“The Working Class Is the Arsenal of Democracy” / by Shawn Fain

_{^{United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain speaking with autoworkers at the a Stellantis assembly plant on July 12, 2023, in Sterling Heights, Michigan. (Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)}}

United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain: “We win by giving working-class people the tools, the inspiration, and the courage to stand up for themselves.”

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

On the night of Friday, April 19, the United Auto Workers (UAW) announced the results of its National Labor Relations Board election at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Workers there voted 73 percent in favor of joining the UAW — a historic victory for the union after two failed drives there, in 2014 and 2019.

Last weekend, fresh off the victory in Chattanooga, UAW president Shawn Fain gave the closing speech at the 2024 Labor Notes Conference in Chicago, Illinois. Jacobin is pleased to publish his remarks here. This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Something’s happening in this country, something we haven’t seen in a long, long time: the working class is standing up.

Forty-eight hours ago, four thousand workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, did what many people said was impossible. We did what the pundits said couldn’t be done. Every time I was interviewed by people and we talked about organizing the South, they would always do an eye roll and say, “Do you really think you can win in the South?”

You know what? Those workers stood up for themselves, and they voted for a union.

I want to recognize a person in this room, because this battle wasn’t won by me. It wasn’t won by one person, but there is one person that we injected into this drive midway through, with a group of people we brought in to help get things back on track and moving, and that’s Carla Villanueva. We took a group of organizers and leaders like Carla, and we injected them right into the belly of the beast in the American South, where the working class has been shut down and shut out and told to shut up for decades — where the pundits said that we couldn’t win.

It’s not just Volkswagen we’re here to talk about today. It’s also the five thousand workers at Mercedes-Benz in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Those brave workers down there are ready to vote for a union, and they’re going to be voting in the second week of May.

It’s also the seven thousand Daimler workers in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. I want to talk about those workers at Daimler because they told management that if they don’t get the deal by next Friday, they’re going to shut shit down.

With our victory at Volkswagen, autoworkers around the country are speaking with one voice now. We’re telling corporate America that their time is up — let me assure you of this. When I was at Daimler Truck, we came up with a saying: when I say, “Time’s up,” you say, “Tick-tock, motherfucker!”

Labor Notes and Union Reform

It’s not just corporate America that has something to learn from our union family at Volkswagen. It’s us — it’s the labor movement. Over twenty years ago, I was a young union activist who was ready to fight the boss. I was ready to fight for a better life. I was stunned when I got elected to my first term as a committeeman at my plant, to find myself in a union with leadership that seemed to have no interest in that fight.

When I travel around and speak about faith, I’ve been known to bring my grandmother’s Bible with me. But as a young union activist, I had another bible: The Troublemaker’s Handbook from Labor Notes. This was my bible when I became a union rep, and it taught me how to fight the boss and how to fight company unionism at the same time. I’ve got a section here flagged. You can see the multiple highlights I have in this section, chapter five, which is “Dealing with Labor-Management Cooperation Programs.” Because we were living them at UAW.

This bible taught me another kind of faith. It taught me faith in the membership; it taught me faith in the working class. It’s that faith that carried the UAW to our new chapter in history.

About two years ago, I put my faith in the membership of UAW, and I ran for office. I was supported by — and I would not be standing here today as president of the UAW if it wasn’t for — the badass members of UAWD [Unite All Workers for Democracy], a reform caucus. I’m a proud member of UAWD. As UAWD said then, we’re putting an end to company unionism, an end to concessions, an end to corruption, an end to tiers.

In UAWD, we were also inspired by the Teamsters for a Democratic Union. We drew a boatload of inspiration from Labor Notes and everybody else who has fought to put the movement back in the labor movement.

We put our faith in the membership, and the membership spoke. The members chose to end company unionism. The members chose to fight. We took that fight straight to the companies of the Big Three, and we took them on like we’ve never taken them on before.

After years of concessions and givebacks, we put forward very bold demands, and we were laughed at for it in the beginning. We kept the companies guessing, after years of them getting a free pass. We won things nobody thought was possible, and we’ve secured the reopening of a plant [near Chicago], Belvidere Assembly, after decades of closures.

When I took over as president, the electric battery industry was on a race to the bottom, with starting pay at $16 an hour, and after seven years $20 top pay. We went after that. We went after putting [electric battery construction] in our master agreements, and we laid the groundwork for a just EV [electric vehicle] transition.

We killed the wage tiers. We shortened the progression to full pay. We won back cost-of-living allowances. We ended the abuse of temps. But more than anything, what we won in that contract is, we got our union back. We put the membership in charge, and we remembered how to fight, and we remembered how to win.

The Working Class Is the Arsenal of Democracy

We noticed something after we won all this, after we put the membership back in charge. It started by the dozens, then the hundreds, and then the thousands. Nonunion autoworkers were reaching out to join our movement.

When I was campaigning for this job, I said a lot that bargaining good contracts leads to organizing success — they go hand in hand. So the stand-up strike wasn’t just about the Big Three. It was about the entire working class.

It was about proving one thing: that the working class can win. We don’t win by playing defense or reacting to things. We don’t win by playing nice with the boss. We don’t win by telling our members what to do, what to say, or how to say it. We win by giving working-class people the tools, the inspiration, and the courage to stand up for themselves.

In the 1940s, during World War II, UAW members were building B-42 Liberator bombers at the Willow Run plant. Those bombers were a big piece in the arsenal of democracy that helped defeat the fascists, who were seeking to divide and conquer the working class. The UAW was responsible for creating the arsenal of democracy that led to the United States winning the war.

At Willow Run, on that day the president visited us on the picket line, I said that we found ourselves facing a new enemy, a new authoritarian threat. But it wasn’t some faraway country; it wasn’t some other state. It was right here at home in our workplaces, and that enemy is corporate greed.

For decades, corporate greed has threatened to destroy the working class. Workers are told that their rights end at the workplace door and told to shut up or starve. For decades, workers have been led to believe there’s no other way. They’ve been led to believe that resistance is futile, that the class war that has been waged on us for decades is unwinnable. Workers have been led to believe that working-class people don’t have the power, the will, or the courage to fight back.

Today, from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Chicago, Illinois, we say: Hell no! We say the working class is the arsenal of democracy and the workers are the liberators. The one thing I’ve seen throughout this fight, and the one thing we know, is that it’s not a CEO that’s going to save us. It’s not a president that’s going to save us. It’s not me and it’s not you — it’s us, and it’s a united working class. That’s how we’re going to win.

_{Shawn Fain is the president of the United Auto Workers.}

A Brief and Unflattering History of General Motors on Film / by Eileen Jones

_{^{Interior shot of a General Motors factory from American Factory. (Netflix, 2019)}}

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

_{With the UAW’s historic strike wins this week, we look back at the history of US auto manufacturing in movies — with a focus on films that show how the auto industry has tried to shaft workers over the decades.}

According to a Bernie Sanders bulletin, the United Auto Workers (UAW) strike is ending with a tentative agreement reached that Sanders sums up like this:

_{Workers won a 25% wage increase over the life of the agreement, temporary workers will get raises of over 150%, there are increased retirement benefits, and they won the right to strike over future plant closures.}

_{In other words, in addition to wage and benefit hikes, they sent a message to the Big Three that they can’t keep closing plants and hurting our communities without consequences.}

On such an occasion, it seems right to mark it with a “why we strike” commemoration, looking at films that show us the typical ways the automotive industry has tried to shaft the worker over the decades.

