[Unite All Workers for Democracy, the reform caucus in the United
Auto Workers, just won sweeping victories in leadership elections. Now
they’re looking to transform the UAW, one of the largest unions in
the country, into a democratic fighting machine.]
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UAW REFORMERS JUST WON CONTROL OF THE UNION. THEY WANT TO TURN IT
INTO A FIGHTING UNION.  
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Chris Viola
March 18, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Unite All Workers for Democracy, the reform caucus in the United
Auto Workers, just won sweeping victories in leadership elections. Now
they’re looking to transform the UAW, one of the largest unions in
the country, into a democratic fighting machine. _

United Auto Workers (UAW) members picket outside of General Motors
Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly in Detroit, Michigan, as they strike on
October 16, 2019., (Jeff Kowalsky / AFP via Getty Images)

 

They’re trying to figure out how they can steal this one,” one of
my coworkers said after I told her the news that the ballot count in
the United Auto Workers (UAW) would be delayed by yet another week.
“They” meaning the caucus that has held power in the UAW for the
past seven decades, led by President Ray Curry. A week has passed
since our conversation, and reform challenger Shawn Fain currently
stands with a 505-vote lead, with only roughly six hundred unresolved
challenged ballots. He is now the presumptive winner
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On Thursday, the Curry team sent out a press release
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with accusations of impropriety by the reformer campaign, including
questioning the eligibility of recently elected Region 9
director Daniel Vicente
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about “disenfranchisement of UAW members.” These are odd claims
— voters’ information was kept under the slapdash mailing address
system the old guard has controlled for years — but it’s clear the
incumbent Administration Caucus is fighting tooth and nail to hold
onto office.

Vicente, a machine operator in Pottstown, Pennsylvania and his
local’s secretary and education committee chair, is a member of the
UAW Members United slate, a group endorsed by the rank-and-file caucus
Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD). Five of their other candidates
have already won their positions outright. Secretary-Treasurer
Margaret Mock, Region 1 director LaShawn English, and Region 9A
director Brandon Mancilla easily prevailed over their only opposition
from the incumbent slate.

The UAW Members United candidates vying for two of the three slots,
Rich Boyer and Mike Booth, both passed the threshold to avoid a runoff
election while facing the three Curry team candidates, along with
three independent candidates. The independent candidate for UAW Region
2B, David Green, also ran against a Curry team candidate and won
outright.

We’re building a union that will help every worker realize their
true potential so the working class can start winning again.

Since joining UAWD, I have met workers from other plants, companies,
and sectors of our union, from aerospace, agriculture implement, and
other manufacturing, along with many higher education and legal
service workers. And it’s confirmed what I’ve thought for years:
our union is full of some of the strongest, smartest, and most driven
people I’ll ever meet. Unite All Workers for Democracy isn’t just
a clever name. We’re building a union that will help every worker
realize their true potential so the working class can start winning
again.

Building the Caucus

UAWD formed during the 2019 UAW strike at General Motors and the
corruption scandal that led to thirteen high-ranking union officials
being charged in federal court for accepting kickbacks and bribes and
embezzling union funds. UAWD’s founding members — rank-and-file
workers and retirees — joined an effort with other workers across
the union to pass resolutions at their locals to call for a special
convention to change elections for the International Executive Board
(IEB) from the convention system, in which delegates vote on nominated
candidates, to a secret ballot system of direct elections open to all
UAW members. The constitutional conventions have been carefully
controlled by the current IEB: candidates were selected from the ranks
of a single party within the union — the Administration Caucus,
established by Walter Reuther
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the UAW’s early years — for over seventy years.

Efforts to reform the election system were cut short during the
COVID-19 pandemic, with most locals canceling their meetings for
months or even more than a year. Many manufacturing and warehouse
locals did not allow for meetings over Zoom. The effort to win direct
elections was given new life when a consent decree between the union
and the federal government allowed for a secret ballot referendum for
all members over the question of switching from the convention and
delegate system to direct elections — what is commonly referred to
as “one-member, one-vote.”

After this, UAWD and many other members began promoting awareness of
the referendum and the need for direct elections. The referendum
passed
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two to one, despite not much effort to promote it beyond the efforts
of UAWD and many other advocates. (Turnout, however, was anemic at
just under 14 percent. Most members either didn’t know about the
referendum vote or became too cynical over the years to even bother.)

UAWD kept on after this win, focusing efforts on the 2022
constitutional convention. We trained activists to run for delegates
and put out several resolutions for UAW members to pass in their
locals. One frequently submitted resolution, an increase of weekly
strike pay from $275 to $400, was voted in by the UAW IEB just under
two months before the convention.

As the convention kicked off, UAWD members started to plan for a
difficult fight. They decided on a few key resolutions to attempt to
pull out of committee, one of which would have been to confront the
issue of tiers. When a contract contains tiers, a subset of workers
starts at a lower pay rate and/or weaker benefit package than others,
topping out well below the maximum pay of the rest of the workers as
well. It’s been impossible for workers on lower tiers to catch up.
New hires under contracts with subsidiaries are still paid less than
what I was making when hired in 2006 as a summer temp.

