WASHINGTON – Essential Workers For Democracy (EW4D) is launching a campaign to bring one-member-one-vote elections—among other reforms—to one of the nation’s largest unions, the United Food and Commercial Workers.
The immediate catalyst for their meeting in early May via Zoom was the expected retirement, midway through his term, of current President Marc Perrone, and a meeting, scheduled for May 13-14, by the union’s 55-person Executive Board, to approve his successor. The board votes behind closed doors, and ballots are cast openly. So if there is a contested race for the top job, the winner knows the identities of backers and foes and can act accordingly afterwards.
The winner, whoever it is, would then stand for a full 5-year term at the next UFCW convention in 2028. If past is prologue, the successor would be unopposed. Essential Workers For Democracy wants to break that pattern.
On its website, UFCW declares it is democratic: “UFCW’s leadership is democratically elected by its members. Every five years, representatives from UFCW local unions… come together at UFCW’s convention to debate issues, make amendments to the international constitution, and elect officers. Each eligible local union sends delegates to speak and vote on behalf of their local’s members.”
The reality for the top job is different, EW4D says. That board-pick-followed-by-later-ratification pattern has occurred for every UFCW president since the million-plus member union was created through a 1979 merger of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butchers Workmen with the Retail Clerks.
EW4D wants to follow the Auto Workers and Laborers, who both switched to one-worker, one-vote mail-in balloting. Just over a dozen other unions, including the News Guild and the Letter Carriers, also elect top officers by one-member-one-vote tallies.
After the UAW ousted its long-time “Administrative Caucus” leaders in favor of a reform slate headed by Shawn Fain, the union won vastly improved contracts—due to high member commitment and participation—from the Detroit automakers.
“One-member-one-vote can put power back into the hands of the members and give them the power to steer this ship,” one speaker said. “Then we can elect more militant leadership, organizing and striking when we want to, and ultimately winning better contracts.”
But most unions instead choose delegates to a national convention and those delegates, in turn, choose the top officers. The AFL-CIO does that, too. Democratizing the UFCW presidential election is only one part of a multiple-step process to democratize the entire union movement.
EWD’s ultimate goal is to democratize the convention and the board, too, where small locals are overrepresented. They also advocate competitive races for all locals by abolishing guaranteed winners.
Plans to recruit
And EW4D plans to recruit and run competitive slates, especially in larger locals, of rank-and-file members who it feels have been shut out of union decision-making—and who have suffered substandard contracts as a result.
It also wants to remove the current UFCW presidential veto of any local’s decision to strike. Right now, regional VPs can veto a local’s strike vote, but the local can appeal to the president, whose decision is final and unappealable.
“Participation in our union is not really encouraged by our leadership,” explained Eric Marouz, a Northern California member. “We have people” in both national and local leadership “who are beholden to the people” who select them, primarily local union presidents and paid staff.
Make the officers, national and local, accountable to the rank and file, EW4D believes, and participation—and agitation for better contracts—will go way up. And so will success.
Right now, lack of participation is a big part of the democratization problem, speakers explained. The UFCW constitution currently reserves a minimum of two convention seats for any local, regardless of size, and mandates that the local president and a top local staffer get two seats automatically.
In essence, that means there is no popular voting for convention delegates at locals with up to 1,000 members. Larger ones—such as the largest, Local 3000 in the Pacific Northwest, which has 50,000 members—have more seats, but not in proportion to their size. A local with 40,000 members gets 28 seats, for example, and one with 55,000 gets 30.
The group admitted Perrone built up UFCW’s assets, from $199 million when he took office 11 years ago to $514 million now. But with a hand-picked board dominated by delegations with high ratios of professional staffers, who have an interest in their pay and pensions, not in investing in strike pay, the money sits in Wall Street investment funds, Marouz explained.
And that takes away labor’s ultimate weapon: The possibility of a strike at bosses’ vulnerabilities, just as the Auto Workers successfully used to win large pay increases, an end to two-tier wage systems, restoration of cost of living increases and other benefits from the three Detroit automakers in 2023.
“What would you rather do with half a billion dollars? That’s what we asked people. They said ‘strike more and organize more,’” Marouz explained. Instead, Perrone “boasted at the 2023 convention that the pension fund for the union’s employees”—the paid staffers—“was fully funded.”
The first step the group contemplates is to craft constitutional amendments to make convention delegations more proportional to representation. It currently has a suit pending in federal court to try to force the U.S. Labor Department to invoke the LMRDA—the GOP-passed Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959, which mandates more union democracy and transparency—to force that change.
Failing that, EW4D is recruiting candidates to run in the larger locals on a reform pledge, including both the constitutional changes and the one-member-one-vote elections.
All this, organizers admitted, will take time. The amendments may not come up until 2028—unless enough dissident board members are elected in the interim to push them through. Ditto the one-person-one-vote plan. EW4D actually began its push for union reform at the last convention, in 2023. But it was smaller then.
Todd Crosby, former president of UFCW 3000 and international organizing director, is in the race to be elected as Perrone’s replacement of the international union later this week. Crosby played an influential role in organizing the union’s opposition to the recent failed merger between Kroger and Albertsons and was at the bargaining table in Colorado and Southern California.
Whether or not he will win is unclear. But in a conversation with People’s World, Crosby said that he hopes his campaign “will give voice to the growing movement of grocery workers and UFCW members calling for more investment in organizing new unions, coordinated bargaining, and our ability to strike these corporate giants on scale.”
Cameron Harrison contributed material for this story.
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