General Motors (GM), for example, has an unusually large profile in film history, and not at all a flattering one. “The largest automotive company in the world,” as it has so often billed itself in its long, hubristic history, seems to generate resentful portrayals in the entertainment industry.

Even an innocuous light comedy like The Solid Gold Cadillac was inspired — according to coauthor Howard Teichmann, who was working with the legendary wit George S. Kaufman — by a chance remark he overheard that he found hilarious: “Poor General Motors!”

_{^{Paul Douglas and Judy Holliday in The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956) / Columbia Pictures}}

Because who could possibly pity 1950s GM, which bestrode the narrow world like a colossus?

In the hit play of 1953, which became a successful 1956 Judy Holliday film, Teichmann wound up renaming the ubiquitous, filthy rich, and highly corrupt corporation something even more generic — International Products (IP). The plot is about a nice, honest woman who owns ten shares of IP stock and begins attending shareholders’ meetings, soon disrupting the whole company by asking a series of commonsense questions of the board of directors, starting with, “What do you do to earn your salary?” When she gets the vague and highly unimpressive answer, she offers the indignant comment, “Talk about overpaid!”

She winds up leading a small shareholders’ revolt against the board, which is a good illustration of the mutinous spirit that GM inspires in film.

The rest of the films are documentaries. Most famous of them is Michael Moore’s film debut, the still-bracing Roger & Me (1989). Moore centers the film on his own hometown of Flint, Michigan, a GM company town that boomed during the postwar era and became one of many Rust Belt ruins when the bust came. GM relocated its Flint factory to the Texas-Mexico border, chasing cheap labor. It was a common practice in the “race to the bottom” that characterized American corporate practices of the 1970s and ’80s.

_{^{Still from Roger & Me. (Warner Bros.)}}

Moore structured his documentary around his quest to have a meeting with GM chairman of the board Roger Smith and plead the case of Flint, Michigan as a representative GM town. It was very Solid Gold Cadillac of him, proceeding from the assumption that of course an Ordinary Joe could stand up in person to the chairman of the board of an immense corporation and bring him to reason. Wearing his ubiquitous winter parka and trucker hat, the heavyset, shaggy-haired Moore would go schlumping up the steps of the glass-and-steel edifice of corporate headquarters as if he fully expected to be ushered into Smith’s presence by blazer-wearing lobby guards. Cameras would roll on the scenes of him being turned away repeatedly by suited security guards there to make sure that highly paid executives never actually had to deal with lowly members of the public.

Moore became famous overnight with this film because he seemed to have found a formula for representing bleak realities in a bracing fashion, capturing the cruelty and corruption of insanely overpaid executives who feel they owe nothing to the workers who make their profits for them, and the grim pleasure that can be taken in exposing their abuses and fighting them.

But other documentaries about GM tend to be so infuriating, and ultimately so depressing, that they’re quite hard to watch. If you want to see encapsulated the deliberate destruction of the American working class along with any practical hopes for a better future, you can just watch these films to see it play out.

The 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? lays out the way the combined forces of the auto industry, the oil industry, and the federal government set out to destroy the highly promising GM experimental model released in California — the EV1. Don’t look to see the EV1 on the road anywhere, because it exists no more outside of beautiful dreams. It seems it wasn’t enough to simply halt the manufacture of the small, beautifully sleek, ultramodern electric car — it wasn’t even enough to confiscate all the cars that were leased by people lucky enough to get ahold of one, many of whom begged to buy the cars or at least continue leasing them, and were threatened with legal action if they didn’t return their EV1s.

No, GM actually confiscated all the cars, sometimes with platoons of police holding back protesters, and destroyed them — had them crushed to bits of metal and plastic so that no trace of the lovely cars would remain to tantalize the public and make them wonder why they hadn’t been able to buy environmentally beneficial electric cars a long, long time ago. An accompanying disinformation campaign put out false consumer testimony claiming that people didn’t actually like or want electric cars like the EV1.

_{^{Still from Who Killed the Electric Car? (Sony Pictures Classics)}}

And the next big trend in order to boost profits for the auto and oil industries was to popularize Hummers, gigantic SUVs, and obscenely massive pickup trucks.

One lone EV1 survived somehow, and got donated to an automobile museum. “That’s number ninety-nine,” says the sales rep who worked at GM during the brief heyday of the EV1, tearing up when she recognized the wonderfully sporty little red car. “That one was Christine’s.”

All very melancholy, but nothing compared to the despair-inducing experiences of two HBO documentaries made by Stephen Bognar and Julia Reichert about the same factory in the Rust Belt town of Moraine, Ohio. The first is The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (2009), which brilliantly relies on footage shot by the workers themselves, who smuggled in cameras during the last days of work at the Moraine Assembly plant that was the employment mainstay of an entire community. If you want a blast of the canniness and gallows humor characteristic of workers at their best, you should watch it, painful as it is. There’s a wonderful scene when workers on the line mock the idiots in management who, having no idea how the cars were actually made, botched a final work order, bringing the line to a halt far sooner than intended.

But their grief makes the far greater impression, because it’s not just a workplace shutdown, which would be plenty bad enough. Lifelong friendships, community structures, a town’s prosperity, are all broken up with the closing of one GM plant.

In 2019, Bognar and Reichert returned to the abandoned factory to document its reopening when it was taken over by a Chinese company, Fuyao Glass Industry Group. American Factory, produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s company Higher Ground Productions, and winner of the Best Documentary Academy Award, shows us how many of the workers who’d been unemployed or underemployed in the ten years since the GM plant had closed got hired back at crushingly reduced wages. People who’d lost their houses, lost everything, crept back and expressed gratitude for making eighteen dollars an hour at the same place where they’d once made twenty-nine.

“I had nothing, and I mean nothing,” said one former employee with sad dignity on the day of his return to the factory. “Now I’m just thankful I’ve got something.”

_{^{Still from American Factory. (Netflix)}}

American Factory is often compared to the fictional Ron Howard movie Gung Ho (1986), starring Michael Keaton, which is about a Japanese takeover of an American auto plant, mining comedy out of the culture clash. A lot of attention in the documentary is paid to the tensions between Chinese management and American workers. The language barrier is an enormous problem, but also allows each group to insult the other freely, with the Chinese managers particularly confident that no American will understand them when they complain, for example, about the Americans’ “fat fingers” that prevent them from doing the more dexterous jobs on the line.

