[By having contracts with all the Big Three automakers expire on
May Day, 2028, the UAW president also issued a challenge to the labor
movement. Will his union be ready to meet it?]
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SHAWN FAIN’S NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION IS TO LAY THE GROUND FOR A
NATIONAL STRIKE  
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Jonathan Rosenblum
December 28, 2023
The Nation
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_ By having contracts with all the Big Three automakers expire on May
Day, 2028, the UAW president also issued a challenge to the labor
movement. Will his union be ready to meet it? _

Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers, joins
lawmakers at a press conference calling for a cease-fire in the Middle
East outside of the Capitol on December 14, 2023., Kevin Dietsch /
Getty Images

 

Imagine it’s the evening of April 30, 2028. The nation is roiling as
millions of workers coast to coast prepare to walk off the job in an
unprecedented May Day national strike. Workers in manufacturing,
logistics, healthcare, grocery, high tech, hospitality, and public
services have mobilized and committed to bring the economy to a halt
unless their bold demands are met: Medicare for All, a $30/hour
minimum wage, and a tax on billionaires to massively increase public
education funding.

That’s the sort of vision that United Auto Workers (UAW) President
Shawn Fain has challenged the rest of the labor movement to begin
organizing toward.

At the end of October, in announcing strike settlements at the Big
Three auto companies, Fain noted
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contracts all expire the day before May Day 2028. He urged other
unions to align their contracts with the UAW. “If we’re truly
going to take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that
it starts to work for the many and not the few, then it’s important
that we not only strike, but that we strike together,” he said.

Workers have organized national strikes in other countries, where
labor movements are stronger and there’s a history of national
bargaining around social demands. Not so in the US, where the
post-WWII political establishment—too often with the complicity of
union leaders—intentionally created and enforced a labor law
framework that partitioned the working class by establishing
bargaining at the enterprise level, rather than by sector or whole
industries. In the US system, workers are left to fight separate
battles, worksite by worksite, for health care, fair pay, and health
and safety rights—things we’re more powerful fighting for
together.

Fain’s May Day throwdown takes aim at capital’s divide-and-conquer
legal regime. But to be successful in 2028, the labor movement will
need millions of workers to join in: those now in unions, who should
begin to line up contracts for that decisive date, and many more who
are not yet in unions but are beginning to organize.

This vision is what makes the new surge of auto worker organizing the
UAW is currently embarking on particularly momentous.

In the wake of the UAW’s breakthrough strike and contract
settlements at Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, workers at the
industry’s growing non-union plants—Toyota, Honda, Subaru,
Hyundai, BMW, VW, Tesla, and more—are beginning to organize on a
scale not seen in generations. Thousands of workers have signed union
cards in the last few weeks. The UAW has dispatched organizers to
non-union plants and launched a splashy national media campaign along
with social media organizing tools.

“When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be
with the Big 3, but with the Big 5 or Big 6,” Fain predicted
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That’s much easier said than done. Executives at Toyota et al.
already are mounting anti-union campaigns, with carrots—raises of up
to 11 percent—and sticks—anti-union meetings, videos, harassment
of union leafleteers, and one-on-one lectures by supervisors about the
evils of unions. These companies have control in the workplace and
will stop at nothing to thwart the incipient worker rebellions. In the
past, auto executives have hired the worst-of-the-worst union-busting
law firms—outfits like Littler Mendelson, who are the brains and
muscle behind Starbucks’ union-quashing efforts. Expect the same
army of pinstriped busters this time around in auto plants.

UAW members scored big when they struck and won contracts at the Big 3
that began to claw back the concessions of the last generation. It
took hard work, and the divided ratification votes showed that UAW
members are not done demanding their share. It will be an even bigger
challenge—another order of magnitude harder—to beat Elon Musk and
his fellow auto CEOs and successfully organize non-union auto workers
on a mass basis.

Yet we must all root for and materially support the auto workers,
because their victories will lay the foundation for the vision Fain
laid out, the opportunity to do battle for social and economic justice
on a national, class-wide basis.

Today the UAW represents only about 15 percent of the 990,000
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automobile and parts manufacturing workers. That’s down from a peak
of 1.5 million UAW members in 1979
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when 80 percent of US auto manufacturing was unionized and UAW
contracts drove industry standards.

The biggest automaker in the US? It’s no longer General Motors. In
2021 Toyota beat GM
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become number one in the US, churning out millions of cars and trucks
at its 10 manufacturing plants
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so-called “right to work” states where anti-union laws weaken
worker organization and suppress wages.

For years, UAW leaders gave lip service to organizing those and other
plants. In the last decade, the union badly mangled efforts to
organize at Nissan
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in both cases underestimating the potency of the anti-union campaigns
and underappreciating the need to build strong in-plant union
committees.

On Dec. 11, Fain delivered a speech on Facebook Live
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autoworkers and supporters where he recounted the broader uprising
that began during the UAW strike. At the non-union factories,
“autoworkers weren’t just writing us messages, they were signing
union cards,” he said. “They found old organizing websites—some
made their own websites, and just started signing up. They were tuning
in to our Facebook Live updates, our stories, our materials, they made
their own stickers with our UAW wheel and posted them all over
non-union plants.”

Once the strike concluded in late October, momentum grew for signing
union cards, the precondition for a union representation election. By
law unions must get a minimum of 30 percent of workers to sign union
authorization cards before they can request a vote conducted by the
National Labor Relations Board. UAW organizers say they aim to get 70
percent sign-up at plants before filing, to ensure there’s enough
support to overcome management opposition.

