Congratulations to Spokane Graduates of the WeTrain's Washington Meatcutter Apprenticeship Program
/Big congratulations to the inaugural graduating class of the WeTrain Washington Spokane Meatcutter Apprenticeship Program!
Read MoreWith ULPs on the horizon and a strike authorization in hand, we bargained late into the night two days this week. While some progress was made, the hospital is still short of meeting our priorities and continues to push their takeaways. We will not let that happen! Stay prepared and join us for all the upcoming Strike preparation meetings via ZOOM to learn more about the next steps in your fight for a best contract.
Our collective actions over the last two weeks have paid off in this bargaining session, and we are encouraged by the results! Management arrived prepared to engage and met with our team early in the day, replying to several outstanding proposals. Throughout the course of the day, we reached sixteen tentative agreements. One of these was a major breakthrough in our economic proposals – agreeing to the definitions of full time and part time employees. Thank you to our Contract Action Team members who pulled a lot of information to support the need for these definitions.
The union met with LabCorp on Wednesday, October 28, and once again received unacceptable, disrespectful proposals. LabCorp offers minimal, below-market wage increases, resists giving reasonable notice of outsourcing, and wants to strip away our rights and gain total power to change your health insurance whenever it chooses. The company blames upcoming Medicare reimbursement cuts for refusing to move closer to our proposals, but we are skeptical: LabCorp is thriving financially, its stock price is rising, and CEO Adam Schechter received $18,399,913 in compensation last year.
Grocery executives are working to grab every penny from their workers and members of our communities. Every contract negotiation is an opportunity to fight for what we deserve and work to steer the grocery industry back on track, to focus on what matters: delivering quality customer service and great products to feed our neighbors.
In our last contract negotiations, our union won the largest wage increases that we’ve seen, secured a transition to the stable our union health plan through the UFCW Spokane healthcare Trust, and ensured funding to keep our pension plan dependable for retirement. Our NE Oregon contracts recently expired, and our union is prioritizing a new contract that builds upon our previous wins.
After four long days of bargaining with the Employer and countless hours of preparation, our Bargaining Team reached a Tentative Agreement (TA) that we are excited to bring back to our members!
While our initial bargaining sessions were largely positive and relatively low stakes, we now have reached the meat and potato economic proposals that our unit cares about most. This is often the most challenging stage of bargaining – especially when bargaining a first contract. An example from today: in response to our extensively researched wage proposal, the company stated "we don't want to change how we do things" without further discussion.
As 2,500 UFCW 3000 members at MultiCare continue preparations for contract bargaining to begin early next year, there are several upcoming opportunities to gather, discuss and contribute. First off, a big thanks to all who completed the bargaining surveys during August and September. That information will be crucial in our assessing priorities before bargaining.
After holding nomination votes for the Labor Management Advisory Committee (LMAC) from September 21–25, 2026, and then holding nominee votes for Ballard, Central District, and Issaquah on October 21, 2026, we are happy to announce your committee members!
This agreement comes after more than six months of bargaining, an informational picket, federal mediation, a strike pledge campaign, and a strike authorization vote that showed CommonSpirit members were ready to fight for a better contract
After more than a month since our last session, our Union Bargaining Team; Alyssa and Oliver were able to reconvene with the employer on October 19 to receive their economic counter proposal.
Join us via Zoom on Tuesday, October 20, at 6:30 PM to learn more about the tentative agreement reached between our Union Bargaining Team and CommonSpirit.
“At a time when workers are struggling to keep up with sky-high prices for groceries, housing, health care, and other basic necessities, we cannot afford to give a tax cut to the wealthiest people in our state,” said Sam Dancy, UFCW 3000 Executive Board Vice President and Grocery Bargaining Team Member
Our member-led Bargaining Team met with representative from Puzzle Break to lay the foundation for the negotiations of our first union contract. We discussed guidelines around how proposals will be passed, Bargaining Team availability and our desire to have consistent and timely bargaining dates moving forward.
After months of difficult negotiations and a powerful show of solidarity, we have reached a tentative agreement on a new contract! Thanks to our collective strength, we secured significant improvements, including:
Please join us in person at the UFCW 3000 Des Moines office for Contract Action Team meetings on the following dates. We will be meeting in person at the union office, but for those who cannot join in person there will be an online option. During these meetings, will be sharing updates as well as creating picket signs for an upcoming info picket.
After months of difficult negotiations, a powerful informational picket, and an overwhelming strike authorization vote, our Union Bargaining Team fought late into the night on October 8 and reached a tentative agreement on a new contract!