The major complaints from the Chinese contingent concern the supposed slowness and laziness of the American worker, a particularly horrifying claim considering what we know of the grueling physical labor of life on the line. When a group of American workers are sent to China to observe the labor practices in a Fuyao plant, it’s chilling to hear the accounts of labor abuses that are accepted there, right under the huge painting of Mao. Women on the line talk about not seeing their children except on rare holidays, because they work such long daily hours and don’t get weekends off as a rule.

A Chinese manager says with quiet contempt that the American eight-hour day with weekends off is “pretty soft,” and an American manager — seemingly anxious to curry favor — agrees fervently with him that Americans need to toughen up and follow the Chinese model if they want to prosper again.

We see a ghastly neglect of safety standards at the Chinese factory. Workers crouch over a huge mound of broken glass discarded by the factory, having to pick through it without equipment or protective wear of any kind. “Look at the gloves they’re wearing,” exclaims one shocked American worker to another, of the ordinary cloth gloves the workers wear. “That glass will slice right through! That is fucked up.”

The Chinese labor union that factory members belong to, we’re informed, works hand in glove with factory management, with hardly any separation between them. It operates according to the same ideological stance as the factory bosses, with union reps arguing that the workers need to dedicate themselves entirely to the factory’s success, because if the factory fails they’re all out of work.

Here we get a look at how far we still have yet to fall in the United States in our international “race to the bottom.” The rights to weekends and eight-hour workdays and safety regulations, won by unions in brutal labor struggles that took generations, are all on the chopping block.

So let’s celebrate what seems to be a spectacular UAW win, and the American labor history that still has strength enough left in it to allow for these struggles and triumphs to occur.

_{Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin and author of Filmsuck, USA. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck.}

The UAW Strike Has Shown the Extraordinary Power That Workers Can Wield / by Dan DiMaggio

_{^{A “UAW On Strike” sign held on a picket line outside the Stellantis Sterling Heights Assembly Plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, on October 23, 2023. (Emily Elconin / Bloomberg via Getty Images)}}

_{Reposted from Labor Notes}

Fifty thousand UAW members are heading back to work after securing tentative agreements that deliver landmark gains. The UAW strike has been a master class in how to flex worker power.

All three dominoes fell in a few days.

The United Auto Workers (UAW) now have agreements with each of the Big Three automakers. The new contracts are a sharp about-face from decades of concessions.

The tentative agreements go further than many thought possible on issues that the companies insisted were off the table. Stellantis agreed to reopen its idled Belvidere assembly plant. General Motors (GM) and Stellantis will include new battery plant workers in their master agreements.

While the contracts don’t abolish benefit tiers, they get rid of the many wage tiers the Big Three had created to drive down pay. Some workers will see their pay more than double as a result.

The gains are a testament to the UAW’s bold, aggressive strategy under its new leadership, which ramped up the strikes, at first slowly and then faster until the companies caved one by one. It was a master class in worker power.

On Monday, the UAW announced it had reached a tentative agreement with GM, the last holdout. Workers at GM’s Spring Hill, Tennessee, Cadillac factory had joined the strike Saturday night.

The union announced tentative agreements with Ford and Stellantis last week. The agreements came after UAW members struck at each company’s most profitable truck plant, the latest escalation in the union’s six-week Stand-Up Strike.

The 146,000 UAW members at all three automakers will vote on the contracts in the coming weeks. In the meantime, fifty thousand strikers are headed back to work.

Ford Details

On Sunday night, UAW president Shawn Fain and vice president Chuck Browning laid out the details of the Ford agreement for members in a Facebook Live appearance. (Full details, including the highlights document and the “white book” with all changes, are available at uaw.org/ford2023.)

Fain said each year of the deal is worth more to members than the entire 2019 contract.

The agreement includes 25 percent wage increases over four-and-a-half years, including 11 percent immediately. It reinstates cost-of-living adjustments, a major goal. Combined, that will bring top pay for production workers to $42.60 by the end of the agreement in 2028, up from the current $32.05, while skilled trades will earn more than $50 an hour. Starting pay will increase from $18.05 to $28.

Many workers will see much bigger increases, though. It will now take three years to get to top pay, rather than eight. Members now on the progression will receive immediate 20 to 46 percent bumps.

Workers at two Detroit-area plants, Sterling Axle and Rawsonville Components, will now be on the same wage scale as the rest of the UAW’s members at Ford, meaning that wage tiers at Ford are eliminated. Workers at these two plants had been on a lower tier since 2007, with wages ranging from $16.25 to $22.50. They’ll see immediate raises of 53 to 88 percent.

Temporary workers with more than ninety days’ service will be converted to permanent status immediately. Future temps will become permanent employees after nine months, and those nine months will count toward their progression to top rate. Over the past two decades the Big Three have kept temps on for years at low wages; if they were finally “rolled over” to regular status, they would then have to wait another eight years to get to top pay.

To completely end tiers would require that second-tier workers, those hired since 2007, get pensions and retiree health care, as first-tier workers do. Ford did not agree to either of these proposals, which would add significant long-term liabilities.

Instead Ford will put 10 percent of each worker’s pay in a 401(k), a big increase from the current 6.4 percent. The union also won the first increase to the pension multiplier (for workers hired before 2007, who do have pensions) since 2003.

Temps at Ford will receive profit-sharing checks starting in 2024, the first time they’ve been included.

Workers will also have greater ability to choose when to take vacations. Ford will only be able to force workers to use one week of their vacation while laid off for the annual model changeover shutdown.

“While we may not have won everything we wanted, we won more than most people thought was possible,” Fain and Browning wrote in their introduction to the Ford highlights document.

Stellantis and GM Cave, Too

The UAW and Stellantis reached a deal Saturday. Full details will be announced on November 2, though the agreement appears to mirror the deal with Ford.

One big issue was the status of Stellantis’s Belvidere Assembly Plant in Illinois, which the company idled earlier this year, forcing 1,200 workers to disperse to other plants.

According to the union, the new agreement will bring jobs back to Belvidere, with the company committing to employ two shifts to produce a midsize truck. Stellantis will also add one thousand jobs at a new battery plant there. “Under our contract, members from Belvidere who have been scattered across this country will have the right to return back home,” said UAW vice president Rich Boyer.

Fain and Boyer said Stellantis will add an additional five thousand jobs by the end of the agreement, an about-face from the company’s threats to cut thousands of jobs heading into negotiations. The union won the right to strike over product decisions and investment, as well as over plant closures. “That means if the company goes back on their word on any of these plans, we can strike the hell out of them,” said Fain.

The new contract eliminates the lower wage for Stellantis’s Mopar parts division, putting those workers on the same wage scale as other Stellantis workers.

At GM, the last of the Big Three to cave, the UAW won another big victory against tiers. GM agreed to bring workers at its aftermarket parts depots (Customer Care and Aftersales, or CCA), its components plants (General Motors Components Holdings, or GMCH), and its Brownstown, Michigan, battery plant all up to the rate of production workers.

Workers at GM Subsystems, who currently work under a separate, inferior contract, will now be under the GM master agreement. The company has shifted warehouse and material-handling jobs in several GM plants to the lower-wage Subsystems in recent years, and the union was concerned that it would use the transition to electric vehicles to shift even more types of jobs to the subsidiary. The agreement would end this race to the bottom.

