Ringo Chiu via AP
United Auto Workers members take part in a protest at the University of California, Los Angeles, November 15, 2022, in Los Angeles.
People following the strike of 48,000 teaching and research assistants and postdocs at the University of California—not just the largest strike ever of university employees, but also the largest strike of any kind the nation has seen in a number of years—may understand just why the grad students who do much of the actual teaching at America’s foremost public university have taken to the picket lines. Annual incomes of $20,000 or $30,000 fall abysmally short of covering just the cost of housing in America’s priciest state, let alone when the price of gas and food is laid atop that.
But I suspect people following the strike also suffer from a kind of mild categorical bewilderment. These grad students and postdocs are all members of the United Auto Workers—at first glance, a union not only far removed from an educational or service employee union that would seem a more logical choice, but also a union that has been declining steadily for the past 40-plus years.
In that first glance, not much about the UAW suggests a proficiency at organizing or attracting college students to its ranks. But first glances don’t tell the whole story.
In the heyday of American manufacturing, the legendary UAW was the nation’s mightiest union, and did more to create the blue-collar middle class than any other U.S. institution. But even at its height, the UAW seldom strayed from heavy industry: By 1950, it was the union for the workers at General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, at Caterpillar and John Deere, and at many of the big aircraft manufacturers. Thereafter, it made news by striking and bargaining with those pre-globalization behemoths and, until the late 1970s, winning the best union contracts in the country.
That long-gone UAW was so exciting a place to be that it did attract a host of students—not to organize campuses, but to go to work in the plants, to be part of a union that was “the vanguard in this country,” in the words of its president, Walter Reuther, who also declared, “We are the architects of America’s future.” In its first decade, the UAW waged the most innovative strikes (shutting down GM by seizing its key factories) with the most ambitious goals (shifting control of GM to representatives of management, the union, and the government) of any union.
While it never could compel GM management to surrender its control of the company, the UAW did compel GM and its corporate peers to recognize its locals across the country, and to give their workers health insurance and pensions, yearly cost-of-living adjustments, yearly increases that matched the companies’ increases in productivity, and, when the plants closed down each year to adjust production lines for their new car models, company payments that topped off the unemployment insurance their members collected so that the UI plus the payments equaled their members’ regular wages. All those gains were UAW innovations; many of them (but not all) spread to other well-financed and unionized industries during the three decades following World War II.
Today’s grad students are often among the most militant of a historically militant generation.
But after the 1970s, the UAW ran out of innovations. In more recent decades, the UAW made news by its repeated failed attempts to organize autoworkers in the anti-union South, by its repeated failed attempts to block the trade deals that hollowed out American industry, and in the last few years by the convictions of union leaders who’d appropriated some of their members’ dues for personal gain.
Facing foreign competition from a rebuilt Germany and Japan, the auto companies fought the UAW more fiercely than before, aided by the steady erosion of the laws designed to protect workers. When the foreign competition came to the U.S., with Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, and their like opening factories in the anti-union South, the UAW’s efforts to organize those plants invariably ended in defeat. Southern pols would weigh in to threaten disaster if their states went union, local establishments made clear their towns would collapse if those factories (which, after all, paid better than Winn-Dixie) would be unionized, and, by the 1980s, labor law had been so weakened that a company could fire the workers leading the union campaigns and suffer no penalties, though such actions were patently illegal.
Besides which, manufacturing commanded a shrinking share of the American economy and workforce, and the UAW didn’t seem able to expand beyond that sector.
Well, not all of the UAW.
Enter District 65, which was an independent New York–based left-wing union founded in the 1930s. Initially, District 65 organized workers in the city’s small retail and manufacturing shops—too small for major unions to bother with, and too racially diverse for the AFL’s craft unions to view with anything other than horror. Organizing small shops required the union to have an activist culture, replete with a higher share of organizers and shop stewards than their union peers. Its activism was political as well: District 65 was among the first, perhaps the first, union to support the civil rights movement and to oppose the Vietnam War.
But District 65 also played on the same turf, geographically and ideologically, as the most avowedly social democratic region of the UAW—its New York and New England region, whose leaders also provided significant assistance to the civil rights and anti-war activists whom other unions were slow to support if they supported them at all. (Many actively opposed them.) Recognizing the synergies, District 65 affiliated with the UAW in the early 1980s, and by the late ’80s, the UAW—recognizing it needed help if it was to expand its reach beyond a shrinking industrial sector—charged it with organizing white-collar workers.
This history made the UAW and its District 65–infused Northeastern region particularly attractive to the kinds of student radicals and progressives who agitated for unions. In recent years, the grad students at New York’s leading private universities, Columbia and NYU, have unionized as UAW locals and now work under the terms of their locals’ contracts with those universities. That’s no small achievement. In states that have legalized collective bargaining for public employees, efforts to unionize employees at state colleges and universities are bolstered by the electoral support that unions can give the political leaders ultimately in charge of those colleges and universities.
But private colleges and universities aren’t overseen by people who run for office, and the people who run those colleges and universities have shown themselves to be fiercely opposed to letting their employees—most especially, their grad student employees—go union. That the UAW has managed to win strikes, recognition, and contracts at such universities is almost as groundbreaking as its earliest successes in manufacturing.
Given that history, and the union’s recent proficiency at organizing and representing grad student employees, it’s no surprise that those in the UC system opted to go with the UAW, too. Most especially since today’s grad students are often among the most militant of a historically militant generation.
Moreover, despite its shrunken size, the UAW still boasts a major asset from its history: a large strike fund, perhaps the largest of any American union. At the height of its power, when negotiating with the Big Three, the UAW customarily had to go on strike at one of those companies to win the gains it sought for its members, and those gains, once won, would then be replicated in its contracts with the other two auto giants. That meant that the UAW had to be able to pay strike benefits to its members at a level that could keep them from crossing picket lines to resume receiving paychecks. When it struck GM, as it often did from the 1940s through the 1970s, that meant it had to have a fund large enough to pay the more than 300,000 members it then had at GM for weeks, perhaps months.
Today, the union’s membership has dwindled from 1.9 million in the late 1970s to roughly 400,000 today, but its strike fund is still set at a level to sustain a strike at GM—or at UC. An article by Dan Boguslaw in The Intercept last week reported that there was $815 million in the strike fund last year, and UAW sources tell me that for now, roughly $145 million has been allotted to support the striking UC grad students, in the form of $400 weekly stipends (not much, but also not much lower than many of those grad students’ weekly take-home pay). Presumably, the union can allot more funds if negotiations and the strike drag on.
With their combined 48,000 members, the four UAW locals of UC teaching and research assistants and postdocs now represent more members than those employed by Fiat Chrysler, and their numbers rank them behind only the union’s GM and Ford divisions. Size-wise, they’re number three in the UAW’s new Big Three, and the reason they can stay out on strike is that, for all its recent shortcomings, the UAW still boasts a strike fund that enables its members to wage strong and necessary fights for living wages and adequate benefits. Having justice on your side is nice, but a big pot of money can really help justice along.
