One of the reasons this process takes so long is that the many who are in power now are afraid of change. Here’s some of the excuses we heard for not supporting revitalizing amendments at the convention last month. We break them down, and you can see why they just don’t make any sense.

LAS VEGAS—The movement for union democracy, campaigning for directly elected leaders who are much more accountable to members, has come to the United Food and Commercial Workers, the AFL-CIO’s third-largest union.

A growing group of workers, “Essential Workers for Democracy,” or ewd.org, is campaigning for reforms in the 1.2-million-member union.

The world, even then, could often feel hopeless and cruel, but within that heat we felt transformed, energized, empowered by a truth we held together, by a faith in something greater than each of us that bound us together in a common cause.

Growing worker power and changing the culture of an entrenched, status quo form of leadership is a frustrating and slow process. But it's worth the time and effort it takes to achieve the member power a union needs to be successful and to grow. 

A 2022 Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans support organized labor, higher than at any point since 1965.

This enthusiasm presents a huge opportunity for workers to organize our workplaces. But one thing standing in our way is a growing $340 million industry of “union avoidance” consultants. Essential Workers for Democracy believes that unions need to spend at least 30% of their budget on organizing. Because the “union avoidance” firms we’re up against are a serious threat.

But I think UFCW has a really long way to go to be a significant part of that wave. 

I know that there's gonna be enthusiasm for some of this, and we're hoping to get as many rank and file members or even union leadership from locals who want to be part of this change in UFCW to be able to show up at the convention in April.

Recently, the union-busting firm IRI Consultants caught notice of our worker-led attempts for more aggressive worker-led organizing.

To market their services, they wrote a blog post about attempts to strengthen the UFCW. They say that the UFCW Executive Board has been “put on notice” that members expect more. They then proceeded to market their services to fight more aggressive unionization pushes.

The UFCW is 1.1 million members strong. That's a huge amount of POTENTIAL member power. Some call UFCW the Sleeping Giant: it's big but isn't flexing its power for members.

We want the International President to have and use the union’s big power to take on employers. Because member employers are giants, too, these days!