Full details of the GM agreement will be shared by the UAW on November 3.

May Day 2028

The proposed new contracts will all expire on April 30, 2028. At four-and-a-half years, they’re longer than the four-year agreements that have been typical in recent Big Three contracts.

Fain said the UAW wants to give time for other unions to align their contract expirations with the UAW and strike together on May 1, 2028 — International Workers’ Day. “If we’re going to truly take on the billionaire class and rebuild the economy so that it starts to work for the benefit of the many and not the few,” Fain said, “then it’s important that we not only strike, but that we strike together.”

Fain hinted that the fight for a shorter workday or workweek could be a part of the UAW’s contract campaign in four-and-a-half years. One of the union’s public demands in this round of bargaining was for a thirty-two-hour week at forty hours’ pay. Autoworkers frequently complain of being forced to work mandatory overtime, including sixty-hour weeks (six ten-hour days).

“May Day was born out of an intense struggle by workers in the United States to win an eight-hour day,” said Fain. “That’s a struggle that is just as relevant today as it was in 1889.”

Fain said the other reason for the longer contract was that the UAW is planning a push to organize the many nonunion automakers: Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW, Honda, Nissan, and others. “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with the Big Three, but with the Big Five or Big Six,” he said.

The author received a message from a Toyota worker in Alabama the next day, saying management had called an emergency meeting. Toyota — clearly running scared — was raising top pay to $32, he said, and shortening the time to get there from eight years to four. Another worker at a Toyota plant in Kentucky said the company was boosting wages and slashing the progression to top rate in half there, too. The new top rate will increase $2.94 to $34.80 for production workers and $3.70 to $43.20 for skilled trades.

EV Organizing

At Ford, the union had wanted a pledge that all electric vehicle (EV) plants, including joint ventures, would be brought under the master agreement. It extracted from Ford a pledge to recognize the union at two plants now under construction, the Tennessee Electric Vehicle Center and the Marshall Battery Plant in Michigan, if a majority of workers sign union cards (what union organizers call “card check”). This should be easy for the UAW.

Ford is planning three other battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky, jointly owned with South Korea’s SK On and scheduled to start production in 2025. There, it appears the union will have to organize the old-fashioned way.

At GM and Stellantis, the gains on EVs were greater. Each agreed to put workers at their joint-venture battery plants under their master agreements. “They told us for years that the electrical vehicle transition was a death sentence for good auto jobs in this country,” Fain said. “With this agreement, we’re proving them all wrong.”

Broke With Tradition

Fain was elected this year in the UAW’s first-ever one-member, one-vote election, after a corruption scandal landed two of the union’s most recent presidents in jail. His victory ended eight decades of one-party rule in the union.

Fain ran as part of the Members United slate on a platform of “No Corruption, No Concessions, No Tiers.” He beat incumbent Ray Curry by just five hundred votes, and took office less than six months before contracts expired at the Big Three.

As president, Fain finally took the union back on the offensive. “For decades, we’ve been fighting with one hand tied behind our back,” he said in announcing the Stellantis agreement. “And to tell you the truth, sometimes it felt like both hands.” Fain is a Stellantis veteran, having cut his teeth as an electrician in Kokomo, Indiana.

Symbolizing the union’s new direction, Fain refused to kick off bargaining with the traditional handshake with company executives. Instead, he and other new UAW leaders inaugurated what they hope will become a new tradition, the Members’ Handshake — greeting members at plant gates to launch a very public contract campaign.

Fain also abandoned the UAW’s long-term strategy of picking a single lead company among the Big Three to negotiate with first and win an agreement to set the pattern. Instead, the union negotiated with, and struck, all three companies simultaneously.

Fain broadcast bargaining updates publicly via Facebook Live, breaking with the union’s precedent of sharing no information before a tentative agreement was reached. The transparency and boldness won members over — Fain’s videos regularly have forty thousand to fifty thousand live viewers on Facebook, and more on other platforms.

And he never hesitated to raise members’ expectations, laying out demands for a 40 percent wage increase, a thirty-two-hour week, and the restoration of pensions and retiree health care to all UAW members at the Big Three.

Members will decide whether the gains are enough to match their heightened expectations. But the UAW is in a much different place than it was six months ago: on the offensive, framing its battles as fights for the entire working class, and showcasing power like it hasn’t done in many years.

_{Dan DiMaggio is an assistant editor at Labor Notes.}

UAW Strikers Have Scored a Historic, Transformative Victory / by Nelson Lichtenstein

_{^{A UAW worker pickets outside the General Motors plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, October 30, 2023. (Kevin Wurm / Bloomberg via Getty Images)}}

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

With its successful strike, the UAW has broken with decades of concessions, won on pay and workplace democracy, and launched a new national labor leader. There’s much more organizing to be done, but this is an unmitigated victory for the entire working class.

The UAW’s victory in its forty-five-day strike against the Big Three Detroit automakers is historic and transformative, ending a forty-three-year era of concession bargaining and labor movement defeat that began with Chrysler’s near bankruptcy in 1979 and Ronald Reagan’s destruction of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization two years later.

Not only did the union win substantial wage increases for all members in its tentative agreements (TAs) — at least 25 percent over the four-and-a-half-year contract — but the wage structure is radically progressive, eliminating the second- and third-class status endured by thousands of temps and second-tier workers. With the regularization of their employment status, these workers will enjoy extraordinary pay increases, in some cases upward of 150 percent.

And the union clawed back the annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) that had been eliminated during the 2008 financial crisis. COLA had been a standard feature of UAW contracts since 1948, when General Motors first proposed it to the union to blunt the effort, forcefully pushed by then UAW president Walter Reuther, to limit auto and steel industry price hikes either through collective bargaining or government regulation. The labor movement at the time was fighting to limit inflation but secure a healthy wage increase — benefitting working class and middle class alike, union and nonunion, by advancing a program that shifted income and wealth from capital to labor.

That ambition failed during the increasingly conservative postwar years, making COLA increasingly coveted, and not just among industrial workers. During the major 2022 strike of graduate students and other academic workers at the University of California, winning COLA became the key demand of the most radical and activist segment of the student workers. Among the unionized workers of the Big Three, the restoration of COLA will probably add a 7 or 8 percent wage boost to the nominal wages workers earn over the life of the contract. (UAW members still need to ratify the tentative agreements, which they’re expected to do so in the coming weeks given the strength of the deals.)

UAW president Shawn Fain and other progressives, in the unions and out, have correctly denounced the vast pay inequalities that have given corporate CEOs three or four hundred times more income than the bulk of those employed in the same firms. But that income gap has always had an abstract quality. Few workers ever meet a top executive. Far more important, and divisive, have been the petty inequalities within the working class itself. When the person doing the same work on the line or behind the counter is making two dollars more an hour, solidarity decays and resentment festers. That is why Shawn Fain’s campaign for the UAW presidency last year declared, “No corruption, no concessions, no tiers.”

