[ The United Auto Workers’ strike last fall saw the union renew
its militancy and win big victories on behalf of worker control. The
historic walkout suggests the possibility of a broader revival of
class struggle and the ideal of economic democracy.]
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THE UAW STRIKE COULD PORTEND A BROADER REVIVAL OF WORKING-CLASS POWER
 
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Nick French
January 8, 2024
Jacobin
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_ The United Auto Workers’ strike last fall saw the union renew its
militancy and win big victories on behalf of worker control. The
historic walkout suggests the possibility of a broader revival of
class struggle and the ideal of economic democracy. _

Workers along the picket lines in Arlington, Texas described years of
pent-up frustration with how the company has treated them., JUSTIN
MILLER

 

On November 20, the United Auto Workers (UAW) announced that members
had approved new contracts with General Motors (GM), Stellantis, and
Ford by 64 percent following the union’s six-week strike against the
Big Three US automakers.

The contracts at the three automakers
[[link removed]] represent
historic victories. Across all three companies
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the UAW achieved a 25 percent increase in base wages over the
four-and-a-half-year contract span — more than workers had won
over the previous twenty years — while also eliminating wage
tiers and reinstating cost-of-living increases that had been given up
during the Great Recession.

Importantly, the union also won the right to strike against plant
closures. Stellantis and General Motors, meanwhile, have agreed to
bring their joint-venture battery plants under the union’s master
agreement, ensuring that EV workers receive wages and benefits
comparable to workers in traditional auto manufacturing. The UAW also
forced Stellantis to agree to reopen the Belvidere Assembly Plant in
Belvidere, Illinois, that it had shuttered earlier this year. And at
GM and Stellantis, the union additionally won the right to strike if
the automakers break promises not to outsource certain aspects of
production, or if they violate product and investment commitments at
various plants.

Even more than the significant wage and benefit gains, forcing the
reopening of a closed plant and winning the right to strike over
investment decisions may be the union’s most important contract
victories. They represent
[[link removed]] workers
asserting control over something that management has long regarded
as its exclusive prerogative
[[link removed]].

Perhaps as important as the contract wins was _how _they were won.
Breaking with decades of the union’s history of concessions and
corruption, recently elected president Shawn Fain and other UAW
leaders made ambitious demands and clearly communicated them to
members and to the public. And the union has not shied away from the
language of class war, with Fain denouncing the greed of the CEOs in
biblical language and declaring that autoworkers were fighting
​“for the good of the entire working class
[[link removed]].”

The militant strike and its victories suggest the revival of a vision
of economic life that has been largely sidelined in the United States
in recent decades. That vision sees workers as entitled to a real say
over their workplaces, where they spend much of their working lives.

Who Gets a Say?

It’s hard to overstate the significance of the UAW winning the right
to strike over plant closures and other investment decisions (and
already forcing Stellantis to reverse course on its prior closure of
Belvidere). Most businesses have long held that their owners and
executives have a unilateral right to decide where and how their firms
invest and what and how they produce.

The UAW’s contract victories directly rebuff this logic,
establishing that workers, not just bosses, have a say in these
company decisions. And by allowing the union to strike to influence
these choices, the contract legally entitles workers to use their most
powerful weapon to shape what the automakers do.

This amounts to a reversal of key aspects of the “Treaty of
Detroit,” as Barry Eidlin details in _Jacobin_
[[link removed]].
In its 1950 agreement with GM, in exchange for generous and stable
wages and benefit packages, the UAW, under its president Walter
Reuther, accepted that management would have exclusive control over
production on the shop floor as well as investment decisions. It was,
in effect, an agreement to trade away workplace democracy for economic
gains, which soon became standard for organized labor in the United
States writ large.

But the Treaty of Detroit was at odds with a long-running radical
strand in the American labor movement. From the Knights of Labor in
the late 1800s to the International Workers of the World at the turn
of the century to Socialist and Communist Party organizers, labor
radicals have denied that management has legitimate unilateral
authority over the workplace or investment decisions. This radical
tradition
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the labor movement as workers’ weapon against employer tyranny, and
sought to use it to establish democratic workplaces and collective
control over productive investment.

Many early trade unionists viewed the democratic rights that (some)
workers enjoyed as citizens as continuous with the kind of rights they
should enjoy in the workplace. Just as citizens exercise influence in
the political sphere through their rights to freedom of speech and
assembly and the right to vote, these radicals thought, workers should
similarly have a meaningful say over their lives on the job.

In the late nineteenth century, according to labor historian David
Montgomery
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factory workers resisted management’s control of the workplace in
various ways, including by asserting union rules governing the labor
process; they called such rules ​“legislation.” (The
International Association of Machinists, for instance, mandated fixed
apprenticeship terms for prospective journeymen and prohibited members
from working more than one machine at a time.)

