by By Mara Rafferty
The Strike at the Big Three Automakers Showed the Changes that have Happened in the UAW – and the Challenges to Come
This year’s UAW contract campaign at the Big Three automakers (General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis [formerly Fiat Chrysler]) represented a historic step forward for US labor unions. It was one of the largest and most well-publicized contract campaigns in recent years, and it represented yet another step forward in the labor resurgence that’s been sweeping the country. As a major manufacturing strike in a key industry in the US, it got major press and media attention, and brought the debate about our rigged economic system into the national spotlight in a way it hasn’t been since Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. The strike was also a key moment in the movement for environmental justice, and its militancy highlighted what is possible through a radical decades-long struggle for reform within labor.
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A Class-Struggle Strike
Under newly-elected leaders from the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) slate, the union approached the Big Three contract campaign with a strong drive to win over the sympathies of working-class people across the country. From the outset, new UAW president Shawn Fain served as a spokesperson for direct appeals to the US working class to fight to make up for their losses since the Great Recession. “Record profits should mean record contracts,” was not just aimed at the Big Three, but employers across manufacturing and the broader US economy. Fain spoke early in the campaign about why the union was fighting for a four-day workweek with no loss in pay, talking about how all working people need more holidays, weekends, and time off to live full lives as human beings.
The vast majority in the US polled in September and October supported the strike, including conservatives and Trump voters.
Putting the Justice in a Just Environmental Transition
Already, battery and Electric Vehicles (EV) plants opening across the US are paying low wages for difficult work in hazardous conditions. Not only are jobs getting worse, they’re getting fewer; since EVs have vastly fewer parts than combustion vehicles, the transition to EVs will leave tens of thousands of workers out in the cold without a job.
When climate policy means eliminating good jobs and creating shoddy jobs, it shouldn’t be surprising when working class people oppose it.
Throughout the strike, the UAW made justice in the electrification transition a key demand. The union bargained hard for – and won – important policies like job guarantees for those whose jobs have been eliminated, prevailing wages at joint ventures, the right to strike over plant closures, and, maybe the crowning achievement, the application of the GM Master Agreement to battery plants nationwide.
Moving forward, it will be an uphill struggle to win fair conditions at Tesla, non-union vehicle manufacturers, and the myriad supply chains that support them. Beyond that, there are battles to be fought in other industries like energy production, construction, and freight transportation. The UAW strike shows what a more just transition could look like: one where workers are guaranteed good, union jobs.
A More Democratic Strike
The Big Three auto contracts cover 140,000 members. The massive, nationwide scope of the negotiations, together with the longstanding lack of democratic life within the union, has traditionally meant that national UAW contract campaigns are heavily top-down affairs.
The Fain administration has taken major steps to open up the process, and the Big Three Bargaining Convention was much more open and democratic than its predecessors. During the campaign, Fain used Facebook Live streams to speak with members each week, sharing relatively in-depth summaries of key points in the negotiations with members. These livestreams have been a hallmark of Fain’s presidency, and their spontaneous, genuine, and often irreverent tone has signaled that the leadership is speaking to people in a much more unfiltered way than before.
However, the key decisions about the strike have been made by Fain and the elected leadership behind the scenes. Fain’s announcements have been very much that: announcements about what’s happening – a way of keeping members in the loop about a process that they don’t have direct control over, beyond strike authorization and tentative agreement (TA) ratification votes.
We should be balanced, recognizing that a nationally-run negotiation process does need to be centrally coordinated and centrally run, and having an elected, empowered leadership is essential for that. At the same time, we should look clearly at the limitations of the Fain approach.
Stand-Up Strike Strategy
Take, for example, the stand-up strike strategy and the process by which it was arrived at. There’s much that can be said about it. There’s an argument that the union could have won more, and set an example for US workers, by waging a full strike of all members from the very beginning. The merits of that can and have been debated in the opinion pages, but what’s important is that they weren’t debated in the ranks of the union.
Throughout the strike, the news media attempted to paint Fain and UAW leaders as the unilateral directors of the strike – and they weren’t completely wrong. Members listened for livestream updates on Fridays, a process that kept them in the loop but not feeling fully empowered about making decisions. Members talked about being called out onto picket lines, and wondering when a settlement would be reached so they’d be called back to work, and even where there was a willingness to go along with the group, there was a pervasive attitude nationwide that the leaders were calling the shots and the members were following.