Indeed, this strike victory, spearheaded by Fain and a new slate of union leaders, resembles the dynamic that launched onto the national stage other tribunes of the US working class, from Eugene V. Debs in 1894 and William Z. Foster in 1919 to Walter Reuther in 1946 and Cesar Chavez in the late 1960s, armed with a progressive message and a mobilized membership backing that up. The UAW strike flowed organically from the movement to democratize the union, a multigenerational effort that culminated in the successful push, led by an opposition caucus, United All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), to elect top union leaders by a referendum vote of the entire membership. This would curb the insularity, corruption, and self-perpetuating leadership of a UAW executive board long dominated by a machine known as the Administration Caucus.

The Leader and the Strategy

Fain was not a leader of UAWD, but he made a name for himself inside the union, in 2009, when he vigorously opposed the concessions at his Kokomo, Indiana, Chrysler local that other UAW leaders accepted. He was chosen by UAWD to head an insurgent slate after a 2021 referendum, in which a majority of UAW members voted to henceforth elect top union officers by union-wide election.

Although most on the Fain slate easily defeated candidates of the ruling Administration Caucus, Fain was forced into a runoff against incumbent Ray Curry, who argued for the virtues of “experience” when the next round of collective bargaining began. The academic workers and graduate students, who now comprise nearly a quarter of the UAW membership, might well be credited with putting Fain over the top. They had not participated in large numbers, but when they did, university-employed people voted overwhelmingly for a changing of the guard.

Fain got off to a running start right after the election results were certified in March 2023. He put a new cohort of energetic labor militants on his staff, toured the country to mobilize support for a major confrontation with the corporations, and developed a rhetorical voice that grew in strength, radicalism, and self-confidence in the months leading up to the start of the strike on September 15 and during the conflict itself.

From Walter Reuther, the legendary UAW leader, Fain channeled the vision of the UAW as a vanguard institution setting the pace and purpose for a newly empowered working class; with Bernie Sanders, he openly denounced the billionaire class. In a highly symbolic rebuff, Fain absented himself at the formal start of negotiations when UAW leaders and company officials offer an across-the-table handshake for the press. Instead, Fain turned up at factory gates, pressing the flesh with the UAW membership in preparation for the struggle ahead.

And there is one more element that has made Fain a forceful spokesman, not only for his membership but for many thousands more. Fain deploys the social gospel in a very skillful fashion. Raised in a Protestant family, he declares that the UAW can “move mountains” when workers have faith in their power and righteousness. He denounces the greed and arrogance of corporate chieftains with the outrage of a prophet and declares that in the contemporary industrial world they have created a “hellish” underworld where men and women are forced to endure overtime, insecure jobs, and wages that fail to keep pace with either inflation or the never-ending growth of executive salaries. On occasion, Fain has also unleashed a sort of Midwestern populist condemnation of his cosmopolitan adversaries, as in one speech where he told UAW members that the CEOs at the big auto companies would never want to have dinner with their blue-collar employees or offer them a ride on their corporate jets. To such class contempt, Fain offered an even larger portion of disdain in return.

But rhetoric alone did not win the auto walkout. In a dramatic break from a seventy-seven-year bargaining tradition, the UAW did not choose just one company to strike and thereby set the “pattern” the others would follow. Instead, the union hit selected plants at all three companies, ratcheting up the number of factories and parts depots on strike according to the progress — or lack of progress — in negotiations.

Fain and his team called this the “stand-up strike,” in homage to the Flint sit-downs that founded the UAW and the modern US trade union movement in 1936–37. This strike and bargaining strategy had three advantages: it kept the conflict in a suspenseful news cycle as each new factory was shuttered; it preserved the UAW strike fund because only a minority of all workers would be out of work; and it applied a diverse set of pressures to all three corporations, in some instances generating last-minute concessions just before the UAW was scheduled to announce which new facility would be struck.

A Political Strike

The UAW strike was of a fundamentally political character, which is why it has often been compared to the UAW walkout against General Motors in 1945 and 1946. At stake in the recent strike was not just a wage hike big enough to compensate for the 20 percent drop in real wages during the previous two decades. Of equal importance was the entire auto industry’s transition to producing electrical vehicles. The Detroit Big Three, as well as all the nonunion companies, wanted the new generation of battery plants — the majority slated to be built in the South — to pay wages substantially lower than those mandated in the standard UAW contract. Virtually all the battery plants and some additional facilities were to be joint ventures between Korean or Chinese firms and US automakers, and thus excluded from contract coverage.

The UAW saw this as a union death sentence, and so did the most progressive parts of the Biden administration. The trillion-dollar Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) offered billions to the auto companies in loan guarantees and outright grants to advance the green transition. Although the legislative sausage-making stripped the IRA of its capacity to coerce or incentivize companies to unionize their new facilities, Biden clearly wanted the UAW to get a strong contract, and he became the first sitting president in US history to actually show up on a picket line (at a GM distribution center in Michigan). His presence was intended not only to curry favor among a strategic strata of Midwestern industrial workers but also to counter the argument put forward by Donald Trump and other Republicans: that a green industrial policy was a recipe for low wages and lost jobs.

“Industrial policy” means that corporate managers are no longer the sole arbitrators of new investment in plant product, location, and technology. It’s not quite government planning, let alone workers’ control, but it does help politicize and, to a degree, democratize the industrial future.

As a result of the strike, the UAW has taken an important step in this direction. First, it has forced the Big Three to include contract language guaranteeing that their new battery production facilities will be included in the master UAW agreement. And the union won important leverage to ensure that plant closures will no longer be at the sole discretion of management: UAW will now have the right to strike an entire company to prevent the shuttering of a production facility.

Indeed, the UAW did something unprecedented at the conclusion of its strike against Stellantis, the parent company of the old Chrysler corporation. The new contract guarantees that the Belvidere Assembly Plant, located in the small Illinois city of the same name, will reopen after management mothballed it last February. This is an absolute first in the auto industry, making clear that investment decisions are not those of management alone. Stellantis has also agreed to place a new battery plant in Belvidere, which will eventually add some five thousand additional jobs to the town.

The Next Fight

However, unless the rest of the auto industry is soon organized, the UAW victory in Detroit will turn Pyrrhic. Auto executives like Ford’s James Farley have complained that the labor cost differential between his unionized firm and nonunion Tesla will hamper Dearborn’s competitiveness and the employment levels the company can sustain. With Toyota, Nissan, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Tesla, and Hyundai all nonunion, the UAW represents workers producing less than half of all cars sold in the United States. Despite the signal success of this contract round, those companies keep a steady, downward pressure on the wages that the Big Three can profitably pay.

For more than forty years, UAW leaders, even the most stolid, have been well aware of this threat. And yet the union has repeatedly failed to organize these nonunion competitors. The reasons are manyfold, but the incapacity of the UAW to demonstrate what a powerful union can accomplish is certainly paramount.

Now that has all changed. “One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” said Fain after the union won a tentative agreement with GM. “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with the Big Three. It will be with the Big Five or Big Six.”

