October 3, 2025

The following speech was delivered by MLK Labor Executive Secretary-Treasurer Katie Garrow at the UFCW Local 1518 annual conference in Vancouver, B.C., on September 18, 2025.

Good morning, UFCW!

Thank you to Sister Perez for the invitation to speak with you all today. Thank you all for spending the last two days here. You have families and full lives, kids’ soccer practices, and aging parents. It’s so important that you’re here today. For the future of the North American labor movement. For our children. 

Before I get started, let’s do a call and response chant. We’ll do it three times. We’re working people who stand together. We know whose side we’re on, but we gotta make it crystal clear for the whole world. So I’m going to shout, “Whose side?” and I want you to shout, “Workers’ side!” We’ll do that three times! Here we go!

UFCW, WHOSE SIDE?

Workers Side!

Whose side? 

Workers Side!

Whose side?

Workers side!

Thank you! That was awesome! You sound SO powerful!

My name is Katie Garrow and I lead the Central Labor Council in Seattle and its surrounding suburbs. Our diverse coalition of firefighters, scientists and janitors wear white collars, blue collars, and some no collars at all. We were founded in 1888 by dock workers, farmers and loggers to build power for working people. For as long as there has been industry in the pacific northwest, workers have bound ourselves together to fight for our fair share.

Today, I’m going to talk about the enormous challenges we face in America as working people, what we’re doing to fight back, and how you can join with us to win a better world.

Today in Seattle, union members with legal status in the United States are being snatched off the street and thrown in jail by masked agents in plain clothes. It’s shocking, and yet it is happening every day. We can’t get numb to it. Dads with kids to pick up from school… teachers who don’t show up in the classroom… These aren’t just stories. These are real people! These are people who are being harassed, disappeared by our own government, and being denied the foundational rules of the United States… basic due process.

Here are some of the names of our union members who have been kidnapped. Max Londonio, Lewelyn Dixon and Fernando Rocha. These union members today are free. We freed them. It didn’t happen without a fight, and we’re not done yet.

How did we get here? I have a theory. In my opinion, the primary condition that has allowed facism to take root in America is poverty.

I’m going to tell you why poverty is the problem, and why unionism… and the broadly shared prosperity that we can win with unionism… is the answer.

I’m from a hopeless place. I grew up on the wild and blustery WA coast, in an old logging town called Hoquiam. I feel lucky I got out. So much so that I have survivor’s guilt sometimes.

I think we all know the history that brought my family and a lot of our families to the Pacific Northwest. The timber companies and lumber mills and their rich out-of-state investors tried to exploit us, but we organized and we built our unions. We won middle class lives for three generations.

My family all worked in the woods. My great grandma built chairs using lumber from our forests. My uncle Rob cut cedar shakes. My dad was a boilermaker in the mills. Neither of my grandparents had a college degree, but they took their family on vacation every summer.

Things weren’t perfect, though. My grandpa died young from lung cancer, caused by the asbestos at the pulp mill. My uncle Rob suffered an injury when a cedar block fell on him from a helicopter and crushed his hip. My dad and both uncles lived with chronic pain from work related injuries.

By the time I was old enough to work, the trees had all been logged, the unemployment lines were long and no new industries had come to town. So I left home, for the place that still offered the promise of prosperity: the city.

But it is so expensive to be a person who works for a living and lives in Seattle. A renter needs to make $127,000 Canadian / year to afford a one bedroom apartment in Seattle. The average renter’s income is $112,000 Canadian. The math isn’t mathing. And I know you know what I’m talking about, because it’s worse here in Vancouver.

Have you ever heard the saying that “hurt people hurt people?” Poverty hurts people, and then they hurt others. It encourages desperation. And unfortunately, that’s what I think is happening in the United States. It’s classic misdirection, and it’s ridiculous when it’s said out loud… as if deporting millions of brown-skinned immigrants would make rent more affordable, or eggs and gas cheaper, or our jobs safer and with better pay! It doesn’t work that way. 

I do not seek to excuse the racism and sexism that helped elect President Trump. Please don’t think I am. Prejudice paved the road to facism in America and poverty was the car they drove in to get there. 

Your country is further ahead than ours is in accounting for the violence of our past. We need to repair the harm done to indigenous people, honor our treaties, and in the United States, we need to pay people who are descendants of slaves. While we’re doing that, we need to teach kids in public schools the roles our governments played in colonization and enslavement, so that white people have context for these policies.  

I know that this is possible because I’ve seen it in the union. Hostesses and waitresses in Unite HERE, fighting for a better wage for cooks in the back of the house and splitting tips. Meat cutters standing up for bakery workers to get their due in UFCW. The teachers union in Washington won pay raises for the lowest paid lunch ladies and classroom assistants using the enormous power of solidarity with licensed teachers. 

If people can be taught to hate, they can also be taught solidarity, they can also be taught to love. 

We can afford to atone for our mistakes and take care of our people. The United States and Canada are two of the richest nations in the history of the world, at the wealthiest time in human history. There is enough for all of us. We’re in this position because of the mass hoarding of wealth by the very few at the very top.

It’s workers vs billionaires. Not whites vs people of color. Not citizens vs immigrants. Not warehouse workers vs computer programmers.

So I’m going to ask you again, whose side are you on UFCW?

Whose side are you on? The workers side!

Whose side are you on? The workers side!

In King County, Washington, our first job is to protect immigrant workers, because the government is coming for them first. Which is why we’ve done Know Your Rights trainings, helped members create family separation plans, and mobilized mass protests on May Day, Labor Day, and posted up outside the detention center each time a union member’s been taken. We’re helping with legal bills and we’re changing state laws, so our state and local government does not collaborate with our corrupt federal government to disappear our coworkers and neighbors.

But we have to move an offensive strategy too, even as we’re playing defense.

And that’s why we’re doing all that we can to make Seattle more affordable, to reduce the cost of childcare, to win the strongest collective bargaining agreements with the highest wages, and dramatically increase the number of apartments and affordable housing.

We challenge every idea that is contributing to our gross inequality. We need to fight like hell to improve the lives of all working people. Those with a union, those without, those who wish they had a union.

The next step is to follow in your footsteps to build independent political power for working people. 

This is the only way we will win a society that is better than the one before Trump was president. A reality where:

• Immigrants can get papers simply
• Our countries acknowledge the complicated truths of our past, and take steps to do the right thing today. 
• And where one job is enough, and we win a 32 hour work week!

I’m going to be honest with you. This is a scary time. I don’t know how it’s going to end. But fear will not make us freeze. We’re going to stay and we’re going to fight. 

We’ll follow every bus that hauls off our co-workers. 

We’ll stand outside every jail. 

We’ll fight for every immigrant mom and dad. 

We won’t back down. We won’t back up. We won’t sit down. We won’t give up. 

And we will win. 

Whose side are you on, UFCW?

The workers side!

Thank you for having me. It was my honor. I’m Katie Garrow from MLK Labor. Keep up the fight!