Defined-benefit pensions are also a thing of the past, with workers
having to make do with a 401(k) match they may not be able to afford
to take full advantage of with their lower pay, while also having to
manage their portfolio on their own. Even the annual profit-sharing
payout, a big local news item early every year, only amounts to 25
percent of the amount workers under the master agreement receive.

Unfortunately, UAWD delegates were not able to enshrine a “no
tiers” policy in our constitution, with two-thirds of delegates
being swayed by arguments that it would tie the bargaining team’s
hands, or that it should be an issue voted on in a separate bargaining
convention. But we forced a debate on it, and we also passed a motion
to begin paying strike pay on the first day of a strike (instead of
day eight, as was the policy in the past). This makes strikes easier
for those who haven’t worked long enough to save up a financial
cushion.

Passing a resolution from the floor should be a normal development for
a convention, but it’s a very rare occurrence in the UAW. Upon
reading the minutes from previous conventions, you might think there
was a contest to see which delegate could list the most positive
qualities of their regional director before speaking. Upon watching
videos of the conventions, you might think yelling and using a
noisemaker to drown out a delegate nominating a candidate not put
forward by the current administration was a totally normal and
appropriate response.

This was a new convention with a caucus organized to flip the script.

But this was a new convention with a caucus organized to flip the
script. Even those not in UAWD felt emboldened by what was shown to be
possible. One delegate, then on strike at Case New Holland, brought a
resolution to increase strike pay to $500 a week. It passed easily.
But two days later, at the behest of the leadership, another delegate
brought the same issue to another vote in the last few hours of the
convention. It was defeated as easily as it was adopted.

Were the delegates more clearheaded in the final day than they were
earlier in the week? Or were they influenced by the Administration
Caucus, which wasn’t quite ready to turn over the convention
proceedings to the membership — nor to make striking more
attractive?

The convention was also where the nominations for the various IEB
positions were made. Afterward, election season began. UAWD members
began to leaflet our locals. Phone- and text-bankers reached some of
the major activists who helped us get the word out about the
referendum one year ago to measure support for the UAW Members United
slate. A communications strategy committee and even a meme team formed
to plan our messaging both online and off.

Our candidates campaigned hard for themselves as well. In the week of
the election there were meet and greets at local bars. Some candidates
planned cookouts in parks and fundraisers at bowling alleys. Several
took a road trip together to leaflet at the gates at plants all over
the Midwest and met up with supporters nearby. All that was left to do
was to keep up the momentum through the election and hope it resonated
with the membership.

It worked.

Unite All Workers

It’s common in elections to focus on how one side or the other
“got it all wrong,” but I have no doubt about the love for our
union the vast majority of Curry voters have. The same is true for
members who sat out the referendum and both rounds of the election.
Nonvoting members and others have not seen their union as a force for
good in their lives, seeing it instead as a group of people who make
deals with their employers for them every few years when their
contracts are up.

To treat one’s union as a third party in this way is often seen as
falling for a right-wing talking point and discouraged by most people
in the labor movement. But I don’t think that most people who refer
to the union in this manner do so on purpose, or even realize it’s a
bad way of thinking of their union. We need to build unions that
don’t simply offer to fight _for_ their membership, but
fight _with_ them and constantly challenge them to fight for issues
they care about.

What’s stood in the way is a caucus whose only ideology has been to
hold onto power at the expense of everything else. The caucus’s
recent attacks are emblematic of its attitude of blaming everyone but
itself. The bargaining convention is roughly a week away, and the fact
that the caucus is willing to drag the election through for a
last-ditch, certain-to-fail effort instead of letting the delegates
get to work tells workers everything they need to know.

We need to build unions that don’t simply offer to
fight _for_ their membership, but fight _with_ them and constantly
challenge them to fight for issues they care about.

Our fights on the horizon are many. Harassment and discrimination are
still major issues in all workplaces. My union siblings in higher
education
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up against universities that function as unaccountable judge and juror
and often protect harassers in positions of power. Tiers have also
made it into some of their agreements as well. In auto, we have made
progress on eliminating tiers after ratifying our last contract, but
the door has been left wide open for companies to hire workers at
electric vehicle (EV) plants who will follow completely separate
contracts based on their working for a subsidiary or as a part of a
joint venture with an electronics or battery manufacturer. And even
solving this particular issue won’t fully endear auto workers to
EVs. There are still issues workers have with the transition, such as
affordability of the products and the integrity of the electric grid.
Several major outages over the past two years alone have left over a
million residents in the Detroit area without power, many for over a
week at a time.

There’s a phrase on the shop floor, “they can do that,” that
you’ll hear when management does whatever it wants. The same
hand-wave response can be used whenever union leaders act without
input from the membership, or when politicians tune out their
constituents. But we’re building a union that understands that our
power is in the working class, and we only win when we bring everyone
together to face our problems head-on. So goodbye to “they can do
that.” We’re all sick of hearing you. It’s time we set our own
terms. It’s time we start saying, “we can do that!”

_CHRIS VIOLA is an auto worker and member of UAW Local 22, Unite All
Workers for Democracy, and Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of
America._

_Subscribe to JACOBIN today, get four beautiful editions a year, and
help us build a real, socialist alternative to billionaire media._

* Labor
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* Union Elections
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