In workplaces and communities big and small across the country, the United Food and Commercial Workers is Canada's leading and most progressive union. Our UFCW Canada family stands strong together always, with more than 250,000 members coast to coast.
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Clifford Evans was working in a grocery store in his hometown of Guelph, Ontario in 1957 when he was recruited as a full-time organizer by the Retail Clerks International Union. He was then 19 years old. The union had 42 members in Ontario south of Thunder Bay and only 5,000 members in all of Canada, making it one of the smallest national affiliates of the Canadian Labour Congress.
Born in Toronto in 1902, Fred Dowling was a star semi-pro baseball player as a young man. No one could have then guessed that the crowd-pleasing second baseman would become one of the giants of the Canadian industrial union movement. In 1935, with baseball behind him, Fred moved to Chicago and found work in the hide cellar of giant meatpacker Armour Corp. where, as he said years later, “I learned what it's like to work in hell.” The conditions in the packinghouses and the human misery of the Great Depression turned Fred into a lifelong advocate for trade unions and democratic socialism.
Back in Toronto in 1937, Fred became involved with the CCF and the fledgling Canadian CIO union movement. As a $25/week CIO staff member, he worked on the United Auto Workers' epic organizing campaign at General Motors in Oshawa and several successful United Rubberworkers campaigns. In 1941, he was assigned to the near-dormant Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee and quickly spurred meat plant organizing from coast to coast. When the United Packinghouse Workers of America was founded in Chicago in 1943, Fred Dowling was unanimously elected Canadian Director, a position he held until his retirement in 1972, even after the UPWA merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America in 1968.
During World War II, Dowling brilliantly maneuvered the Federal government and the "Big Three" Canadian meatpacking companies – Canada Packers, Swift Canadian and Burns Meats – into establishing a National Master Agreement system that gave unprecedented bargaining power to the union. When the federal government turned jurisdiction for labour relations back to the provinces following the war, Fred engineered a dramatic nation-wide packinghouse strike in 1947 that secured the master agreement system and turned the young union into one of the most militant in Canadian labour history. His organizing skills then turned to other sectors of the food processing industry: canning, poultry, dairy and others. In the late 1960s, Dowling launched what would become the massively successful organizing of the Atlantic fishery industry.
Fred Dowling devoted a great deal of his time and passion to the CCF and was a friend and close advisor to J.M. Coldwell, Tommy Douglas, Stanley Knowles and David Lewis. He was a key figure in the founding of the New Democratic Party in 1961 and was elected its first labour vice-president.
In his last interview a few weeks before his death in 1982, Fred Dowling summed up his advice to those who would carry on the work of him and other union pioneers: “As long as there is one worker who is exploited or mistreated, our work is not complete.”
2000 - UFCW Canada establishes the Young-Workers Internship Program, or YIP, which has since become the Canadian labour movement’s premier leadership development program for young workers.
2000 - Walmart workers in Jacksonville, Texas, make history by becoming the first Walmart employees to exercise their right to join a union.
2000 - Perdue chicken catchers join the UFCW to demand a voice on the job and a right to join a union.
2001 - Joseph T. Hansen elected President of Union Network International (UNI), an International labor organization representing 15 million workers, in 900 unions, in more than 100 countries.
2002 - Agriculture Workers Support Centre established in Leamington. Since then, nine more centres and mobiles centres set-up across Canada to assist and organize agriculture workers.
2003 - More than 70,000 food retail members across California forced on strike to protect healthcare benefits.
2004 – Meatpacking workers at Lakeside Packers in Brooks, Alberta, one of Canada’s largest beef processing facilities, win a hard-fought organizing campaign and become members of UFCW Local 401.
2004 - Joseph T. Hansen elected UFCW International President.
2006 - Agriculture workers in Ontario finally granted the protections of the Occupational Health and Safety Act as a direct result of UFCW Canada lobbying and campaign efforts.
2006 - Wayne E. Hanley voted UFCW Canada National Director.
2007 - UFCW Canada launches webCampus, the union’s award-winning, online education resource.
2007 - UFCW Canada establishes the Human Right, Equity & Diversity Department (HRED) to help lead the union’s diversification and inclusion efforts.
2008 - UFCW Canada offices of National Director and National Council President are combined to create the office of UFCW Canada National President. Wayne E. Hanley serves as the union’s first National President.
2008 - Walmart workers in Weyburn, Saskatchewan, certified as members of UFCW Local 1400.
2012 - UFCW Canada National President Wayne E. Hanley nominates Thomas Mulcair for federal Leader of the NDP.
2013 - Paul R. Meinema voted UFCW Canada National President.
2014 - Walmart is found guilty by the Supreme Court of Canada for violating its employees’ rights. Walmart abruptly closed its store Jonquiere, Quebec after workers there voted to join the UFCW.
2014 - Anthony “Marc” Perrone elected UFCW International President.
2015 - The UFCW Canada National Defence Fund (NDF) membership more than doubles in size as large retail memberships, from Loblaws in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario, join the strike and lockout fund.
2017 - Agriculture workers gain right to join the union in Alberta, after Rachel Notley’s NDP government expands the province's labour relations act to include farm workers.
2017 - UFCW Canada National Convention unanimously passes resolution to reform composition of the UFCW Canada National Council to ensure gender equity.
2018 – The “Fight for $15 & Fairness” campaign – supported by labour unions across the country, including UFCW – achieves its first victory in Canada, as Alberta becomes the first Canadian province to enact a $15 an hour minimum wage.
2018 – Kim Novak becomes the first woman president of UFCW Canada Local 1518.
2018 – After years of advocacy from UFCW Canada and the Agriculture Workers Alliance (AWA), as well as a series of town hall meetings hosted by UFCW and the AWA, the federal government agrees to provide one-year open work permits for migrant and temporary foreign workers who have experienced abuse from their employer.
2019 – Years of activism pay off after UFCW helps achieve Canada’s first-ever national food policy, which includes commitments to create a Canadian Food Policy Advisory Council, promote Canadian-made food products, and provide new resources for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA).
2019 – UFCW helps a Mexican farm worker in Quebec become the first-ever migrant worker to receive an open work permit in Canada. The permit was granted to the worker after he experienced abuse from his employer while working at an onion farm.
2019 – UFCW Canada launches a constitutional challenge to the Ontario government’s exclusion of cannabis production workers from the Labour Relations Act. The union argues that Ontario’s exclusion of cannabis production workers from the right to unionize violates Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
2019 – A major victory for ride hailing drivers is achieved when UFCW 1518 enters mediation with Lyft and Uber at the B.C. Labour Relations Board.
2020 – During the COVID-19 pandemic, UFCW Canada fought for its members on the frontlines advocating for the health, safety and economic well-being of workers.
2020 – Federal goverment launches the Agri-Food Pilot in direct response to UFCW Canada's political action and legislative efforts.The pilot helps provide opportunities for experience workers in agricultural and food industries to achieve permanent residency in Canada.
2022 – UFCW Canada and Uber Canada sign national agreement that provides over 100,000 workers on the Uber platform access to representation.
2024 – Shawn Haggerty elected UFCW Canada National President.
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United Food and Commercial Workers Union
Canada's private sector union