_{Nelson Lichtenstein is research professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His newest book, which he wrote with the late Judith Stein, is A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism.}

How the UAW Broke Ford’s Stranglehold Over Black Detroit / by Paul Prescod

_{^{A black autoworker installs engines into Ford automobiles. (Bettmann / Getty Imges)}}

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

In the early 1900s, Ford Motor Company commanded strong loyalty from Detroit’s black workers. But the United Auto Workers broke Ford’s stranglehold through patient organizing, cementing an alliance that would bear fruit for decades.

n December 1942, during the heat of World War II, a private report trickled in from an investigator at the Office of War Information. The department was busy monitoring the progress of defense production and the potential explosive effects of racial discrimination in employment. Discussing Detroit, the investigator noted, “It is remarkable how thoroughly the whole Negro community supports and believes in the UAW [United Auto Workers]. . . . The leadership of the UAW . . . has converted them into a solid union asset.”

Just ten years earlier, most black Detroiters would have had a hard time imagining this. The auto companies, especially Henry Ford personally, commanded the loyalty of and hegemonic influence over the city’s black workers through a sophisticated web of paternalism and patronage. Most black workers were understandably skeptical of trade unions given past discriminatory practices and their cynical use as strikebreakers by employers.

But through patient, thoughtful, and skilled organizing, the UAW was able to break through Ford’s stranglehold over Detroit’s black workers and cement a productive alliance that would bear fruit for decades.

This process, described in excellent detail in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick’s Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW, should serve as inspiration for organizers today seeking to build broad labor-based coalitions to counter corporate dominance. The story is also a quintessential example of the emergence and consolidation of the civil rights/labor alliance that was so critical for advancing the cause of working people throughout the twentieth century.

“Enough to Make the Savior Himself Weep”

There was a material basis to Ford’s prestige and influence within Detroit’s black population. The jobs provided by Ford Motor Company were exceptionally good opportunities for black workers before and during the Great Depression. Already by 1926, Ford employed twenty-six thousand black workers in its Detroit area plants, far outpacing other auto companies.

Black autoworkers were disproportionately concentrated in the more difficult and dangerous jobs in the foundry, paint shop, and wet sanding operations. While this was true at Ford as elsewhere, the company was unique in opening up more skilled jobs for blacks as bricklayers, crane operators, mechanics, electricians, and tool and die makers.

Ford cleverly sought to ingratiate himself with Detroit’s important black institutions to promote these economic opportunities. He did this most effectively through cultivating contacts in the clergy. For example, Reverend Robert L. Bradby was pastor of Second Baptist Church, the oldest and largest black religious institution in the city. In 1919, he was invited to a luncheon with Ford and other company executives where he agreed to begin recommending good workers.

Respected black figures were recruited to join the Ford Motor Company cadre: policeman Donald J. Marshall was hired by the Ford Service Department, for instance, and University of Michigan football star Willis Ward was placed on the personnel staff.

Eventually, it became virtually impossible to get a job without first going through the conduit of an influential black minister or public figure. Ralph Bunche explained this dynamic in The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR:

_{The fact is that the possibility of getting a job at the Ford Motor Company has been the incentive in many instances of Negroes’ joining [a] church. . . . It follows that the minister will cater to the positions taken by the company which employs large numbers of his flock.}

Some were of course critical of black churches’ subservience to Ford. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader Roy Wilkins wrote in the Crisis, “The spectacle of poor preachers, ministering to the needs of poor people whose lot from birth to death is to labor for a pittance, rising to frenzied, name-calling defense of a billionaire manufacturer is enough to make the Savior himself weep.”

Ford’s infiltration was common across all black institutions, not just the church. Lloyd Harding Bailer remarked in his study Negro Labor in the Automobile Industry, “There is hardly a Negro church, fraternal body, or other organization in which Ford workers are not represented. Scarcely a Negro professional or business man is completely independent of income derived from Ford employees.”

The Detroit NAACP was dominated by religious and business leaders tied to Ford, and Henry Ford’s son Edsel made large contributions to the chapter. National NAACP president Walter White remarked in his autobiography A Man Called White about the executive committee of the chapter, “Most of its members at that time were businessmen, doctors, and other representatives of the upper middle class of Negro life.” The Urban League was no better, as it was financed in part by the anti-union Employers’ Association of Detroit.

The UAW Makes Progress

Despite these many challenges and barriers, the UAW slowly made progress with black workers. As was often the case with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions, early defeats unearthed critical lessons and worker leaders that would prove invaluable in the future.

The UAW’s effort to organize black Ford workers in 1935–1936 failed, but through it the union established a cadre of younger pro-CIO black activists. This converged with broader developments in black politics that tipped the scales more in favor of trade unionism. In 1936, a Detroit chapter of the National Negro Congress (NNC) was created. A brainchild of black trade unionist A. Philip Randolph, the NNC worked to unite black union activists and promote the labor movement within black communities.

Not many black workers were involved in the famous sit-down strikes, but there was an active group in the first one at Midland Steel Frame Company in 1936. During the peak of the strikes, Detroit YMCA secretary Wilbur Woodson hosted a debate on unions and the black workers between minister Horace White and Ford personnel member Donald Marshall. White broke from the ranks of the black clergy and endorsed the cause of the UAW.

As it grew clear that there was no way to successfully organize Ford without winning over black workers, the UAW became more deliberate in its efforts to overcome racial division. Paul Kirk, a crane operator and NNC activist, was the first paid black organizer hired in April 1937 to help organize the Ford River Rouge plant. Gradually more black staff were hired, including Walter Hardin, a former Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Communist Party member.

The new staff organizers created neighborhood committees to reach black workers. The Ford Organizing Committee got creative and sponsored radio programs that targeted black audiences, while also hosting baseball games and band concerts.

Black union organizers played an important role in fostering continued debate on the trade union question. For example, Kirk put together a conference sponsored by the Michigan NNC and the Works Progress Administration Union. Randolph was featured on a panel discussion about what black workers could gain with the UAW. Here Randolph declared, “The day the Negro depended upon the ‘good, rich white man’ is gone — and gone forever!”

This debate spilled over into other black institutions and came to a head at the NAACP annual conference in June 1937. In his autobiography, Walter White recalls being met by an angry delegation of black ministers who demanded that UAW activist Horace Martin be removed from the convention program or else they would boycott. White refused to bow to the pressure, and Martin was able to give his talk. However, the convention still refused to formally endorse the CIO.

Even certain ministers began to express more openness to unions. William Peck was a conservative pastor of Bethel A.M.E. Church, but was willing to host pro-union speakers in his church. In February 1937, Peck opened up his doors to Howard University president Mordecai Johnson, who made the case that black workers should not be afraid to join unions that seemed supportive of racial equality.

Progress was slow-going, but there were signs that the auto companies’ hegemony over Detroit’s black workers was starting to break. In 1939, the UAW struck Chrysler, and a lockout ensued. Predictably, the company attempted to develop a back-to-work movement among the seventeen hundred black autoworkers at the Dodge Main Plant.

