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New York City’s annual show of union strength marcheed up Fifth Avenue from 44th to 64th Street on Sept. 7. Fallon Ager-Norman, the international vice president and region 1 director of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) was out front of this year’s Labor Day Parade.

Ager-Norman chaired this year’s spectacle. The young union advocate says that she was shocked and elated when the New York City Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO, the organizers of the parade, asked her to join the march.

“I know that there are so many champions for workers’ rights and labor heroes who have served in this position before me. So for my name to be held in such high esteem is really just extremely humbling.”

Ager-Norman grew up in Queens Village and attended Jamaica High School. Her plan at the time was to attend Hunter College after graduation. However, a casual conversation with a neighbor about looking for summer employment changed her trajectory. She wanted to earn money to buy school clothes, and the neighbor told her there was a position open where she worked. Ager-Norman jumped at the opportunity for an interview. Thinking it was simply going to be a quick gig she could use to make some cash, she confesses she didn’t ask any questions about the employer.

At the interview, Ager-Norman was told it was a job working for a union, which still confused her.

“I had no idea what a union was,” she said. “When I heard ‘union,’ I thought ‘credit union.’ because my mother used to always take us with her to the credit union.”

Ager-Norman’s parents were self-employed, so she learned little about organized labor from them. But she comes from a two-generation strong New York City born-and-bred family. Her maternal grandparents moved to New York from Savannah, Georgia and her paternal grandparents came from Cocoa, Florida. Ager-Norman witnessed her mother’s father doing work as a window washer on Manhattan skyscrapers: he was a member of 32BJ SEIU for over 40 years. Ager-Norman’s grandmother worked two jobs for most of her life, having worked in a hospital for years before finally retiring from work after a career with the post office.

The couple had been forced to work hard to support seven children, but because they had secure jobs, Ager-Norman reflects, they were able to pool their funds and purchase a home. “I would say that those union jobs are what afforded them the ability to move their family from the projects in Brooklyn and purchase a home in the middle-class neighborhood of Cambria Heights, Queens.

“They still lived in it till the day we lost my grandfather during the pandemic. But my grandmother still lives there. And yeah, she’s still living off of that hard-earned union pension. So yeah, I do realize the difference that a union makes,” she said.

“I wish my grandparents would have told us. Because with my involvement in the movement, I wish they would have told us that it was because of the union that they got to move their family and give them a good life and take them on vacations and things like that. Because that definitely is what afforded them the ability to do that.”

Helping workers build careers

As a high school graduate, Ager-Norman accepted the offer to work as a filing clerk with Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) Local 338. She started out filing medical claims in the medical department and worked her way up through various other departments. “I always wanted to learn new things and challenge myself,” she said. “So whenever there was an opportunity to try something in a different department, I would do that while working as an assistant to the executive assistant to the president. I learned a lot of things that way. I moved through there and then there was an opportunity to help on an organizing campaign in the city –– they were looking for young folks to help out and so they asked me to help on that campaign. My last role at Local 338 was as the field director, overseeing all of the field staff and that’s before I moved on to work for the international union in 2015.”

For 23 years now, Ager-Norman has been organizing workers and promoting labor unity. She’s proud of the actions UFCW has taken to elevate the jobs of its 1.2 million members who work as grocery workers, in meatpacking and food processing plants, as retail, bookstore, pharmacy and health care workers, winery, distillery and chemical industry employees, and as workers in the newly emerging cannabis industry.

“Cannabis is our biggest focus right now. That’s an emerging industry where we are holding employers accountable and making sure that those workers are able to build careers and have apprenticeship programs,” she said. “We’re just making sure that those are jobs that workers with families can sustain as careers, not just jobs. We’re excited about the role that we’re playing there, making sure that these employers are doing the right thing by these workers.”

The UFCW represents workers across the country. In New York they have been working on legislation to grant the state’s farm workers the right to collectively bargain. “Those are some of the world’s most vulnerable workers –– most exploited workers –– who were left out of the [National Labor Relations Act] back in 1935, so we were extremely proud of the fact that we were able to get that law passed and able to organize the first farm workers in New York State.”

Ager-Norman’s work with UFCW, an international labor union, has reinforced her advocacy for workers to hold jobs that can help sustain themselves and their families, while simultaneously altering the mindset that they’re not just jobs – they’re careers.

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