Joseph T. Hansen

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Joseph T. Hansen is a member and the International President of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW).

Hansen's career as a meat cutter began in 1962 at National Food in Milwaukee. As a union member, he shortly became a volunteer organizer for Local 73 of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America.

By the mid 1960s, Hansen had been successful in securing a place in the Executive Board of Local 73. In 1973, his career as meat cutter came to an end, and his career as a labor leader began as he became an organizer for the Amalgamated Meat Cutters International Union. In 1979 the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America and the Retail Clerks Union merged to form the UFCW. In 1985 he was appointed UFCW Northcentral Region Director in Minnesota. In 1986 he was elected a UFCW International Vice President. In 1990 Hansen was appointed UFCW Pacific Region Director in California, and four years later became Director of UFCW’s Food Processing, Packing and Manufacturing Division.

Hansen was elected UFCW International Secretary-Treasurer in 1997 and International President in 2004.

Hansen is one of the founding leaders of the new Change to Win federation after UFCW’s disaffiliation of the AFL-CIO in July of 2005.

In March 2005, Hansen was named to a 14-member Citizens’ Health Care Working Group. He is the only union leader who served on the panel that includes esteemed health care providers and advocates, economists, and other leaders. The Working Group was created by Congress, and was charged with bringing the American people together to confront the health care crisis and facilitate the direct communication of their views and concerns to lawmakers so that Congress can initiate comprehensive, national health care reform.

In the global union movement front, Hansen was elected president of Union Network International (UNI)—an international labor organization representing 15 million workers in 900 unions in more than 100 countries—at its first World Congress in Berlin in 2001. He was reelected president at its second World Congress in Chicago in 2005.