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HOW UNIONS CAN PROTECT IMMIGRANTS  
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Patrick Iber, Natasha Lewis
May 8, 2025
Dissent Magazine
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_ An interview with Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000. _

A May Day immigrant rights rally in Union Square in New York City in
2010, Tony Savino/Corbis via Getty Images

 

_In February, the labor reporter Luis Feliz Leon published an essay
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the _n+1_ website on unions’ varying responses to Trump. We were
intrigued by his mention of a members’ meeting organized by Faye
Guenther, president of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local
3000, to discuss immigration and how the union could prepare for the
new administration’s deportation plans. We spoke to Faye on February
28 about how she confronts divisions within her membership, and how
unions can protect their immigrant members. Since then several union
members have been detained—including former UAW member Mahmoud
Khalil, Lewelyn Dixon and Rümeysa Öztürk of SEIU, and Alfredo
Juárez of Familias Unidas por la Justicia—which only underscores
the importance of this discussion._

PATRICK IBER: You’re in daily contact with people whose experiences
are shaped by changes in the immigration regime, whether they’re
immigrants or not. Luis Feliz Leon reported that you had a meeting
about immigration with United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)
members. What did you hear from workers?

FAYE GUENTHER: We’ve been doing scenario planning since April of
last year, when we thought Donald Trump was going to win. We focused
on the most likely threat, which was deportations.

We’ve been talking with our members for a long time about why unity
has to be maintained when we’re protecting everybody at work. And
we’ve been doing a ton of know your rights work: “Employers do not
have to let ICE agents in without a warrant; here’s how to check a
warrant.” And we were trying to negotiate that training into all of
our contracts prior to Trump taking office. Because people have more
rights than they think.

Employers have rights also. Employers do not have to scare the shit
out of workers. They do not have to tell people that they could be
fired. They don’t have to do anything. And employers do not want to
lose their workforce. Kids do not want to lose their family members.
I’ve seen kids who haven’t been picked up from day care. You need
to have a plan for the worst-case scenario.

IBER: How has the membership responded?

GUENTHER: We’ve been talking and trying to build unity and
solidarity between workers for a long time. For example, we took a
strong stance on wearing masks and being vaccinated; if coworkers felt
safer with people wearing masks, people needed to wear masks. That’s
our duty to each other. There are some folks who don’t agree. But we
work hard to build consensus, and if we can’t build consensus, we
vote using majority rule.

IBER: There are big debates about whether a more homogeneous working
class is easier to organize. And it seems to me that whatever debate
they’re having about this in Denmark doesn’t apply to the United
States. Our working class is diverse, and it always will be. Even if
the Trump administration creates a terrible environment for recent
immigrants, that’s not going to change. What message do you have to
union leaders who might not be taking the same approach that you’re
taking?

GUENTHER: Right now, there’s so much isolation in our society that
the only place you’re interacting with people is at work. The
workplace is where people care about each other, talk to each other,
and of course disagree with each other. I think it’s a bunch of
bullshit that people can’t, or think that they can’t, build unity
among workers. Workers already care about each other. That’s just
the natural way humans behave. White workers will stand with a worker
who they know and who is going to get picked up by ICE and ripped away
from their family. I’ve watched people stand together.

UFCW has the youngest membership of any union in the country. It’s
majority women, because we work in grocery stores and healthcare
facilities. And a big chunk of our workforce is people of color. When
you have a predominantly white male workforce, then maybe you’re not
getting exposed to the true stories of other people’s lives, and it
might be harder to understand what somebody else is going through. But
I think workplaces that are integrated, where you meet people from all
walks of life, are super vibrant and a place where learning happens. I
represent workers all across Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, and I’ve
found rural and urban workers face the same things: the housing
crisis, low wages, and shitty bosses.

NATASHA LEWIS: When there is disagreement, how does that process
work? What questions are you asking?

GUENTHER: I’m a certified mediator, which I think has been helpful.
We try to get to the heart of the matter and put how people really
feel on the table. Then—even if there are emotions—we take a
caucus. We go for a walk. We have people talk it through one-on-one or
in groups. Sometimes people get really pissed off and decide they
don’t want to be on the bargaining team anymore. But we have
guidelines when we’re trying to reach consensus that we all sign off
on, so there are expectations about how we treat each other. It sounds
a little corporate, and it is, but we’ve put our staff through
something called Radical Candor, which is about trying to talk to
people directly. We do a lot of education with our staff around
communicating, listening, and being okay with disagreement. If we’re
winning, it’s going to feel very chaotic, but our member-leaders
have the tools they need to fight fair.

