On May 17, Jacobin magazine reposted an article from Labor Notes titled “UFCW Members Didn’t Get to Pick Their New President.” The article, written by Lisa Xu, addresses the anti-democratic manner in which the United Food and Commercial Workers’ new president, Milton Jones, was selected by the executive board behind the backs of 1.3 million rank-and-file members.
The article begins by noting that outgoing president Marc Perrone announced his retirement earlier this month and that “the same day, the union announced his successor, chosen in a special meeting of the international executive board.” Though “international presidents are supposed to be elected by delegates to the union’s convention,” the article explains, Jones is the fourth president in a row who has been chosen between conventions by the international executive board. The executive board consists of 55 leading bureaucrats, at least 36 of whom have salaries over $200,000 a year—paid by workers’ dues money.
The Jacobin/Labor Notes article stops short of criticizing incoming president Milton Jones, instead noting that he “is the union’s first African American president” and describing him as “a UFCW member for forty-five years” who started “as a teenage courtesy clerk at a Kroger grocery store in Alabama.”
Be that as it may, Jones left the shop floor long ago and ascended the ranks of the union’s massive bureaucracy. In 1990, he joined UFCW staff, winning promotion to a series of well-paid positions, including International Representative, Executive Assistant to the Director of Region 2, Executive Assistant to the International Bargaining Director, Director of Region 5, International Vice President, National Bargaining Director, Executive Vice President and International Secretary-Treasurer.
According to public data from the Labor Department, he has been paid $4,631,249 in workers’ dues money since 2000 alone. In the last five years, he has taken home between $243,000 and $272,000 per year. Unlike most rank-and-file UFCW members, Jones is now due for another big pay raise. Outgoing president Perrone made $335,000 in 2024, and hasn’t had a salary under $275,000/year since 2007. Perrone has accumulated a staggering $6,233,983 in less than 20 years in the UFCW bureaucracy. It would take a grocery store employee with a $40,000/year salary a full 155 years to make as much money as Perrone.
Lisa Xu’s article makes no reference to these figures and instead promotes another figure from the bureaucracy, Todd Crosby, as the “democratic” alternative. Xu writes that Crosby “called for the UFCW to invest more in organizing” and “put rank-and-file members on bargaining teams.” Crosby currently occupies the post of “Assistant to the President” and netted $178,147 in 2024. Crosby has made $2,996,761 since joining the UFCW apparatus in 2002.
Jacobin and Labor Notes speak not as opponents of the bureaucracy and representatives of the rank and file. They represent a faction of the bureaucracy who are concerned that the nakedly anti-democratic character of leadership selection may produce a rank-and-file rebellion that threatens the bureaucracy’s massive accumulation of wealth.
This is shown most nakedly by the article’s juxtaposition of the undemocratic union election process in the UFCW and the exemplary model of … the UAW!
Xu, a former local staffer for UAW Local 5118, writes that “reformers from the United Auto Workers” met with a reform faction of the UFCW to discuss how “one member, one vote had helped push” the UAW “in a more fighting direction.” This, Xu writes, is an example of “union democracy.”
Xu does not mention that the UAW bureaucracy did not decide to hold elections as an act of democratic good faith, it was forced to hold elections by a federal judge because of rampant corruption within the apparatus, which saw several past presidents convicted to jail terms. And the election the UAW ultimately held in 2022 was not a shining example of “union democracy,” it was conducted as an internal campaign within competing factions of the bureaucracy and involved massive voter suppression.
In fact, each statement Labor Notes/Jacobin’s article makes to attack the UFCW’s anti-democratic self-selection process for determining leadership applies equally to the present leadership of the UAW and president Shawn Fain.
Xu notes that in the UFCW, “most UFCW members were unaware they were about to get a new president.” The same applies to the UAW election in 2022. Out of 1.1 million eligible voters, only 104,776 cast ballots while roughly 1,000,000 did not. This turnout—9 percent—was the lowest turnout of any national union election in US history. The UAW apparatus relied on the Local Union Information System (“LUIS”) to provide notice of the election, a system that was historically used only for communication between national and local officials, in an attempt to prevent workers from learning that an election was taking place.
According to a survey conducted by rank-and-file socialist candidate Will Lehman, vast majorities of workers never received notice that an election was taking place either via email, phone, workplace poster or physical mailer.
According to an audit of local social media pages, only 7.2 percent of locals advertised the election on their website and only 7.7 percent made any request that members update their addresses to receive a ballot. Only 11.5 percent of locals made any reference to the election on public local Facebook pages, and only 8.1 percent made any reference to updating addresses.
In the article by Xu, Jacobin and Labor Notes refer to the fact that two UFCW “activists” filed a lawsuit in 2024 asserting that the UFCW’s election process violates the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. The lawsuit argues that many UFCW locals “provide only the barest reference, often buried in small print in union magazines, not calculated to make members aware that such elections are being held or that they have the right to nominate themselves or others as delegated.”
The lawsuit appears significant, but this reference makes it all the more revealing that neither Jacobin nor Labor Notes reported once on the multiple lawsuits brought by Lehman challenging similar disenfranchisement efforts by the UAW bureaucracy, of which Jacobin and Labor Notes form a critical component. Both publications routinely cheerlead Fain and his faction of the UAW bureaucracy, which came to power through the fraudulent 2022 election.
Neither publication mentioned the fact that Lehman defeated the Biden administration’s Labor Department in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in 2024, when a federal judge deemed that the Department’s effort to dismiss Lehman’s complaint on timeliness grounds was “irrational” and “arbitrary and capricious.” The court ordered the Labor Department to address the merits of Lehman’s arguments about massive voter suppression. In the interim months, the Labor Department has simply refused to abide by the Court’s order.
Jacobin and Labor Notes’ effort to prop-up one bureaucratic apparatus (UAW) by criticizing another (UFCW) has led them into an absurd position. The rank-and-file strategy advocated by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is of a totally different character than the bureaucratic infighting of the pseudo-left. In contrast to dead-end efforts to “reform” the bureaucracy, it is necessary instead to abolish the bureaucracy and transfer power to the rank-and-file workers on the shop floor, both in the UFCW, UAW and beyond.