LaborForce Media | History of Unions Series | August 30, 2026
Walk into almost any grocery store in America and you will see the finished product.
Fresh meat wrapped behind glass. Produce stacked in neat rows. Prescriptions waiting behind the pharmacy counter. Shelves filled with food and household goods.
What you usually do not see is everything it took to get them there.
You do not see the worker standing on a meatpacking line hour after hour. You do not see the grocery clerk unloading pallets before sunrise. You do not see the pharmacy technician helping a worried customer understand whether a prescription is ready. You do not see the retail worker closing a store late at night and returning the next morning.
And you probably do not think about the generations of workers who fought to make many of those jobs safer, more stable, and better paid.
That is where the story of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union — UFCW — begins.
Today, UFCW represents about 1.2 million workers in the United States and Canada. Its members work in grocery and retail stores, pharmacies, healthcare and manufacturing facilities, food-processing plants, meatpacking facilities, cannabis businesses, distilleries, and other industries.
But UFCW itself did not exist until 1979.
Its history stretches much further back.
And part of that history begins in one of the harshest workplaces in industrial America.
Before UFCW, There Was the Meatpacking Floor
At the beginning of the 20th century, America’s meatpacking industry was enormous.
Chicago’s stockyards became a symbol of industrial production — thousands of animals moving through sprawling processing operations and thousands of workers performing difficult, repetitive, dangerous jobs.
In 1906, writer Upton Sinclair famously exposed conditions inside the meatpacking industry in The Jungle. The public reaction helped produce new federal food-safety laws.
But there was an important difference between protecting the food and protecting the workers.
Government action began addressing what happened to the meat.
Workers still had to fight for what happened to them.
Meatpacking employees began organizing because the risks were immediate: dangerous equipment, long hours, low wages, brutal production demands, and very little power for an individual employee to challenge the system.
One of the major organizations to emerge was the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America, chartered by the American Federation of Labor in 1897.
The early fights were difficult.
In 1904, approximately 50,000 union members participated in a national meatpacking strike. It ended in defeat. Many striking workers were blacklisted.
Another major strike in 1921 also failed, and five strikers were killed by police, according to UFCW’s historical account.
Those defeats matter.
Labor history is sometimes remembered only through victories. But many of the institutions workers eventually built came from people who lost first — and organized again anyway.
Workers Who Were Supposed to Be Divided
There is another part of the meatpacking story worth remembering.
Meatpacking plants employed immigrants from different parts of Europe, Black workers migrating into northern cities, skilled butchers, and lower-paid production workers.
Employers could benefit when those groups competed with each other.
Organizing required them to do something much harder: recognize that they had more in common as workers than the divisions separating them.
During the 1930s, Black, white, immigrant, skilled, and unskilled packinghouse workers increasingly organized together. In 1943, the United Packinghouse Workers of America, or UPWA, was formed.
The union became known not only for collective bargaining but also for its involvement in civil rights.
According to UFCW’s history, unionized packinghouse workers had equal-pay protections for Black workers written into contracts and were negotiating pay-equity provisions for women during the 1950s — years before those issues received widespread national attention.
That is an important piece of the UFCW story.
A union contract could do more than establish an hourly wage.
It could establish a principle:
People doing the same work should be treated with the same dignity.
Meanwhile, Another Fight Was Happening Behind the Counter
While meatpacking workers were organizing industrial plants, another group of workers faced a very different-looking workplace.
Retail.
In 1888, UFCW’s historical account says the average retail employee worked approximately 86 hours a week for $10, with no paid holidays, sick pay, pensions, or insurance.
Think about that for a moment.
An 86-hour workweek.
For the equivalent of six 14-hour days.
Retail workers began organizing too.
In 1890, the organization that would eventually become the Retail Clerks International Union was chartered by the American Federation of Labor. It started with workers from clothing, men’s furnishings, and shoe stores in Muskegon, Michigan, then spread into other states and Canada.
Their issues sound surprisingly familiar more than a century later:
Better wages.
Shorter hours.
Fair treatment.
Equal pay.
Respect.
The workplace looked very different from a slaughterhouse, but the underlying problem was similar.
One employee had very little leverage.
A group of employees speaking together had much more.
Two Different Worlds Move Toward One Union
For decades, the meat cutters and retail clerks developed along separate tracks.
The meatpacking movement also experienced mergers of its own. The United Packinghouse Workers and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters eventually came together, strengthening organized labor within the meat and food industries.
Then, in 1979, something much bigger happened.
The Retail Clerks International Union and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America merged.
The result was the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.
UFCW was born.
At first glance, grocery clerks and meatpacking workers might seem like an unusual combination.
But look closer.
They were part of the same system.
One worker produced the food.
Another processed it.
Another transported or stocked it.
Another sold it.
Another might eventually dispense medicine at a pharmacy located inside the same store.
UFCW was building a union around something Americans encounter virtually every day:
the enormous workforce behind the products we consume.
The Middle-Class Job That Did Not Happen by Accident
One of the most important lessons in labor history is that jobs are not automatically “good jobs.”
Industries do not simply decide, on their own, to create middle-class careers.
Workers often have to build those standards.