LEWIS: How has the debate about immigration changed among workers
since you joined the labor movement? Is there an example you can think
of when you’ve seen a worker change their mind?

GUENTHER: There’s always been a problem with racism and
anti-immigrant rhetoric, but I felt like we were making advances in
building a multiracial, multi-generational, multi-gendered front. Now
we have slipped back quite a bit. And many labor leaders are afraid. I
went to the People’s March in D.C. [on January 18], and I thought I
was going to see all my labor friends, but nobody was there. We’re
headed toward a fascist or conservative period of time, and I’m
hoping that we can at least stop the fascist part.

When I meet Republican members—and all my family are Republican—I
keep listening and I keep talking and I keep having conversations. And
people do sometimes say: “You know what? You changed my mind.” Or,
“I hear what you’re saying.” Or, “You treated me with respect,
even though I completely disagree with you and you disagree with
me.” I think it requires constant listening to see if there’s
something that can bind us together. I try to appeal to people’s
humanity. I think it’s the only way forward.

IBER: What do you make of the Republican Party’s attempt to brand
itself as a more working-class party?

GUENTHER: I grew up in very rural eastern Oregon. I didn’t have
access to a television, so I didn’t see the news very much, but
there was radio. And Rush Limbaugh was on it, poisoning everybody’s
minds. I remember thinking, “My community is getting rotted out by
this.” The floor was falling out on logging, but they spun it and
blamed it on [efforts to protect] the spotted owl, which was so
bizarre to me.

I am so sick of billionaires having two parties and workers having
none. People say Biden was the most pro-labor president. Oh, really?
He’s the most pro-labor president, who chose to not step down so
that we could have a real primary—and now Trump is the president? No
thank you. I know there are good Democrats. And I think there are some
good Republicans. But overall, both parties are too owned by money to
be good advocates for working people.

In _Poverty, by America_ by Matthew Desmond, you can see the rates
of poverty don’t change whether the president is a Republican or a
Democrat. They just hold steady. And if there’s poverty, that pulls
down workers’ wages. There are dips, like during COVID-19, but the
parties are not solving problems that workers care about. So I am not
satisfied with either party.

LEWIS: Do you have advice for other people in the labor movement
about how to conquer some of the information that’s coming from the
Rush Limbaugh types?

GUENTHER: No matter how white a workforce is, there are people who
are affected or who are married to somebody who is affected. Stories
change hearts. One-on-one conversations change minds. You’re not
going to do a big town hall and get screamed at; that’s not going to
help you. Go and find your people who are empathetic to the position
and center them. Center their stories, and keep building out. You can
start with five people who will come with you to meetings and who will
push back and say, “Hey, well, that’s not how I experienced
that,” or, “My grandfather and my grandmother immigrated here.”
Every single person, whether they’re white or a person of color, has
a story about how their family immigrated here, and a lot of it was
through war and starvation. Our histories are actually quite similar.

We have a stagnant labor leadership who are afraid to talk to their
own members, who got their unions from their daddies, who are getting
their pension and their healthcare. They’re not movement builders.
We need to clean up the labor movement, just as much as we need to
clean up our political parties. We’re trying to reform the UFCW. If
you’ve been in office for more than ten years and you can’t figure
out how to talk to your members, it’s time to step aside. Let
somebody else lead.

LEWIS: How is the reform effort going?

GUENTHER: UFCW really doesn’t want to be the union that advocates
for low-wage workers and takes on corporate America, but someday that
will change. It’s either going to change soon or it’s going to
change later, but it’s going to change. Because low-wage workers,
grocery store workers, healthcare workers, frontline workers—they
know that they kept this country going during the pandemic, and they
are coming for what they deserve. They are going to expect more from
their unions.

_FAYE GUENTHER is president of UFCW Local 3000._

_PATRICK IBER and NATASHA LEWIS are co-editors of Dissent._

_DISSENT is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it
quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual
journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Dissent has
published articles by Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A.
Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin,
Czesław Miłosz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chinua
Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz, Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and
many others._

_Dissent is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. We publish the very
best in political argument, and take pride in cultivating the next
generation of labor journalists, cultural critics, and political
polemicists. If this work is important to you, please make a
tax-deductible donation today by clicking here
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* Labor
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* unions
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* Immigrants
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* immigrant rights
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* Solidarity
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* Working Class
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* Racism
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* anti-immigrant rhetoric
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