But the aspiration for workplace democracy extended beyond such rules.
Groups like the Knights of Labor and later the Socialist Party of
America, exemplified by leaders like Eugene Debs
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wanted to replace privately owned and managed firms with a
​“cooperative commonwealth
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in which workers would democratically and collectively run their
workplaces. A similar vision of workplace and economic democracy was
promoted by the Communist labor organizers
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helped build the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s and
1940s.

With the Red Scare
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purged and marginalized socialists and communists in the labor
movement in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the acceptance of
business unionism by the UAW and other major unions, this vision
receded into the background. The UAW’s recent wins, however, hearken
back to this earlier tradition.

The Return of Class Struggle

It’s too soon to say whether the UAW’s victories are just a flash
in the pan, or whether they could be a harbinger of a broader revival
of the idea of economic democracy. But if workers in the United States
are going to win a greater say over their workplaces, the UAW strike
provides important lessons for them.

Shawn Fain was elected president of the UAW this past March, after a
massive corruption scandal led the federal government to force the
union to hold a vote on whether it would hold direct elections for top
officers. Unite All Workers for Democracy
[[link removed]] (UAWD) — a
reform group in the union that formed in 2019 — campaigned to
let members directly decide new leadership, and won. In fall 2022,
UAWD helped elect six reform candidates to the UAW’s international
leadership, while Fain and another UAWD-backed candidate won run-off
elections in spring 2023.

UAWD members founded the group with the intention of democratizing the
union and bringing back its fighting spirit, which had
atrophied after decades of rule by the corrupt Administration Caucus
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The Big Three strike seems to show that this effort is already bearing
fruit. In a departure from prior practice, union leadership has been
communicating transparently with workers and encouraging their own
initiative and activity. As Jane Slaughter wrote in _Labor Notes_
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late September, during the strike:

[Fain and allies] set to work building a contract
campaign — strike pledge cards, practice picketing, lots of
communication, lots of media — that built to the strike that
started two weeks ago. . . . Members at the Big 3, whether they voted
for UAWD or for no one, are thrilled that their president is actually
sharing the union’s demands, speaking to them regularly via Facebook
Live (and responding in real time to comments in the chat), and
calling out the CEOs who make up to $14,000 an hour. . . . The
excitement on the picket lines and the creativity of the slogans and
tactics members are inventing are something not seen in the union in
many decades.

UAWD (including Fain himself, who is a member) and the new UAW
leadership are reviving a spirit of bottom-up militancy in the union.
And they are projecting that militant spirit outward: Fain’s live
speeches have been directed at the public as much as his own
union, framing the UAW’s fight
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a fight against the billionaire class. Fain has also encouraged other
unions [[link removed]] to set
their contract expiration dates to match those of the UAW’s new
contracts with the Big Three on April 30, 2028 — potentially
laying the groundwork for a collective strike beginning on that
year’s May Day (May 1), the international holiday celebrating the
labor movement.

The UAW is now seeking to relay its victories at the Big Three into
organizing nonunion auto shops across the country. An auspicious early
sign: workers at Tesla’s Fremont, California, plant just announced
they have formed a UAW organizing committee
[[link removed]].

The Horizon of Worker Control

Awider revival of demands for economic democracy is not a vain hope.
Recent research by political scientists Soumyajit Mazumder and Alan N.
Yan suggests that most Americans would prefer to have democratic
workplaces
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The researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample and found
that most respondents would like to work at companies that put workers
on corporate boards, give employees the opportunity for ownership in
the firm, or that let workers directly elect their managers.

Nor is the UAW the only union that has fought for more control over
the workplace. After a months-long joint strike this year, Hollywood
film and TV writers won serious restrictions
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studio use of artificial intelligence, including AI-generated digital
replicas of actors and AI-written material. UPS Teamsters, meanwhile,
leveraged a strike threat this summer to win a historic contract,
which includes a provision requiring the introduction of new
technology to be reviewed and approved by a technology committee with
union representatives.

These victories show that winning more say by workers over the labor
process and investment decisions is far from a pipe dream — and
point toward a deeper vision of workplace democracy. Like the Knights
of Labor and socialists and communists of earlier eras, today’s
labor activists are positioned to articulate a more complete,
long-term vision of democracy at work.

Thinkers like political economist Mike Beggs, for instance, have
sought to develop proposals
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show how workplace democracy can be made compatible with broader goals
like income inequality and environmental sustainability, through
combining firm-level democracy with a system of financing through
public banks. Other writers
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recent years have argued for their own proposals
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economic democracy with similar goals in mind, from having corporate
boards comprised of workers and instituting sectoral bargaining to
having elected representatives help make companies’ planning
decisions.

Ambitious visions of economic democracy like that may not be on the
agenda today. More class-struggle victories like the UAW’s, however,
could eventually help make them a real possibility.

_Nick French is an associate editor at Jacobin._

* UAW Strike
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* Working Class
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* political power
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