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DECEMBER 1, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

Revolution at the UAW

And that's hardly the only labor news in a tumultuous week.

There's enough significant labor news this week for the mainstream
media to resurrect their long-discarded labor beats. Noam Scheiber does
a fine job at the

**Times**, as does Josh Eidelson at

**Bloomberg BusinessWeek**, but they can't cover it all by themselves.
Progressive journals and websites do have designated reporters, but most
legacy mainstream outlets still lack the dedicated beat reporters who
are essential to covering events and issues that affect damn near
everyone.

Turning to this week's news, there are, to begin, all the issues
raised by the impasse in bargaining a contract for railway workers and
the government's efforts to impose a settlement, about which I'll
have a piece up tomorrow.

Then there's the ongoing strike of teaching and research assistants,
postdocs, and academic researchers-48,000 strong-at the University
of California, the largest strike in the history of American
universities. Earlier this week, the university reached a settlement
with the postdocs and academic researchers, who number 12,000, but is
apparently still far from presenting anything adequate to the 36,000 TAs
and RAs-grad students whose yearly incomes come in at the mid-20
thousands, which is hardly enough to cover the cost of a rented room in
California's grotesquely inflated housing market. In a model display
of solidarity, the postdocs and academic researchers aren't returning
to the classrooms and are continuing to walk the picket lines until UC
can settle with its grad students. Which could take a while.

In fact, it was relatively easy for UC to come up with significant
raises, subsidized child care, and the like for its postdocs and
academic researchers, as most of their jobs are largely funded by such
agencies of the federal government as the National Institutes of Health,
as UC academic researcher Mao-Mei Liu notes in her first-person account
<[link removed]>
of the issues behind the UC strike, which we posted earlier today. But
the feds provide no funding for the TAs and RAs, whose paychecks come
entirely from UC's till. Which is one reason among many why Gov. Gavin
Newsom, who appoints UC's regents, should involve himself in the
process, as this is a problem that only the state can adequately
resolve.

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As I noted earlier this week, one reason the striking workers can
sustain and afford their strike is that their union, the United Auto
Workers, has a sizable strike fund-close to a billion dollars, a
legacy of the days when they could fund a long strike of their
then-300,000-plus members at General Motors. Today, of course, not only
is their GM division at about one-sixth that size, but their entire
membership, university employees included, is about 400,000. While
successful at organizing grad students, the UAW hasn't been able to
organize an auto factory-chiefly, those making German and Japanese
cars in the ferociously anti-union South-in decades. Worse yet, a
number of their leaders have been convicted of serious dipping into the
union's treasury for personal, often sybaritic, purposes. For which
reason, the courts have ordered the UAW to select its new officers
through a rank-and-file election, as opposed to a vote of convention
delegates, which has been the practice since the union formed in 1936.
This week, the votes in that election are being counted.

And, holy shit, the first results appear to signal little short of a
revolution. Three incumbent regional directors have been ousted, one in
the historic UAW bastion of Detroit, and another in New England (where
the new regional director will be the former head of the UAW's Harvard
grad student local). At this stage in the vote-counting, incumbent UAW
President Ray Curry is trailing insurgent candidate Shawn Fain by 2,500
votes, and the insurgent candidate for the union's number two post,
secretary-treasurer, has opened a 13,000-vote lead over the
administration-backed candidate.

The insurgents ran on the slate of Members United, which encompasses the
candidates of a caucus of UAW members entitled Unite All Workers for
Democracy (UAWD). The caucus is somewhat analogous to Teamsters for a
Democratic Union (TDU), which spent decades criticizing Teamster
leadership until their endorsed candidates managed to win control of the
Teamsters-in another court-ordered rank-and-file election-last year.
UAWD is newer to the game than the TDU, and some of the UAW's
problems-like the difficulties in unionizing Southern
factories-aren't going away no matter who controls the union. But
it's been a very long time since the UAW had a significant cadre of
the socialist and social democratic leaders it enjoyed, and flourished
with, during the presidencies of Walter Reuther and Doug Fraser. How the
UAWD will navigate the union remains to be seen, but they will gain
simply by replacing the stale, frequently exhausted, and often corrupt
leadership the union has endured in recent years. One thing that's
certain is that the union's campus organizing will certainly increase.

To what extent the UAWD will actually control the union won't be clear
until the vote count is completed over the next several days. In some
regions, the only candidates are administration incumbents, and the
vote-counting for the two top offices is far from complete. That said,
the union that, from the 1940s through the 1970s, was the only social
democratic institution in U.S. history to wield real power and win real
gains for workers, may well have a new birth of radicalism. We'll see
how that goes.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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The Corruption of the Legal Profession
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A new book shows how corporate law firms bear great responsibility for
the degradation of the rule of law. BY BRAD MILLER

The 'Dobbs' Promise Gets Tested at the Supreme Court
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A Supreme Court case being heard next week will begin to test whether
the elimination of rights in 'Dobbs' will remain limited to
abortion. BY MARC SPINDELMAN

What America Can Learn From Donald Trump's Greatest Accomplishment
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On the COVID-19 vaccines, well, you have to hand it to him. BY RYAN
COOPER

Why I'm on Strike at the University of California
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On how to stop a history of recurrent exploitation BY MAO-MEI LIU

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