The Militants’ Victory at the UAW

Over the past four years, the United Auto Workers—once the most influential and progressive union on the planet—has shown clear signs of reviving some of its past glory and moxie. In recent decades, the union’s once-stellar record had been tarnished by the declining fortunes of America’s three legacy automakers (GM, Ford, and the renamed Chrysler, now doing business as Stellantis) and the concomitantly paltry contracts the union had bargained, by the UAW’s inability to unionize the foreign-owned auto plants spread across the South, and by the spending of union funds on the semi-lavish lifestyles of some union officers (including two past presidents), a number of whom have served time in federal pens for their misdeeds. As a result of those felonies, the union reached a court settlement that brought its internal workings under the oversight of a court-appointed monitor, who four years ago shifted the union’s process of electing its officers from the delegated conventions it had been holding since its founding in 1936 to elections by the rank-and-file membership.

More from Harold Meyerson

In those 2022 elections, the members voted in a new slate of outsider-reformers, headed by a then-obscure staffer named Shawn Fain. The new president brought in a new staff, including a number of militants who’d worked on the fringes of the labor movement (some as left-wing journalists, some as community organizers) for some time. Four years later, they—primarily, Fain—boast an impressive record. As the union’s contracts with the Big Three expired, the UAW embarked on a “stand-up” strike in which the union engaged in sudden, surprise shutdowns of selected plants—a strategy that plainly discombobulated GM, Ford, and Stellantis. On YouTube and Zoom, Fain would explain to members both the union’s contract goals and the strategies for winning them on a regular basis, as well as discussing the broader context in which the UAW was waging this fight: the shift of corporate revenues from employees’ wages to profits and shareholders’ payouts, and the huge levels of economic inequality that resulted from these practices. Thus contextualized, the union’s demands resonated throughout liberal America (as they once had during the mid-20th century when Walter Reuther headed the union), to the point that President Joe Biden even joined a UAW picket line.

It all worked. The union won record contracts from the Big Three, which included wage increases and a restoration of yearly cost-of-living adjustments that combined came to a 30 percent wage hike over the four-year life of the contract, with even greater increases for the newer hires and part-time workers whom the companies had brought on in recent decades.

As well, UAW organizers finally succeeded in unionizing a foreign-owned auto plant in the South: the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which it followed up by securing a landmark contract. Its successes in organizing and winning good contracts for academic workers in California and the Northeast continued apace. For all of which, Fain’s re-election should have looked like a shoo-in.

There was, however, a pebble in that shoe. Fain’s hard-charging new staffers had encountered some hard-resisting long-timers, and disputes developed, particularly between Fain and the union’s secretary-treasurer, Margaret Mock. These disputes wouldn’t likely have amounted to much but for the intervention of the federal monitor, who opted to investigate and threatened to criminalize some of these disputes, even as they struck many observers (including this reporter, as I wrote in a Prospect feature story earlier this year) as unexceptional union infighting. Moreover, Neil Barofsky, the federal monitor, only began his investigation and his allegations after he’d clashed with Fain over the union’s call for a cease-fire in Israel’s war on Gaza—a question clearly outside the purview of a federal monitor charged with oversight of the union’s processes.

Barofsky’s allegations heightened the disputes between Fain and two of the union’s leading officials, Mock and Stellantis division vice president Rich Boyer, who opted to challenge Fain for the union’s presidency in this fall’s rank-and-file election, even as Fain backed a rival to Mock for the secretary-treasurer’s post. In my Prospect piece this spring, I’d written that I doubted the inside-the-headquarters disputes that Barofsky had both brought to light and inflamed would matter much to UAW members, particularly when compared to the notably successful record Fain had amassed in winning contracts and organizing a major factory in the South, over the opposition of the region’s political establishment.

Turns out that my doubts were well founded. Last week, the as yet unofficial results from the union’s election were tallied. Fain was re-elected with 68 percent of the vote, to a mere 14 percent for Boyer and less than that for the other presidential candidates. Fain’s candidate for secretary-treasurer also won with an identical 68 percent of the vote, and all the other candidates that Fain backed for the union’s three vice presidencies and its regional directors won their races, too.

The members’ vote of confidence in Fain’s leadership ensures that the union will continue on the more militant course that Fain has laid out. Organizing efforts at the non-union factories in the South and Midwest will likely be intensified. Fain has long vowed that when the union’s contracts at the Big Three expire in 2028, he’ll be working not just on more militant strike tactics to win a good contract, but encouraging other unions to join the UAW’s striking members in strikes of their own—something of a 21st-century version of a general strike, intended to close at least some of the huge gap that has emerged between corporate America’s profits and corporate America’s wages. That would be a tall order for any union leader, but Fain now has won the support he needs to go ahead and try.