Creating activists. How do U.S. unions try to build membership-based campaigns for collective bargaining?

In the US, labor contracts are usually only enforceable on each particular worksite. At regular intervals, local unions bring to the negotiating table their members’ working conditions. Hence, negotiating labor contracts is both exceptional and usual in the local unions’ life. It stresses the relations between members and union staff. I focus on strategies developed by union staff in order to get members involved in negotiation campaigns. Indeed, most union staff convoke members only at the end of the collective bargaining round for a ratification vote of the new labor contract while few of them, decide to take other paths.

Based on a one-year ethnography of one of the largest UFCW local unions, this presentation deals with a major collective bargaining campaign this local had to cope with. The local union had to negotiate a new labor contract that covered half of its membership employed at various positions by supermarket chains belonging to the same European company. This multinational recently extended its power over UFCW by acquiring non-unionized supermarket chains where organizing campaigns remained difficult to win, primarily because of the workforce’s specificities. It allowed the company to be more reluctant to any conciliation in already organized workplaces. Facing this new resistance, the local re-organized the shop-steward structure, carried out a members’ engagement program and even hired some members within the staff.

I will pay attention to the organizational and ideological shift that happened in this local at the end of the year 2000, with new elected officials and union staff. I will show that members’ engagement program produced an ephemeral and staff-driven activism, strategically used during the campaign by some newly hired staff dedicated to this task. I will point out that staff-driven activism incrementally overshadowed the previous staff/members relationship inherited from social distance and years of servicing members.