It was clearly a strategy to heighten racial tensions, and fears of racial violence were high. Minister Horace White sprung into action to prevent the situation from deteriorating like it had so many times before. He organized twenty-five prominent black leaders, including two pro-union ministers, to distribute leaflets to black church attendees that discouraged them from supporting the back-to-work movement.

Black workers began to see some measurable progress in exchange for their support of the union. After the Chrysler lockout was over, certain UAW contracts won clauses prohibiting racial discrimination in seniority and promotion. Some larger locals went a step further and began including black workers at social events.

At Chrysler, the UAW was finally able to rally blacks to their side and demonstrate their ability to fight discrimination on the job. The stage was being set for a big showdown with Ford.

Showdown at Ford

The Ford organizing effort was renewed in earnest in September 1940. CIO leader John L. Lewis added seven salaried black former autoworkers as staff organizers to help with the drive. One staffer was even assigned specifically to work with Detroit’s black ministers.

Emil Mazey, former Briggs Local 212 president, was chosen to direct the effort. Though Mazey was white, he had won the allegiance of black workers within his local by fighting discrimination on many fronts.

Ford was the last major auto company holdout against unionization. The River Rouge plant in Detroit, by far its largest operation, was the most important for both its economic and symbolic power; it also had the largest concentration of black workers. Clearly the Ford Motor Company was not going to let the union in without a fight.

Black UAW organizers had to make contact with black workers at their homes because of the harassment they would face in the plant. Besides the progress the UAW made in the workplace, other organizational developments also helped the union.

By the end of 1939, membership of the Detroit NAACP branch had risen to six thousand members. Its president, James J. McClendon, was not particularly pro-union but developed a broad base that included left-labor activists on the board. But the real dynamism was found in the chapter’s youth councils, which were more focused on labor issues and exerted independence from the more moderate members. Horace Sheffield was one of the more skilled youth organizers and worked with his father at the Ford River Rouge plant.

Two days before the Ford strike began, the Interdenominational Ministers Alliance publicly endorsed Ford. But this did not fully represent the mood of black Detroit. The NAACP chapter was divided, with even the conservative former president Louis Blount endorsing the UAW. The Detroit Urban League board had members like Geraldine Bledsoe and Beulah Whitby who were vocal union supporters.

With the situation still in flux, Sheffield attained a UAW sound truck (without permission) so that the youth councils could urge blacks to leave the plant. The Ford Motor Company, of course, was making their own preparations. It recruited two thousand unemployed blacks as strikebreakers, making sure to include many boxers and street fighters.

The strike began spontaneously on April 1, 1941. Most black workers did not cross the picket line, but a significant minority did. On April 2, the UAW managed to get one thousand black strikebreakers to leave the plant and put out a press release to clarify that it held the company, not black workers, responsible for trying to break the strike.

The UAW continued to consolidate black support by holding a UAW luncheon at the black YMCA on April 3. The meeting was noteworthy for the broad spectrum of organizations in attendance. Clergy were present, but also the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, the Michigan Federated Democratic Clubs, and the Detroit Urban League. The meeting did what would have been unthinkable just a few years before — it released a joint statement that endorsed the UAW and criticized Ford’s strikebreaking.

The UAW continued to put on radio broadcasts targeting blacks and purchased advertisements in local newspapers. The NAACP played a critical role by distributing ten thousand leaflets at churches on the morning of April 6. While its message still was not a full-throated endorsement of the union, it told black workers clearly to not let themselves be used as strikebreakers. Walter White came to Detroit and personally drove around the plant in a sound car urging workers to leave.

On April 11, Ford relented and finally recognized the union; the UAW signed a contract with Ford on June 20, 1941. The alliance between the UAW and Detroit’s black workers was cemented and ready to pivot toward enforcing fair employment.

Fair Employment

The coalition was immediately put to the test as a tight wartime labor market was loosening by 1942. While government agencies like the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) were by now in place, they had little ability and resources to enforce employment laws.

The limitations of federal regulatory power made the importance of a continued civil rights–labor activist coalition even more important. Fortunately, both the UAW and black political organizations were well-positioned for the task. By 1943, the Detroit NAACP had exploded to twenty thousand members. Many of these members were black union activists who poured into the chapter and gave it a decidedly working-class character. The executive secretary, Gloster Current, was interested in labor and worked closely with black union leaders.

Wildcat walkouts from white workers over the promotion or transfer of black workers, often called “hate strikes,” tested the UAW’s commitment to racial equality and involved an ongoing delicate dance between the union, civil rights organizations, and the federal government. As time went on, the UAW became more confident in their ability to discipline the leaders of hate strikes.

The union often displayed courage in its willingness to stand with black workers at the risk of losing the support of white workers. At Dodge Truck in June 1942, twenty-six blacks were transferred, and a few hundred white workers walked out. The union went as far as to make sure the leaders of the walkout were fired. At Hudson, Local 154 dealt with the issues by putting up signs that read, “Violators cannot expect to get the support of Hudson Local 154, UAW-CIO in any discipline they may suffer.”

Sometimes the international got involved when local union leaders were obstinate. At a Chevrolet plant in late 1941, 240 black janitors were being denied transfer rights. When it became clear they would not get help from the local, international officials like Victor Reuther inserted themselves. Rallies were held, and eventually the transfers took place.

The UAW’s actions during this period earned the praise and deepened trust of Detroit’s black workers. As Meier and Rudwick state, “The union was an organization whose top leadership was far in advance of other sectors of the white community in its racial attitudes.”

The culmination of this fair employment work came during the fight specifically for black women autoworkers. In contract talks with Ford, the UAW proposed that black workers make up at least 7 percent of the women hired, especially at the Willow Run plant. The company refused, claiming that hiring black women would create “disturbances.” Local 600 officials even met with white women workers and got them to acknowledge (in front of Ford management) that integration wouldn’t create any problems.

But Ford still refused, and the coalition sprang into action. Black leaders in Local 600 worked with civic groups to picket Ford’s employment offices. Repeatedly, FEPC investigators were brought to Detroit to monitor progress. The peak of this activity came in April 1943 when over five thousand marched in Cadillac Square and joined a rally of ten thousand against discrimination in war plants.

While progress was often slow and incomplete, the UAW successfully allayed the fears of many black workers that the union would not look after their interests. As the battles within the plant gates raged on, the coalition turned to address issues outside the workplace.

“Warmest and Most Dependable Ally”

The war brought with it not just dramatic changes to employment, but also an explosive housing situation. The federal government constructed public housing projects to deal with the influx of defense workers, and the racial basis of this housing became a thorny topic.

In January 1942, the Detroit Housing Commission, whose secretary-director, George Edwards, was a former UAW organizer, was authorized to assign the Sojourner Truth housing project to blacks. Just two weeks later, this decision was reversed on the claim that it would cause a race riot.

In response, the Sojourner Truth Citizens Committee was formed, its leadership including black UAW activists. Sheffield from Local 600 organized black foundry workers to send five hundred postcards to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the local made a big financial donation to the committee. White UAW members participated in interracial picket lines at City Hall and the Detroit Housing Commission offices. By April, the activists had won, and blacks began to move into the housing project.

