UFCW 3000’s Faye Guenther on Building Worker Power

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 3000 President Faye Guenther says union growth is not an accident. It is the result of mergers that built bargaining strength, disciplined organizing that prioritizes first contracts and a strike program designed to keep workers from being starved out when employers refuse to move.

In today’s interview on the America’s Work Force Union Podcast, Guenther laid out a strategy rooted in collective power, industry density and relentless follow-through.

• Faye Guenther said Local 3000’s growth to more than 50,000 members was driven by strategic mergers paired with heavy investment in organizing and strike capacity.
• Guenther said first contracts are the real test of union power and that workers must prepare early for employer efforts to stall, division tactics and the possibility of a strike.
• Guenther said their next major organizing frontier is large consolidated employers, with a focus on grocery density and the grocery footprint of major retail and tech companies.

A Local Built Across Industries and State Lines

UFCW Local 3000 is not a single-industry union. It is a regional labor institution spanning grocery, retail, health care, meatpacking and emerging sectors such as cannabis. The Local’s jurisdiction reaches across Washington state, northeast Oregon and northern Idaho, representing more than 50,000 workers.

On the America’s Work Force Union Podcast, Local 3000 President Faye Guenther described that scale as both a responsibility and a tool. The responsibility is to deliver real gains at the bargaining table and enforce contracts on the shop floor. The tool leverages density across industries and employers, enabling workers to bargain with more power than any single unit could muster on its own.

Guenther’s own story began far from the institutional world of labor. Raised by a single mother who followed seasonal work in rural Oregon, Guenther said her family moved where jobs were available. She described an upbringing shaped by field work, flagging work and the instability that comes with chasing wages across long distances.

Guenther said her mother’s first union experience came later through a flaggers’ union and that it changed the family’s baseline. Her family’s first access to health care and a pension came from that union membership, which is how she learned her first lesson about what collective bargaining can deliver for families who were previously living one emergency away from crisis.

From Farmworker Advocacy to Labor Strategy

A scholarship provided Guenther the opportunity to enter, along with the help of a teacher who recognized her academic drive. At Oregon State University, she said she became involved in advocacy programs focused on farmworker conditions.

She described participating in field visits that exposed the realities of low pay and harsh living conditions in agricultural labor camps. That experience, she said, became an entry point into the labor movement.

After graduation, Guenther said she worked as an organizer with SEIU, focusing on health care campaigns and organizing across the West Coast. She delayed law school because of cost, then enrolled once she had paid down earlier student loans, she said.

Guenther said she pursued law school to become a more effective advocate for workers, not to build a private practice. She studied labor law, business law and arbitration and became a certified mediator. The goal was to understand how corporate structures operate so workers can develop strategies that match the scale of modern employer power, she said.

Why Laws Follow People, Not the Other Way Around

Weak labor protections persist because political systems respond to money and organized power, Guenther explained.

The labor movement has spent enormous resources trying to change laws through elections, yet major reforms repeatedly stall, she said. This led her to conclude that worker power must be built first, and that legal change tends to follow when a movement becomes large enough to force the issue.

Guenther pointed to earlier eras of concentrated corporate power. When farmers and urban workers united against the monopolistic trusts of the time, their collective pressure helped drive antitrust action and structural change. In her view, the country is again in a period of wealth consolidation, and the labor movement must rebuild density and unity to respond.

Pandemic Organizing and the Power of Visible Fights

The pandemic period produced a surge in organizing because workers saw, in real time, the gap between public praise and workplace reality, Guenther said.

She described health care workers facing severe shortages of protective equipment, forcing the Local Union to fight for hazard pay and stronger protections. Those fights created momentum because workers who watched others take action began to believe they could do the same, she said.

Guenther described organizing as a practical antidote to hopelessness. Workers know they are being squeezed by rising costs and stagnant wages. The question is whether that pressure turns into division or into collective demands aimed at employers and systems that set the terms of work, she said.

First Contracts are the Real Organizing Test

Guenther said winning a union election is not the finish line. The real fight begins when workers negotiate their first contract.

Employers often stall, divide workers and use fear to weaken committees after an organizing win. Her approach, she said, is to set expectations early: workers do not have a union until they secure a first contract, and that may require strike preparation.

The goal of that first contract is not to solve every social crisis. It is to build a durable workplace infrastructure that workers can expand over time, Guenther said. A contract creates enforceable standards and a permanent mechanism for collective action, she added.

She also acknowledged that not every campaign wins on the first attempt. She cited examples where units withdrew petitions after facing intense pressure from large national employers. Her message was that setbacks do not end the story and that workers often need multiple rounds of organizing before they truly win.

Mergers, Organizing Investment and a Strike Fund Built for Staying Power

Guenther attributed Local 3000’s growth to a combination of mergers and deliberate reinvestment.

She described how health care and retail units, combined with grocery workers, built a stronger bargaining base. Subsequent mergers brought meat cutters into a unified structure with grocery clerks, reducing internal fragmentation at the bargaining table.

The payoff, Guenther argued, was the ability to fund organizing and strike readiness at scale. The Local maintains one of the largest organizing departments in the union’s orbit, and the Local’s strike fund has grown to roughly $33 million, she said.

The strike fund is built through a per-member monthly contribution and is paired with strike teams that prepare workers for walkouts, Guenther said. She emphasized that strike capacity is not only about money. It is about preventing employers from waiting out workers and about building leadership on the shop floor.

Grocery Density and the Next Organizing Targets

Guenther said the Local’s immediate strategic concern is maintaining and expanding union density in the grocery sector.

She said the drugstore sector has collapsed from high levels of union coverage to near-zero as major chains entered bankruptcy. She also described the decline of department store jobs in the region and tied it to shifts in retail power.

Her organizing focus, she said, includes nonunion grocery workers who want to join ahead of major bargaining cycles. She also pointed to large meatpacking targets and said the Local intends to expand organizing reach across Washington and into neighboring states.

A Merger Fight That Tested Labor’s Antitrust Muscle

Guenther also described UFCW Local 3000's efforts to oppose a proposed merger between two major grocery chains.

She said the union moved quickly to oppose the deal and rejected pressure to settle for side agreements. Her argument was that prior consolidation had already harmed workers and communities through store closures and bankruptcies.

The campaign involved lobbying state officials, building a public coalition and pursuing legal strategies that produced key financial disclosures, Guenther said. She credited state enforcement and federal action for ultimately blocking the merger in court.

Her broader point was that labor can win structural fights when it refuses to concede early and uses every available lever.

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