Court Protects Self-Governance Rights of International Unions
May 24, 2026
In an important victory for union autonomy, a federal court in D.C. has rejected a challenge to a provision in the United Food and Commercial Workers Constitution that determines the number of delegates local unions may send to the UFCW’s quinquennial convention. The convention, which is the union’s highest governing body, elects international officers and votes on major issues of governance such as constitutional amendments.
To ensure that the voices of its smaller locals are not drowned out, the UFCW constitution provides for a system of graduated proportionality to assign delegates to locals. Under the constitution’s delegate-allocation formula, while larger locals are assigned more delegates than smaller locals, smaller locals have more voting strength per member than their population alone would dictate.
In granting summary judgment to UFCW, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the arguments advanced by Bredhoff & Kaiser attorneys as to the proper construction of the federal Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, also called the Landrum-Griffin Act. The court held that, when Congress guaranteed union members “equal rights ... to vote" in the elections held by their “labor organization,” 29 U.S.C. § 411(a)(1), it meant to ensure that all union members had an equal vote in choosing their respective local unions’ delegates. But Congress did not intend to regulate how federations of autonomous local labor organizations, such as national and international unions, choose through their own democratic processes to assign relative voting strength as between those local bodies. The claim of the two plaintiff members that the UFCW constitution improperly “diluted” the votes of members of large locals therefore failed at its inception.
In the alternative, the Court held that even if the Landrum-Griffin Act did regulate delegate allocation, the robust factual record assembled by the Bredhoff team established that the UFCW’s formula “would be permissible as a ‘reasonable rule or regulation’” within the meaning of Title I of the Act, as it was adopted for proper purposes and “serves the union’s interests of keeping costs down and practically balancing the interests of its locals.”
The court’s careful interpretation of the statute reinforces a core Landrum-Griffin Act principle: that courts are not empowered to “micromanage how a union has structured its affairs.” Because the “UFCW’s democratic channels provide the appropriate forum” for members who wish to change union convention rules, not federal courts, the UFCW prevailed.
The case is Barry v. United Food & Commercial Workers, Case No. 1:24-cv-01137 (TNM), 2026 WL 1430067 (D.D.C. May 21, 2026).