UFCW’s historical account says unionized meatpacking jobs during the 1960s and 1970s could provide wages, pensions, healthcare, and economic stability that allowed workers to buy homes, raise families, save for retirement, and send children to school. Meatpacking wages during that period were reported as roughly 14% to 18% higher than wages elsewhere in manufacturing.
That did not happen because meatpacking suddenly became easy work.
It happened because workers had bargaining power.
And then the industry changed.
When the Meatpacking Industry Moved
Beginning in the latter part of the 20th century, large meatpacking companies increasingly moved away from traditional urban stockyards.
Plants shifted closer to livestock-producing regions.
Technology changed.
Production lines became faster.
Companies consolidated.
And workers once again faced pressure.
UFCW describes an industry in which powerful companies increased line speeds, lowered labor costs, relocated facilities, and in some cases moved operations into areas where organizing was more difficult.
The workplace had modernized.
The fundamental debate had not.
How fast should employees be expected to work?
Who decides whether a production line is safe?
What happens when an employee gets injured?
Who has enough power to challenge a massive corporation?
Those questions are not relics of 1906.
They are still being asked.
The Workers Behind America’s Dinner Table
Today, UFCW says its members process a remarkable share of America’s food supply.
The union reports that more than 70% of the beef and 60% of the pork consumed in the United States is processed in meatpacking plants by UFCW members.
That means there is a good chance that something sitting on a family’s dinner table passed through the hands of a UFCW member.
And yet those workers are largely invisible to the consumer.
That is one reason this union’s history matters.
COVID-19 offered a powerful reminder of what “essential work” really means.
When much of society was told to stay home, grocery workers still reported to stores. Food-production workers still entered plants. Pharmacy employees still served customers. Healthcare workers still cared for patients.
The jobs people sometimes overlooked suddenly became impossible to ignore.
The pandemic did not make these workers essential.
It revealed that they always were.
From Grocery Stores to Pharmacies — and Beyond
The modern UFCW is far broader than its 1979 founders might have imagined.
Its members work in:
- Grocery stores
- Meatpacking and food processing
- Retail
- Pharmacies
- Healthcare
- Manufacturing
- Chemical facilities
- Distilleries and wineries
- Cannabis businesses
- Bookstores
The union describes booksellers as one of its fastest-growing organizing movements.
That evolution tells us something about unions themselves.
A union is not defined only by the industries it represented in the past.
It has to follow work as work changes.
A century ago, organizing might have meant workers walking out of a Chicago packinghouse.
Today it might mean employees at a bookstore, pharmacy, cannabis dispensary, grocery chain, or food-processing operation deciding that they want a voice in their workplace.
Different century.
Different workplace.
Very similar question:
What changes when workers negotiate together instead of one at a time?
Leadership That Started on the Shop Floor
The current leadership of UFCW offers another connection between the union’s past and present.
Milton Jones, elected UFCW International President in 2025, did not begin his career in a national union office.
He started as a courtesy clerk at Kroger in Florence, Alabama, joined the union in 1978, and later served as a shop steward and volunteer organizer before moving through the organization.
Today, UFCW’s elected international leadership includes Jones as president, Shawn Haggerty as international secretary-treasurer, and Stuart Appelbaum among its executive vice presidents.
There is something fitting about the president of a union representing grocery workers having started his own career carrying groceries and working inside a supermarket.
It reinforces one of the oldest traditions in organized labor:
Leadership can begin on the shop floor.
The Work We Notice Only When It Stops
There is an easy way to understand the importance of UFCW workers.
Imagine they all stopped working tomorrow.
Imagine the grocery stores without clerks.
The meatpacking plants without production workers.
The pharmacies without technicians and associates.
Food-processing plants without employees.
Healthcare facilities without caregivers.
Retail stores without workers.
Suddenly the invisible workforce would become extremely visible.
That is the paradox of essential work.
When it is performed every day, efficiently and reliably, society barely notices it.
When it disappears, everyone does.
The UFCW story is ultimately about making that invisible work visible — and making sure the people performing it have a voice.
Built by Union
The history of UFCW did not begin in 1979.
It began generations earlier with meat cutters, retail clerks, packinghouse workers, immigrants, Black workers, women, grocery employees, and countless others who looked at the conditions around them and decided they might have more power together than apart.
Some won.
Some lost.
Some went on strike and never got their jobs back.
Others negotiated contracts that helped turn physically demanding jobs into middle-class careers.
And each generation handed something to the next.
Today, 1.2 million UFCW members continue that story across the United States and Canada.
So the next time you walk down a grocery aisle, pick up a package of meat, stop at a retail counter, or collect a prescription, consider the workers standing behind that everyday experience.
Their labor is part of your life.
And their history is part of the American labor story.
Why LaborForce Media Is Telling These Stories
Built by Union is LaborForce Media’s continuing effort to document the people, organizations, struggles, and breakthroughs that shaped organized labor — and continue shaping the American workplace.
These histories belong not only to union members.
They belong to every generation learning what came before them and deciding what kind of workplace should come next.
Because understanding the future of work starts with understanding the people who built it.
Share this story with someone who has ever worked in retail, grocery, food production, meatpacking, healthcare, or pharmacy.
And follow Built by Union as LaborForce Media on Substack continues telling the stories behind America’s unions.
Sources
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, Our History
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, About UFCW
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, Who We Represent
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, Leadership
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, Milton Jones
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, historical timeline
Tags: Union History, Union Workers