Faye Guenther’s Push to Make UFCW 3000 into an Organizing Powerhouse

August 2, 2026

UFCW 3000 President Faye Guenther talks with a member at Town & Country Market Ballard.

Roots in Rural Oregon

Faye Guenther’s story begins far from the bargaining tables where she would eventually become one of the most powerful labor leaders in the Pacific Northwest. She was raised with her sister in rural Oregon by a single mother who made a living through a patchwork of odd jobs. Despite the hardship, she had little understanding of why her family lived how they did. “I didn’t understand the causes for poverty and inequality,” Guenther recalls. “This was the life I knew.”

Like so many Americans, her life changed through the power of education. After high school, she earned a scholarship to Oregon State University. She gained awareness around the structural inequities in our society and found herself increasingly interested in a life of activism.

At the time, the AFL‑CIO ran an Organizing Institute to train college students as union organizers. She was initially skeptical about the labor movement. She saw organized labor as outdated and disconnected from the needs of young workers. She decided to give it a shot, and it reshaped the course of her life.

Discovering the Power of Organizing

The work at the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute showed Guenther the transformative power of collective action. She was sent to Seattle to organize hospital workers around the time of the infamous WTO protests, and later became an organizer with SEIU Local 503 in Oregon. As she made her place in the labor movement, she reflected on her experience and saw the difference that having a union made in people’s lives.

Eventually, she enrolled in law school, imagining a future as a labor attorney. UFCW Local 21 (now UFCW 3000) hired her to run contract campaigns, and she discovered that in her heart, she would always be an organizer.

Instead of transitioning to legal work, she became involved in the union’s leadership. She was elected Recorder in 2014, Secretary‑Treasurer in 2015, and eventually the union’s President in 2019. She was now leading one of Washington State’s largest unions into a period of immense challenge.

The Pandemic, Strikes, and a Historic Merger

UFCW 3000 has been tested repeatedly in recent years. Soon after Guenther took over as president, the COVID-19 pandemic shook the world. The union’s primary membership — grocery, retail, and health care workers — risked their lives as essential workers during the depth of the crisis.

In 2022, Local 21 and Local 1439 merged to create UFCW 3000, representing more than 50,000 workers in grocery, health care, retail, cannabis, and other industries across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

Guenther’s influence on the union cannot be overstated. She has invested heavily in organizing new workers into the union. She also has not been afraid to strike. Over the past five years, Local 3000 members have carried out five major strikes in order to win fair contracts.

The union polls its membership often, and the message is clear: they want a union that bargains more aggressively for strong contracts. “They want us to be bolder,” Guenther says. “Our members want leaders who aren’t afraid to fight. They want a militant union.”

Her approach to organizing has, at times, put her in conflict with national UFCW leaders, but she remains unapologetic in her approach. Since taking over as president, UFCW 3000 has organized an average of 1,400 new workers every year. They have done this by investing heavily in training new organizers, even setting up an organizing apprenticeship.

A Collision Course with Amazon

Guenther is clear about the biggest challenge facing her members and the labor movement: unchecked corporate power at companies like Amazon.

Companies like Amazon have grown with virtually no check on their power by the hundreds of thousands of workers it employs. As a result, millions of workers who had once had a powerful voice in shaping working conditions have seen their bargaining power eroded.

Despite near-record interest in forming unions among Americans, she sees organized Labor as needing to do more to change the tide. She says to look no further than the percentage of workers belonging to a union.

“What the labor movement is doing isn’t working. We need to organize more aggressively,” she contends.

She sees the fight to organize companies like Amazon as the defining labor battle of this generation. She believes the future of the middle class — and the labor movement — depends on winning this fight.

Organize or Die: The Road Ahead

This year, Guenther and her leadership team won re-election to lead UFCW 3000 for another three years. Her platform was centered around continuing to develop the union’s ability to organize new workers and fight with conviction for strong contracts.

30,000 grocery workers will negotiate their contracts simultaneously in 2027, the first time this has ever happened. This fight will be a massive undertaking by the union and a chance to set new standards for pay and working conditions. The union expects that housing costs will be one of the most important issues at the bargaining table and is exploring innovative ways to address this through the contract.

UFCW 3000 continues to organize across multiple industries, including a massive campaign to organize MultiCare workers in Tacoma. The union is also working to organize meatpacking plants across the state and is front and center in the national organizing campaign by REI workers.

Guenther’s vision for the labor movement is rooted in the belief that organized workers are the source of all power. She sees her responsibility as a leader to listen to her members and fight relentlessly to meet their needs. She sees the fight for economic justice as inseparable from the fight for gender and racial equity and has put her union at the center of intersectional social justice movements.

She continues to pour resources into training the next generation of union organizers and leaders, seeking to build the infrastructure it takes to organize workers at scale. She hopes UFCW 3000 can be a blueprint for other unions.

Shaped by her own journey from growing up in poverty to having thousands of face-to-face organizing conversations, Guenther’s leadership is defined by a refusal to accept the status quo. She believes the labor movement must grow and she is determined to lead the way.