VW workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee were the first to surpass the 30
percent threshold in their plant of 3,800. On Dec. 7, they took their
campaign public, unveiling a video along with a website featuring a
list of the 187 members of the in-plant Volunteer Organizing
Committee [[link removed]] (VOC). As workers at other auto
plants meet the 30 percent threshold, they too will go public.

A confluence of factors is driving the momentum. To be sure, the gains
UAW members made at the Big 3 are a huge inspiration for workers. But
also motivating the union push are the punishing non-union working
conditions. This year, VW eliminated two holidays and increased
insurance costs for workers, according to Zack Curvin, a VW powertrain
assembly line worker in Chattanooga. VW also instituted a line
speedup, telling workers that the company wants to see “a car a
minute off the line,” almost double the line speed of two years ago,
Curvin told me, adding that VW has been reducing time for maintenance
and workers often struggle with broken or substandard equipment.

An autoworker I spoke with at Rivian’s 6,000-worker plant in Normal,
Illinois said his colleagues were frustrated that the company was
expecting workers to use vacation time or take unpaid “voluntary
time off” when the plant shuts down for three weeks of retooling
next spring.

When Jeff Allen began working at Toyota’s massive Georgetown,
Kentucky plant in 1994, “we had free health insurance and Toyota
pretty much followed what the UAW had,” he told me. But over the
years, Toyota shifted healthcare costs onto workers, trimmed
retirement, and kept wages down.

None of these indignities or austerity measures were because the
companies were hurting financially. The “German Three”—BMW,
Mercedes, and VW—made $460 billion in profits over the last decade.
Toyota made $250 billion in profits in the same 10-year period, while
opening a food bank for Allen and his 9,500 coworkers at the
Georgetown plant, according to the UAW
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Workers at these and other plants have tried to organize and failed
before, but this time feels different, they said. In the past, Allen
said he and his coworkers “just leafleted and assumed people would
come on board.” This time, “we’re going back to old school,
talking to people one on one,” he told me.

Yolanda Peoples, a 12-year VW assembly line worker, described to me
how VOC members “are trying to hit every part of the plant, from
young to old.” On national auto worker organizing calls, Peoples
said, she’s gained skills and insights from other workers about how
to approach workers who are on the fence or skeptical. Rather than
barge ahead with a union rap, she’s practiced asking questions,
drawing out worker concerns and hopes. “I’ll ask them, ‘Have you
ever gone through anything that you wouldn’t want your son or
daughter to go through?’ Make it more personal. Everyone has that
one story,” she said.

This daily organizing work is unflashy—but absolutely essential. Too
many past organizing campaigns—not just the UAW’s failed attempts,
but efforts by other unions in myriad industries—have faltered when
organizers took organizing shortcuts, fell back on gimmicks, or
underestimated the scale of employer resistance. They tried to
“sell” workers on the union, rather than challenge workers to step
up and make the union their own. They soft-pedaled the fight against
the boss, rather than describing a power struggle between workers and
management.

To withstand the tornado of the full-blown anti-union campaign,
organizers must place the power struggle front-and-center in
conversations, and they must build a union structure inside the
workplace that can withstand the hostile winds. That means recruiting
respected workers on every shift, in every work area and department,
to serve on the plant VOC so they can educate, unite, bolster, and
move a majority of coworkers into action.

It doesn’t matter how deeply felt the workplace issues are, how
righteous the fight seems to be, how popular it is with the wider
public, if there is not a tight internal organizing structure that is
tested through collective union actions
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vote yes petitions, sticker-up days, and other demonstrations of
majority worker support. The harder the boss fight workers face, the
more solid the structure needs to be—and the more often it needs to
be tested.

In Chattanooga, Curvin described how he and his fellow VOC members
have talked to 85 percent of his line coworkers, and a majority have
signed union cards. “I’m amazed at how quickly things have
moved,” he said. “There’s a lot of strong will to help each
other out.”

A BMW worker in South Carolina described to me how he and his
coworkers have identified every work area—bumper line, assembly,
paint shop, body shop, and so on—and are methodically identifying
which areas have VOC members and which don’t.

That’s the sort of rigorous organizing that will be required to win.
These initial organizing steps are a sign that workers and the UAW are
keen to avoid repeating past mistakes. Still, there inevitably will be
temptations to take organizing shortcuts, become enamored with glitzy
media, or overvalue the public vibe or a politician’s endorsement.
It will be important to bear in mind that the same UAW contracts that
provide non-union workers the courage to stand up and fight also give
the bosses of the multinational companies more incentive than ever
before to fight the union. They have unlimited resources with which to
wage that war, and surely will deploy them.

But if the workers continue to organize in a disciplined manner, the
coming months and years could see the UAW grow by the tens of
thousands, or even more. That is an exciting prospect, not just for
the workers in these plants, but for all of us in the labor movement
who heard Fain’s call to arms and have circled May Day 2028 in our
calendars.

_JONATHAN ROSENBLUM is the author of Beyond $15: Immigrant Workers,
Faith Activists, and the Revival of the Labor Movement (Beacon Press,
2017) and a member of the National Writers Union._

_Copyright c 2023 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the
breadth and depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of
the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical,
independent, and progressive voice in American journalism._

_Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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* unions
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* autoworkers
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* Shawn Fain
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* organizing
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* UAW
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