The leadership took steps to strengthen rank-and-file involvement, from encouraging plans to form strike committees, training them in holding “10-minute meetings” on the shop floor, training picket captains, etc.
However, there was little feeling at the plant level that the decisions of members in their workplaces would substantively change the strategy for the strike.
In his livestreams, Fain would talk about how he had conferred with the leadership of union locals in making decisions about which plans would strike and when. It says something that this was a step forward from the way the previous GM strike, as well as other decisions in the UAW, had been made. However, the age of social media and online forums for discussion and voting could have been used to facilitate more national dialogue.
Power to the Workers
In a future strike, individual workplaces and plants could have more local meetings for discussing strategies about the strike. Being able to discuss at the local level and pass ideas and feedback up to the national level would help the union to make decisions that even better reflect the drive of its members to fight when it’s time.
Leaders of union locals can encourage members to play an even bigger role in the internal life of the union, whether that’s as shop stewards, picket captains, or just doing the hard day to day work of organizing for grievances or to keep membership up in the post-Janus era. In the context of the stand-up strike, if that were to be used as a tactic in the future, individual plants could take votes to go out on strike at key moments. Even this single change would be a way to give individual members more buy-in and more say about the strategy throughout the strike. It’d necessitate members being even more clued in to what was happening in negotiations, and give them direct control over the steps they are taking against the boss.
The contract ratification process can also be even more inclusive and participatory. Right now, tentative agreements follow a lengthy path from the bargaining team to a wider national leadership, then to the leadership of regions, then to the leadership of locals, and finally to the membership. In the meantime, membership is informed about the contract through white papers, info sessions online, town halls, etc.
It’s worth noting that the agreements are hundreds of pages of complex policies, and it is well worth it to have mechanisms to explain the changes to members with context, rather than asking everyone to sift through hundreds of pages of fine print.
Still, the number of steps before the agreement goes to a membership vote, together with the fact that members go back to work while the agreement is pending, all give a huge amount of weight in favor of the agreement reached by the bargaining team.
In this concrete case, despite the “No” votes of several key local unions, it seems clear that the historic gains in the contract would have led the members to ratify it had it been directly submitted to them. Members across the union view the strike as a success. Still, with hard fights and hard decisions ahead, we have an urgent task of building the confidence of members, as a nationwide body, to directly control their own contract fights and have ownership over them.
New Directions for the UAW?
The lack of rank-and-file involvement isn’t specific to UAW; nationwide and across industries, our unions need more empowered members playing a more vibrant role in their unions’ day-to-day organizing. The process of reforming the UAW has shown an incredible example of how unions can shake off ossified and bureaucratic leadership, and how movements for internal reform can translate directly into more militant strategies that win significant changes and benefits that go directly into members’ pockets.
However, with a razor-thin margin of victory in the 2022 UAW elections for a new leadership based on democratic change, those of us seeking to reform the UAW can’t rest on our laurels. It’s time to push forward in the fight to strengthen rank-and-file democracy in the union and create a cohesive democratic body of workers, where a return to the dictatorial and aimless Administration Caucus is both undesirable and impossible.
The UAWD slate that won office in 2023 ran on an anti-corruption and pro-transparency agenda, as well as concrete demands for the Big Three Campaign. There’s clearly more to do on those fronts, but it’s also worth noting that many of the demands in the anti-corruption arena were in reaction to the old Administration Caucus leadership. Now, with the Administration Caucus out of power, the UAWD movement has work to do to define how it intends to strengthen democracy when it holds power.
Another caucus within the UAW, the newly minted Western States Organizing for Power caucus, was incorporated this year, and brings a promising focus on member-driven campaigns, participatory bargaining, increased focus on member organizing, organizing the unorganized, and strengthening the UAW’s campaigns for racial, economic, and social justice.
UAWD and WSOP represent promising trends in terms of members being able to fight to improve their union from within.
UAW members inspired the working class in the 1936 sit-down strike, and have now inspired the working class again in 2023. Moving forward, as the labor movement faces crises and dangers beyond imagination, now is the time for the union to continue showing the way forward to build the kind of militant, democratic, rank-and-file-led movement that is needed to challenge the corporate class and the system of capitalism itself.
Mara Rafferty
Writing here in a personal capacity, Mara has been a member and organizer in the UAW since 2016 and is a member of the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) and the Western States Organizing for Power (WSOP) caucuses. She’s a member of DSA and R&R.