The Nominations are in, now it’s time to vote for who will represent you and your coworkers from Ballard, Central District, and Issaquah PCCs on the newly formed PCC Labor Management Advisory Committee (LMAC). Secure online voting will take place Wednesday, October 21 from 8am to 8pm. Every PCC store elects one LMAC representative, you may only vote on a nominee from your own store.
Following a series of highly attended vote meetings on Monday, October 5, union technical workers at St. Joseph Medical Center voted nearly unanimously to:
Reject CommonSpirit’s subpar contract offer
Authorize a STRIKE
“We set the stage and gave our comprehensive proposal letting the employer know that our priorities are to win wages that we deserve, improve our transportation benefits, win immigration protection language as well as ensuring the safety of our co-workers. We are eager to see what BDA’s response is on the 21. ” -Kota Owens, Bargaining Team Member
Big congratulations to the inaugural graduating class of the WeTrain Washington Spokane Meatcutter Apprenticeship Program!
Read MoreThe Seattle Meatcutters Apprenticeship was established as a union-sponsored apprenticeship school on May 17, 1946 to increase the skills, abilities, and knowledge of meatcutters, which in turn led to higher wages and benefits for these highly trained workers.
Read MoreAmber Wise is truly one of the busiest UFCW 3000 members we have featured here in our Member Stories. Amber is an apprentice meatcutter at PCC Redmond, a mother of two children with her husband Daniel, is serving on the UFCW 3000 Racial Justice Advisory Board and on our Climate Justice Advisory Board, and to top it all off, she is running for public office…
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How can your union further your career? What is a union apprenticeship? What's our union doing to create more high-paying and safer jobs in our industries? Michaela talks to fellow UFCW 3000 member Indy about his experience with the union meat cutting apprenticeship program, and then talks to Evan and Andy about the apprenticeship and the new WeTrain workforce development organization.
UFCW 3000 union shop steward Michaela is always ready to answer fellow members’ questions about their union. She’s also a devoted murder podcast listener. Put those interests together, and she decided to start a union podcast to get all her coworkers’ questions and her own questions answered, and to meet as many people as possible who could share what it means to be a part of UFCW 3000. (No murder on this podcast, only solidarity!)
*The information shared on this podcast is offered by rank and file union member leaders of UFCW 3000. There may be inaccuracies or misstatements shared, as members will be speaking from the lenses of their perspectives and life experiences. While members are doing their best to share good information, we can make no claims to 100% accuracy and this podcast should not be construed as legal advice.
Meet Indy Mendoza, who works as a meatcutting apprentice at PCC Community Markets. Indy has completed his first year of his apprenticeship and loves working at PCC where he has worked since 2020. Prior to that, he worked as a chef in the restaurant industry. When the pandemic hit, he decided he wanted something more stable than restaurant work could provide…
Read MoreMarc Tabisula started with QFC in 2022, as Meat Service Counter Clerk. He attended the Meat Cutter Pre-Apprenticeship Program and credits it for getting him a meat apprenticeship with QFC. The Pre-Apprenticeship Program helps interested workers find out what it means to have a career as a meat cutter and gives them the knowledge that employers are looking for when hiring apprentices…
Read MoreWe are the Union. The members of UFCW 3000 are over 50,000 members working in grocery, retail, health care, meat packing, cannabis, & other industries across Washington state, north-east Oregon, and northern Idaho. UFCW 3000 is a chartered member of UFCW International with over 1.4 million workers in North America.
To build a powerful Union that fights for economic, political and social justice in our workplaces and in our communities.
Correcting the Record: Decades after Organizing Her Own Unit, Leslie Ball Is Still Fighting for Her Coworkers
Leslie Ball, a certified surgical technologist at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma and a longtime UFCW 3000 Union Steward, has spent decades standing up for herself and her coworkers.
Her fight for better working conditions began in the late 1990s, when she received a 30-cent wage increase, which ended up only being a five-cent raise after her employer reduced her shift differential by a quarter. With years of experience and a deep understanding of the value surgical techs bring to the table, she knew a nickel wasn’t going to cut it. So she and a coworker, Gail Miller, started organizing their colleagues at St. Joe's despite warnings that previous organizing efforts had failed.
Within a year, they helped Radiology, Respiratory Therapy, Pharmacy, Physical Therapy, and other departments form the hospital’s first Technical Unit, which ratified its first contract in 1999.
Jenny C., a transporter at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, knows what it looks like when management hopes a problem will just go away.
Jenny has watched the facility's transport elevators malfunction for more than a year, filing report after report after each incident she witnessed. Supervisors did not appear to take these complaints seriously.