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HOW UNION DEMOCRACY BUILDS LABOR’S STRIKE POWER
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Alex Press
December 19, 2024
Dissent
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_ The UAW’s reform movement brought membership back into the fold,
harnessing their energy and forging it into a weapon that could force
the companies to bend. _
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain at a vote watch party on
April 19, 2024 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Elijah Nouvelage/Getty
Images
Scott Houldieson had some questions. He had worked at Ford’s Chicago
Assembly Plant, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 551, since 1989, but
in the late 2000s the company was in a financial hole following the
Great Recession, and the leaders of the UAW told him and his fellow
coworkers that they were going to have to give up some of the benefits
that had long made auto work a good blue-collar job.
Houldieson understood that times were hard; he’d seen the quarterly
reports showing gigantic losses for the company, even if it wasn’t
facing bankruptcy like its competitors, but something still didn’t
compute. The workers were conceding not only on wages and benefits
like pensions, but on other issues too, which seemed to have
devastating, long-range implications: namely, Ford wanted to introduce
tiers into its contract with the union. Tiered pay schedules, in which
workers receive unequal pay and/or benefits while doing identical
labor, are anathema for a union, breeding resentment and mistrust in
an institution reliant upon solidarity.
“To me, tiers are the dumbest concession you can make to try to save
a company from bankruptcy, because they’re not hiring anybody,”
Houldieson told me. “They’re laying people off!” It got him
thinking: what, exactly, was the underlying reason the union’s
negotiators were giving up such a crucial bedrock for any union?
“They were just too tight with the company,” Houldieson concluded.
That realization was a result of extensive research, which led him to
become the editor of his local’s newspaper. He pinpointed the joint
employer-union programs instituted in the 1980s as illustrative of the
issue: they brought the union into a partnership with the bosses,
and _that_ was a problem.
Houldieson was speaking to me from the other side of victory, achieved
shortly before we met in the Huntington Place convention center in
Detroit, Michigan, in March 2023. The occasion was the union’s
special bargaining convention to determine its priorities for what
were then upcoming contract negotiations with the Motor City’s Big
Three automakers—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (formerly
Chrysler)—for whom some 150,000 members work.
In the years since the 2009 contract, Houldieson had become one of the
most recognizable dissidents in what is still one of the largest
industrial unions: from a peak of around 1.5 million members in 1979,
the UAW now has 400,000 members and 600,000 retirees. In 2010, he met
members of New Directions, a small but dogged reform effort within the
one-party state that was the UAW, in which the Administration Caucus
(first formed by the union’s most famous president, Walter Reuther)
monopolized control of the union and its resources through a system of
delegate elections for the union’s leadership.
From there, Houldieson joined the ranks of dissidents, scattered
across not only the country’s auto plants but in other sectors
represented by the UAW, too: most prominently, higher education, which
now comprises some 100,000 of the union’s active members. These
reformers wanted a more democratic union, one which would not, as
Houldieson saw it, be so friendly with the bosses. In late 2020, these
members formed Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a reform caucus
that sought to challenge the old guard in the name of uprooting what
they considered to be a “corporate culture” that had infected
their ranks. Houldieson was chosen to be the caucus’s chairperson.
Their first goal: direct elections for international leadership.
Unions are not only about improving members’ pay and benefits. At
their best, they’re schools of democracy. Whereas the U.S. political
system is stubbornly unresponsive to workers’ desires and policy
preferences thanks to its capture by the rich and powerful, in a
union, every worker’s voice matters. It is here that people denied
the opportunity to lead in so many realms of society are given that
chance: contribute and you will earn the respect of your brothers and
sisters; persuade your fellow worker to your position and you can
start winning what’s most important to you and maybe even help
change the course of history.
But the UAW in which Houldieson came up was far from this ideal,
woefully lacking in democratic processes. The union had become a
top-down affair, and as is often the case, that went hand in hand with
misconduct. When members founded UAWD, the union was reeling from a
far-reaching corruption scandal that had landed about a dozen UAW
officials, including two former presidents, in prison. A federal
monitor appointed to oversee reform suggested the union hold a
referendum on direct elections; in 2021, that referendum passed with
63 percent of ballots in favor. The next year, the UAWD backed a
reform slate that challenged for seven of the fourteen seats on the
international executive board, including the presidency. It won all
seven, but the seventh—between Shawn Fain, an electrician turned
union staffer from Kokomo, Indiana, and a UAWD member, and Ray Curry,
the incumbent president and an Administration Caucus member—was so
close that it had to go to a runoff. Fain was only declared victor and
sworn in the day before the convention kicked off in Detroit.
But democratizing a union doesn’t just mean reforming the means by
which top leadership is elected; changing a union’s culture is a lot
harder than swapping in a new president. As I made my way through the
long days and nights in Detroit that week, evidence of entrenched
resistance accumulated: an old-guard supporter trying to fight one of
my interviewees as we chatted in the convention center; rumors of
property theft and other tampering; whispered discussion as to whether
old-guard staff would cooperate or sabotage new leaders; an animosity
that was potent enough that Fain addressed it when speaking with me,
admitting to a “divide in the room” on the convention floor, one
he diagnosed as a difference in “philosophies.”
Yet there were encouraging signs. It was clear that Fain was a genuine
member of the UAWD, stopping by the caucus’s makeshift headquarters
inside a convention room (at one point, he teared up while professing
pride in his membership). The convention itself set goals that
signaled a sea change might really be underway: the union would
prepare to come to the Big Three bargaining tables with ambitious
proposals, immediately beginning a contract campaign to bring the
union’s membership—many of them checked out and demoralized by the
UAW’s prior approach—back into the fold, harnessing their energy
and forging it into a weapon that could force the companies to fold,
even if that would take a strike.
