By Isaac Soto
Due to several factors, including Local 99’s size and Arizona’s right-to-work status, our union faces serious challenges that cause much of its energy to be spent on sign-ups.
These conditions cause servicing and, consequently, our overall work environments to suffer - feeding into already high turnover and continued emphasis on sign-ups.
This challenge can be addressed by implementing contract enforcement workshops which will make our membership more knowledgeable on its’ contracts and more confident in enforcing them.
These workshops will strengthen the union’s shop floor presence and free up resources.
On December 12th, two coworkers and I attended UFCW Local 99's last quarterly membership meeting of 2023. After our Secretary-Treasurer Stan Chavira finished going through the meeting's agenda items, he opened the floor for questions. I raised my hand and asked: what would it take for Local 99 to host bi-monthly contract enforcement workshops here at the union hall? What do we (the members in attendance) think about this idea? The concept was well-received among members and staff alike. However, there were no firm commitments to the initiative - only mentions of steward training sessions the union held pre-Covid and its quarterly zone meetings, the latter of which occurred only once, early in the first half of my roughly two-and-a-half-year tenure as a shop steward.
Now, I will argue that meeting the moment and taking advantage of the new momentum in the labor movement today requires more and would still require more, even if we were already holding quarterly zone meetings consistently. We are in a situation where a set of compounding factors, beginning with our state's anti-working class right-to-work laws, put a perpetual squeeze on the resources of our union. To further complicate matters, the membership's understanding of its respective contracts is inconsistent at best and misinformed at worst, tending to disunify our ranks and weaken our bargaining position. Considering our prior experiences, there are credible concerns about the effectiveness of the ideas I will put forth to tackle these issues at the shop floor level. I intend to address these concerns and argue what I know to be a strong case that regular, centralized contract enforcement workshops will free up resources, unify membership, and strengthen the union overall.
Compounding Factors
The scourge of right-to-work (for less!) is well known to most in the pro-union orbit. For those unfamiliar, right-to-work is the result of fierce lobbying by powerful corporate interest groups, which gives states the option to enact laws wherein workers in a union shop are not required to join or pay dues but are still entitled to dues-funded representation and the fruit of the Collective Bargaining Agreements they work under. As a result, our union's business agents spend the bulk of their time on member sign-ups. If this wasn't challenging enough, they have to do so with bargaining units spread across the entirety of Arizona, plus parts of Utah and New Mexico. Not only does this wide geographic dispersal demand massive resources in the context of sign-ups, but perhaps even more so as it relates to servicing.
To grow and maintain the confidence of our members, it is crucial that each of their issues is addressed promptly and with care. When they don’t feel like that’s what's happening, in other words, when servicing suffers from resource strain, so do our shops' work environments. Inevitably, this reflects poorly on the union in the members' minds, and whether we agree or not, we cannot ignore objective conditions if we truly want progress. A bad work environment, which should not exist given the considerable provisions in our contract, ultimately leads to high turnover. Recent history suggests we should not take this for granted as essential to the sectors our union represents. This high turnover then creates the need for the further use of union resources on sign-ups, feeding the gnawing cycle of resource drain.
Introducing regular contract workshops would sharpen our membership's understanding of the contract, leading to more consistent policing of its provisions by members. If such a shift were to occur in our shops, not only would it cut down on the necessity of store visits for business agents, members now having the ammunition to nip problems and potential grievances in the bud, but in empowering the rank-and-file, it would fundamentally alter the environment on the shop floor. With such a profound change in culture, we can turn these union jobs into jobs workers want to stay at. By that same token, no longer will potential members be met by their coworkers with ambivalence about whether to join the union; for our newly empowered members, encouraging members to join will become a reflex.
The projected decrease in turnover and members' newfound ability and confidence to resolve potential contract disputes without a business agent present eliminate the need for continual emphasis on sign-ups. This shift creates a relatively self-sustaining revenue stream, freeing resources for servicing and, crucially, new organizing.