Union Values and LGBTQ+ Worker Experiences: A Survey of UFCW Workers in the United States and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, et al.) people are an increasingly organized portion of the United States and Canadian workforce. In 2013, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) formed OUTreach, a constituency group that works to secure rights and protections for LGBTQ+ workers against discrimination and mistreatment on the job. Their advocacy efforts have centered on ensuring access to workplace benefits through collective bargaining agreements, providing educational programming, and collaborating on political advocacy campaigns.After several decades of patchwork civil rights legislation, LGBTQ+ workers are now legally protected from discrimination in employment under national law in both the United States and Canada. Yet awareness and implementation of nondiscrimination protections are uneven, and LGBTQ+ workers are still susceptible to differential treatment. There has been limited research about working conditions for LGBTQ+ people in terms of health and safety, unequal treatment on the job, and access to benefits. Likewise, there is very limited information about the leadership of LGBTQ+ workers in contemporary union organizing or the scope and effects of union support for LGBTQ+ workers’ rights.This report explores LGBTQ+ workers’ contributions to union organizing and how they and their allies have benefited from union advocacy. Three significant findings and recommendations are outlined below. We used a participatory and research justice approach, working closely with UFCW OUTreach to collect and analyze the data. Using mixed-sampling methodology, we surveyed 1,004 union members and conducted 15 interviews with LGBTQ+ workers in diverse industries and regions across the United States and Canada. In addition, we conducted a review of relevant policy and academic literature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".