Everyone knows what happened next: the union struck all of the Big
Three at once, though not by simultaneously calling out all 150,000
members covered by the contracts. Instead, the union engaged in what
it called a “stand up strike,” in which specific plants walked out
in waves, escalating every few days to turn the screws on the
executives when they failed to make what the union considered
sufficient progress at the table. The approach, reminiscent of
guerrilla warfare, rested upon trust in the membership to “stand
up” when called upon to do so. Quite literally: insufficient
progress at the table would lead Fain to call a local’s leadership,
directing them to walk their members off the shop floor, sometimes
with hardly an hour’s notice. They couldn’t have pulled this off
were channels not open for information and pressure to flow both ways,
with leadership confident in not only members’ _willingness_ to
fight, but also in the contract priorities for which they were eager
to do so.
It worked: after six weeks on strike, the UAW secured historic
contracts at all three automakers. Before anyone (myself included)
could catch their breath, the union announced its next gambit. The
majority of America’s autoworkers are now non-union, so the UAW
would try to organize much of the rest of the sector, roughly 150,000
autoworkers at thirteen non-union automakers across the country, the
same number as are covered by the Big Three contracts. Presiding over
an ever-shrinking membership, tending to the union’s private welfare
state without ever looking beyond its borders to the great mass of
unorganized workers? No longer.
The UAW’s success in the 2023 strike was not entirely a result of
reformers’ efforts: a tight labor market and a multiyear pandemic
generated a highly favorable environment. As Fain once told me,
workers came to reevaluate what’s important in life: “being able
to live; not scraping to get by.”
The efforts to organize non-union workers have been slow in some
shops—Elon Musk’s hulking Tesla plant in Fremont, California, will
surely take years—but at others, non-union workers have used the
UAW’s proven ability to secure strong contracts to launch blitz
campaigns. In April, workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee,
shop became the first to unionize a domestic auto plant in the South
through a National Labor Relations Board election since the 1940s;
Fain called it “the first domino to fall.”
Workers at Mercedes-Benz’s plant in Vance, Alabama, held their own
vote the following month, but a union-busting campaign that has led to
investigations in both the United States and Germany proved
victorious: when the ballots were counted, 56 percent were against
unionizing. “Ultimately these workers are going to win,” Fain said
following the completion of the vote count. “We have no regrets in
this fight.”
Since Fain took charge, the UAW has become far more open to debate and
dissent, not only as they carry out organizing campaigns but as the
new leaders and the energized membership get used to wielding their
political power. The international executive board voted to endorse
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in January, with Fain noting
Trump’s long anti-union history in a speech announcing the
endorsement (“Trump is a scab,” one of Fain’s go-to lines, has
since become a popular refrain). The endorsement provoked dissent in
some corners of the union; after all, the UAW had called for a
permanent ceasefire in Gaza months prior, an aim the Biden
administration had failed to achieve. In the lead up to the union’s
endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, the debate continued:
should democratizing the union also mean democratizing the process for
endorsing political candidates? What does international solidarity
require of a union whose government is party to a genocide?
Fain seems comfortable with such heated debate. When I asked him about
the narrow 54.7 percent contract ratification vote at General Motors
last fall, he said, “It sends a great message from the membership to
the corporate class that, hey, they just got a record contract and
they’re still not happy with it.” One gets the sense of a leader
disciplined by an abiding faith in union democracy, an understanding
that the well-worn labor assertion that a union leader’s power comes
from the membership is, in fact, true.
Of course, union reform efforts didn’t start with UAWD. Fain himself
traveled to last year’s convention of the Teamsters for a Democratic
Union (TDU), a reform caucus in the International Brotherhood of
Teamsters that has been the pole of rank-and-file reformers across the
U.S. labor movement since its founding in 1976. There, he told the
room of union militants that neither his presidency nor UAWD nor the
Big Three strike would exist without TDU (as well as _Labor Notes_,
an intertwined organizing and publishing project).
But the UAW’s transformation has resonated. In the past year, a
reform caucus has launched in the historically staid International
Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), where members nearly
struck nationwide during their 2021 contract negotiations with the
Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Reform
campaigns have gained traction, too, in the United Food and Commercial
Workers and among rail machinists, efforts bolstered by those
workers’ grueling experience during the pandemic. Fain’s use of
his bully pulpit to speak not only to his members but to the entire
working class is helping fuel pro-union sentiment and organizing
drives in an enormous range of industries, fitful though they may be
in the face of dysfunctional labor laws and still lacking in the
coordination and resources so desperately needed and desired by much
of the U.S. public.
The inspiration for democratization isn’t only coming from the
outside. Adam Conover, a television writer and member of the Writers
Guild of America West board of directors who was on its negotiating
committee during last year’s 148-day nationwide strike, told me that
he believes it was precisely the WGA leadership’s responsiveness to
democratic pressure from members that allowed them to hold out for so
long and win so much of what they proposed to the AMPTP.
“We turned our democracy into power, and by doing so, we were able
to force the companies to do what we wanted,” Conover said. “Most
unions don’t use member power in that way but they should, because
having been a part of that process as a neophyte, it was enormously
powerful. It was a life-changing revelation for me to experience, and
now I’m a proselytizer of it.”
“All we really want is union democracy so we can make decisions on
behalf of the membership that the _membership_ sent us to make,”
the UAW’s Houldieson told me in Detroit back in March 2023. “We
don’t want any more top-down strategy, because look where it got us.
The membership doesn’t want to go there again.”
_ALEX PRESS is a staff writer at Jacobin. Her writing has appeared
in the Washington Post, the Nation, Vox, and n+1, among many other
places._
_This article is adapted from a forthcoming collection, Labor’s
Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to
Today [[link removed]], edited by
Nelson Lichtenstein and Samir Sonti. Reprinted with permission from
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