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United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) president Marc Perrone announced his retirement May 13. The same day, the union announced his successor, chosen in a special meeting of the international executive board: Milton Jones, previously international secretary-treasurer.
Jones has been a UFCW member for forty-five years, starting as a teenage courtesy clerk at a Kroger grocery store in Alabama. He is the union’s first African American president. The executive board narrowly elected him over Mark Lauritsen, head of the meatpacking and food processing division.
UFCW has 1.3 million members in the United States and Canada, mainly in grocery and meatpacking. International presidents are supposed to be elected by delegates to the union’s conventions, which occur every five years.
But this makes four presidents in a row who were first chosen by its international executive board between conventions, following their predecessors’ retirements. Perrone, for instance, was appointed by the board in 2014, then formally elected at the 2018 convention, where he ran unopposed.
“It’s an unfortunate reality that the UFCW has created a long-lasting legacy of accumulating power and holding onto it in a small group of people,” said Eric Marcuz, a Safeway worker and UFCW Local 8 member in Northern California. “They’ve really doubled down on it over time.”
Most UFCW members were unaware they were about to get a new president. While several candidates jockeyed for votes behind the scenes, including Jones and Lauritsen, the UFCW reform organization Essential Workers for Democracy (EW4D) provided the only public alert of Perrone’s impending retirement.
Only one candidate, Todd Crosby, the former international organizing director, announced publicly that he was running. Crosby is a former president of Local 21, which became part of Local 3000, the UFCW’s largest local.
Crosby is now on staff with Local 3000. He has been a key figure in the successful fight against a Kroger-Albertsons merger and in ongoing coordinated grocery bargaining on the West Coast.
Crosby was the only candidate to attend EW4D’s presidential candidate forum on May 12, on the eve of the board meeting to choose Perrone’s replacement. (EW4D asked the UFCW election chair to invite others.) He called for the UFCW to invest more in new organizing, put rank-and-file members on bargaining teams, and coordinate national bargaining with common employers.
Perrone presided over a doubling of the UFCW’s assets, from $199 million in 2014 to $521 million in 2022. EW4D argues these resources should be spent on union activities, rather than continuing to accumulate.
EW4D has been campaigning for direct elections by the membership — instead of elections by convention delegates — otherwise known as “one member, one vote.”
Marcuz chaired a May 7 call hosted by EW4D where reformers from the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters spoke about how one member, one vote had helped push their own unions in a more fighting direction.
One purpose of the call, Marcuz said, was to “shine a light on what it’s like in other places.”
“A lot of people in the UFCW don’t have any idea what the process is,” he said. “It’s just been invisible to us.”
EW4D is also pushing to reform the way that convention delegates are chosen. Two activists filed a lawsuit last year alleging that the current methods violate members’ rights under the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. The lawsuit seeks to force the union to proportionally allocate delegates across locals, ensure that locals hold delegate elections, and get rid of the automatic appointment of officers as delegates.
The next UFCW convention is in 2028.
Great Job Lisa Xu & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
