By Disillusioned Former Rep

I first became a union steward under UFCW in early 2022 after working at the store for about 8 years up to that point, in an initiative that I and several other comrades in our city had in getting more involved with the US labor movement as an initial attempt to hone our skills as organizers and to build working class power in the area. I contacted my union representative and we had a meeting in my store to talk about why I wanted to become a steward and when I was able to go to the union steward training. The steward training I went to was fairly standard, mostly going over the responsibilities of a union steward, how to file grievances, and community outreach that the UFCW did, along with a fairly lengthy segment on supporting Democratic Party candidates and voting in elections. Looking back it was very notable that they didn’t talk at all about how to involve regular working class people in the union process or how to keep them informed on union events.

When I went back to work at my Kroger store, I told everyone around me that I was the new union steward and that if they had any questions about the contract or union related activity they could just ask me. I also got into contact with the other union steward who was located in the deli department and we began talking about union steward duties. Our Kroger store, as one of the biggest in the country, was managed in a way that tried to minimize conflict as much as possible between management and workers. There wasn’t much to do beyond putting up new union posters when they were required to be put up. So I took it upon myself to engage with my fellow coworkers, asking many of them what they thought of the current contract and the union in general in an attempt to see what I could bring up to union leadership in order to improve the union to the average Kroger employee and have their voices heard. Many older coworkers who had been working at Kroger pre-2021 had expressed dissatisfaction with the current contract and the increased premiums for their union provided health insurance. They felt they had also received relatively poor pay increases, which was a big sticking point as well. A few also mentioned the undemocratic practices that had been employed by the union in trying to get people to sign the current contract, such as sending out mail urging people to vote for the contract without telling them what was actually in the contract to begin with.

The event that really changed my view of the union was when a coworker who worked in the clicklist department was asked to condition the store and he refused due to the heavy load in clicklist that day. For this he was immediately fired without having any warnings or write ups on his record to that point. The unjust firing made me want to take action to support him so I got into contact with the former associate and I started a campaign where I went around and got signatures from over 30 people in different departments in order to demand that he be reinstated. I made one copy of the petition for the union and one copy to present to the general manager of the store. I tried to work with the union and presented the petition to our union representative but the document was ignored and never used in any kind of meeting between the union and management. I followed up with the fired coworker and the union made such a feeble attempt at representing him, basically telling him that they could not and would not fight for him because what he did was considered “insubordination” and was in their view a legitimate fireable offense. This, to me, was a wake up call and it led me to lose faith in the union progressively as I realized that they were so spineless as to not be able to do anything for a worker who had been clearly unjustly fired, and were unwilling to work with me to mobilize my co-workers around the issue.

After this event, I began to slowly stop going to meetings and did doing more and more investigation and research into the union itself. I realized why the UFCW had a bad contract and why they never made an active effort to be in the workplace or get basic workers engaged with union activities; because the union itself was run by labor bureaucrats who make six figure salaries and have never worked in a Kroger store in their lives, or if they have it was many decades ago at this point. The union itself was never really present on the store floor beyond myself and the other steward. Union representation and communication was only ever active around election season, when union representatives would come out and urge store workers to vote in the local elections, or in the highly unusual case this year when they renegotiated with Kroger to vote on a 50 cent raise to “battle” the recent inflation that has been happening around the country.

To say that I was thoroughly demotivated by this point would be an understatement. I had felt like I wasted the better part of a year being a contract lawyer for a bureaucratic union and at that point didn’t feel confident enough or strong enough to start a campaign on my own, along with other issues happening in my life at the time. My time as a union steward was fairly short, only lasting about a year and a half but it gave me a new and more mature perspective on business and state unionism, how they work with governments and companies to suppress worker power, why they don’t represent the basic everyday workers that they collect dues from, and just how much of a parasitic force they really are.