By Nick Douglass
I started working at Kroger about a year ago and was excited to work a union job as a rank-and-filer. The contract stipulates that all new hires will have 30 minutes to meet with a union rep or steward to go over the contract and talk about the union. I made sure to communicate to my new union rep that I was fired up to help build the union however I could.
I attended my first union meeting about three months after I was hired and it was a serious wake up call. I work in a major metropolitan area and the meeting was a hotel conference room that was not easy to get to. When I arrived, I was disappointed to see that only two other workers were in attendance. There are several thousand members in my Local, yet union staff outnumbered membership by about 5 times.
When I spoke to my coworkers, it was clear that one of critical obstacles to increased meeting attendance was the location of the conference hall. My coworkers who owned a car weren’t convinced attendance was worth the gas and a difficult drive through the maze of highways and sketchy drivers. My coworkers without a car couldn’t attend even if they wanted to.
I started asking around if people would be more open to attending the meetings if we organized a carpool. The response was positive and so I communicated this information to my rep. My rep’s response was positive but no matter what I did, I couldn’t figure out how to turn “Ok that’s a good idea” into a serious plan of action.
New pressures from inflation and broadly felt frustration with our local’s healthcare plan meant increasing frustration among my coworkers. I worked hard to make the case that if we want to improve and strengthen our union, we have to turn frustrations into actions and communicate to our leadership how we are feeling and what our pressing needs are. The best place to do that, I said, was at the upcoming membership meeting.
We needed a plan to get ourselves to that meeting, but it was just impossible to get any motion from the staff or leadership. I decided we needed to adapt to the reality of leadership’s inaction and started reaching out to a few local labor supporters in my area. I asked them to help organize a volunteer carpool arrangement where any of my coworkers who could get themselves to our store would have a free ride to the meeting and back.
This plan ended up turning out five workers from my store alone. When we arrived, my coworkers and I represented about half of the membership in attendance. We also came with a clear understanding of what we felt was most important: our healthcare and inflation. These two points also resonated with the rest of the membership in attendance.
The meeting was not especially productive in terms of working out anything like a real plan of action; mostly it felt like the leadership was more interested in making excuses and minimizing our feelings. No one expected one meeting to transform the union but I was worried my coworkers would feel cynical about the meeting. I was happy to find out that all of them were more fired up to build the union after the meeting than before it.
We have another meeting coming up in about two months and hopefully we can get people out there again. We still aren’t sure how to finally get the leadership to work with us on building shop-floor organization and engaging membership in owning our union, but working together and with our community allies to show up to our meeting was an important first step of many more steps to follow.