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**JANUARY 25, 2024**
On the Prospect website
Why Virginia Costco Workers Organized With the Teamsters
The company has a reputation as a good employer, some of that due to a
legacy union membership. Workers had to stand up to prevent backsliding.
BY LUIS FELIZ LEON
Arkansas Gears Up for Difficult Abortion Amendment Campaign
Abortion rights supporters have their work cut out for them after the
state attorney general certifies a constitutional amendment. BY
GABRIELLE GURLEY
A Dead Cellphone, $27 in Cash and Nowhere to Turn
Migrants released by ICE after dark often must rely on the kindness of
strangers and sheer luck or risk spending long nights on the street. BY
KATE MORRISSEY
Meyerson on TAP
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**** Biden, UAW, and the Teamsters
Those two unions and that president (if re-elected) hold the greatest
promise for reviving working-class power.
President Biden made a provocative historical assessment in his address
yesterday to the National Legislative Conference of the United Auto
Workers. (Well, it was provocative to the labor-beat journalists
covering the speech who were steeped in labor history.) He referred to
the UAW's formative strike, its sit-in in General Motors' Flint auto
plants in the winter of 1936-1937, hailing it, quite rightly, as the
breakthrough for unionizing American industry and creating a mass middle
class. We remember that 90-year-old strike, he said (rounding up the
years a bit), just as people will remember the strike you just waged
against GM, Ford, and Stellantis 90 years from now.
Of course, that constituted flattering his audience, but he then
proceeded to make that case by listing what the UAW had just won:
restoring annual cost-of-living adjustments, compelling Stellantis to
refit and reopen a factory it had declared closed, winning wage hikes of
25 percent to 33 percent, and (dropping his voice suddenly to
dramatically enhance its significance) eliminating the two-tier wage
system that the companies had compelled the union to accept 15 years
ago.
The 800 or so UAW leaders and activists in the room roared, but then,
they roared through almost all of Biden's very effective speech
(which, my fellow Bidenologists, he delivered flawlessly, looking very,
well, old only when he fiddled with the UAW cap that union president
Shawn Fain handed him). It was a populist speech in the traditional
economic sense of populist-hailing the return of manufacturing that is
a signature goal and fledgling achievement of his administration,
decrying free-trade policies of presidents past that enabled
corporations to go where labor was cheapest, arguing that it was unions
that created the American middle class and the need for powerful unions
if we're to recreate it.
[link removed]
His speech comported with the themes that the UAW's Fain emphasized in
introducing Biden and appears to be emphasizing everywhere he goes: that
the UAW's goal, beginning with its organizing campaigns at the
nation's non-union auto plants, is to politically and economically
activate the entire working class. That's not really been a UAW theme
since the presidencies of its postwar leaders: the legendary Walter
Reuther and his two Reutherite successors, Leonard Woodcock and Doug
Fraser. During their presidencies, of course, the UAW had three times
the members (and sometimes more) than it has today; automaking was by
most accounts the center of the American economy; and the UAW itself was
the anchor tenant in the house of postwar liberalism, using its enormous
resources to provide crucial funding to the movements for civil rights,
women's rights, and environmental preservation and mitigation. It
still backs progressive movements: In Fain's speech, he referred to
the right to love who one chooses, and in the press gaggle he held
following the session, when asked about the immigrants at the border, he
said they were, like most immigrants of yore, "desperate" people just
seeking a safe and decent life.
But the union is now, aspirationally and commendably, punching above its
weight in an America where manufacturing constitutes a much smaller
share of the economy than it did in Reuther's day. And its punching is
centered on economics and shifting the balance of class power, as he
made clear in explaining why the union had just endorsed Biden for
re-election. (During his talk, he showed videos of Biden's appearance
on the union's picket line, and of Donald Trump's response during
the 40-day strike the union waged against GM in the third year of
Trump's presidency: That screen was blank.)
Right now, as Josh Eidelson's excellent cover story on Fain in the new
issue of
**BloombergBusinessweek**makes clear, Fain is the one labor leader with
the credibility and militance to speak as something of a tribune for the
nation's working class. Not since Reuther has a UAW president played
that role. But manufacturing now employs just a tenth of the U.S.
workforce, far from the nearly 50 percent it employed in Reuther's
day. There's one other union president-like Fain, also elected by
his union's rank and file; like Fain, coming off a landmark union
victory (at UPS); and like Fain, also named Shawn, though he spells it
differently-whose union has to follow where the UAW just went if
we're really to roll the union on: the Teamsters' Sean O'Brien,
who has vowed his union will take on Amazon. Logistics, transportation,
and retail dwarf manufacturing in today's economy, and it's in those
sectors where empowering workers will have the greatest and most
salutary effect. Seans (or Shawns), go to! Joe will have your back.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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