, movement at bargaining finally began.
We saw substantial movement on our benefits, reasonable movement on wages, and a historic precedent in a staffing proposal that can finally provide a modicum of relief to the staffing crisis rocking the foundations of the grocery industry. It’s up to us to build power on the shop floor and enforce the staffing language, through organizing with our coworkers, building strong stewards and member activists.
Meanwhile, the company propaganda died down. No more huddles. No more calls. Nothing to tell. It was time to see if the solidarity with the bargaining committee would hold, and the contract would ratify. Now, those nine months of work can be viewed on the union website, there, in black and white. My name can be seen as a committee member that witnessed the whole process. You too, can see for yourself.
But this isn’t the end. At the beginning of the process, we worked with several other local unions to pressure the companies as a broad unit of the West Coast. Union leaders across the country are planning for a general strike in 2028, headed by Shawn Fain of the United Auto Workers. We have seen what we can win as a semi-cohesive unit in a portion of the country. Now what could we win with a nation united? We’ll see.
William Anthony Cox
Highlands Ranch, Colo.
UFCW Local 7, King Soopers Bargaining Committee Member