Campaigns such as these yielded an enduring close political alliance between black Detroiters and the UAW that took shape in mayoral and city council campaigns. This rich history gives proof to Meier and Rudwick’s claim that, “It was in the UAW that the black community found its warmest and most dependable ally.” Horace White later acknowledged that, “The CIO has usurped moral leadership in the [black] community.”

The long-standing relationship between black workers, the auto industry, and the UAW have their roots in these early struggles. By the mid-1960s, the auto industry was the second-largest employer of black semiskilled production workers, surpassing one hundred thousand in 1966. Even today, black workers make up 16.6 percent of autoworkers (as compared to 12.5 percent of workers in the economy as a whole). A casual glance at video footage and pictures from the current UAW Big Three strike shows that black workers still have a strong presence within the UAW.

The UAW’s work in Detroit is just one more example of how closely intertwined the fate of black communities and the labor movement has always been. Their successful campaign at Ford is an important lesson that corporate hegemony is not necessarily permanent or immovable.

_{Paul Prescod is a Jacobin contributing editor.}

The UAW Strike Has Transformed the Organizing Landscape / by Keith Brower Brown

_{^{Workers picket outside a Ford assembly plant as the UAW strike against the Big Three automakers continues on October 10, 2023, in Chicago, Illinois. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)}}

_{Reposted from Labor Notes}

The UAW strike isn’t over, but workers have already won major victories on everything from plant closures to electric vehicles. Going forward, the UAW will be in a position to launch an organizing offense at Big 3 battery plants and nonunion companies alike.

The highest stakes of the United Auto Workers (UAW)’s strike could be for workers not yet hired, at plants not yet built.

In the last few weeks, the “stand-up” strike has wrenched breakthrough offers out of all three automakers — Ford, General Motors (GM), and Stellantis — that will have big implications for the transition to electric vehicles (EVs).

Moving beyond the dead-end job security strategies of the past — concessions and corporate partnership — the union is digging footholds to fight for an electric future on workers’ terms.

Six thousand jobs across four planned GM battery plants will now be covered under the UAW’s master national agreement, rather than a separate low-wage contract.

And at Ford and Stellantis, the union has won the right to strike the entire company over any plant closure during the next contract — a significant win given concerns about job security in the EV transition.

Now the union is aiming to lock in all these wins at all three companies.

For a generation, hostile bosses and anti-union politicians have shut the UAW out of every part of the auto industry beyond the Big Three. The EV transition could have knocked the union into a downward spiral, as the companies planned to shift the electric supply chain into low-tier union contracts, or none at all.

Instead of that grim version of the EV future, this strike has set the UAW in position to go on offense with organizing, both at Big Three battery plants and at nonunion auto factories.

Battery Triumph at GM

UAW president Shawn Fain announced October 6 that GM had agreed in writing to put its electric battery manufacturing work under the national master agreement with the union. That contract currently includes stamping, assembly, and drivetrain plants, along with parts hubs.

“We’ve been told for months this is impossible,” Fain said. “We’ve been told the EV future must be a race to the bottom. We called their bluff.”

The CEOs had been insisting that bringing battery work under their national agreements was legally impossible because of a move they had made themselves: shuffling their EV supply chain plans into “joint ventures” with foreign electronics firms like South Korea’s LG and SK On.

But under the pressure of the strike, GM must have found a way around its legal quibbles.

“People here were very happy,” said Local 2250 trustee Shana Shaw, an assembly worker at GM’s striking plant in Wentzville, Missouri. “It’s a huge win.”

Workers at the Ultium Cells battery plant in Lordstown, Ohio, a joint venture between GM and LG, voted to join the union in December and have been negotiating a first contract.

The thirteen hundred workers there were on a pay scale that started at $16.50 an hour and rose to $20 over seven years. In an interim deal in August, they won a raise of $3 to $4 and thousands of dollars in back pay.

GM’s offer includes the Ultium plant in Ohio and new ones being built in Indiana, Michigan, and Spring Hill, Tennessee.

The top rate under the master GM agreement is $32 — and it will likely rise by at least 20 percent over the course of the new contract.

Ultium workers also demanded stronger health and safety standards after multiple spills and accidents at the EV plant. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited plant managers for “failing to use and train workers on safety and emergency response procedures.” Under the master agreement, union safety committees will now have paid time and contract rights to push management to fix shop floor hazards.

An Open Door?

ews of the battery plant win spread fast at GM Spring Hill, where gas-powered and electric vehicles are made on the same line. The company is building a major battery plant down the street under its Ultium joint venture.

“To be honest, it was an incredible shock,” said chassis assembly worker William Pigg. “GM, Ford, Stellantis, they have the means to do it. They told us they couldn’t do this, then they did it.”

Spring Hill has another EV-related tier that the union is still fighting to eliminate. As a condition of making an EV at the plant, GM demanded to outsource paint and injection molding jobs to GM Subsystems, a shell company that has a separate UAW contract where wages start at $15 and end at $17 after four years.

Although EVs changed nothing about paint and plastics work, UAW members under the master agreement were suddenly laid off, forced to scrap for openings in other parts of the plant.

For Pigg, the key question is how current workers will be able to transfer into battery jobs. Will they retain their seniority and wages? Those details are still being hashed out at the bargaining table.

Transfer rights into battery plants could be life-changing for thousands of autoworkers who have moved from closed plants. “It’s an opportunity for workers at my facility to transfer back home,” Local 14 president Tony Totty told the Toledo Blade. Hundreds have transferred to GM’s Toledo transmission plant from the shuttered Lordstown plant, three hundred miles away, where GM’s first major battery plant now looms nearby.

A Fighting Defense at Ford

The UAW will now attempt to push Ford and Stellantis to bring their battery plants under the master contract, too.

Stellantis has been furthest behind in rolling out EVs, but has announced two battery plants in partnership with Samsung in Kokomo, Indiana, requiring three thousand workers.

Ford has two battery plants already under construction in Kentucky and Tennessee, with the electronics firm SK On, plus a wholly owned Ford subsidiary plant planned in Marshall, Michigan, where the company recently paused construction. According to CEO Jim Farley, these three plants would hire seventy-five hundred workers, part of the company’s goal to quadruple EV production by the end of next year.

Ford went so far as to hold a press conference on September 29 — its first of the strike — in which it accused the UAW of holding up a contract agreement “over battery plants that won’t come online for two to three years.”

Farley said that rather than putting the plants under the master agreement, “we want to make an agreement where we can become competitive in any area of the country.”

He added that the size of the Marshall plant under construction will be determined by labor costs. “We can make Marshall a lot bigger or a lot smaller — we’re pausing to determine that.”

Still, while Ford has yet to budge on EVs, one week into the strike it gave in to another important demand — granting the union’s right to strike the entire company if Ford closed a single plant. Workers laid off indefinitely from closed plants would also be guaranteed income security for up to two years, with health care.

Many Big Three stamping and assembly plants are already adding electric vehicles onto their lines. Gas engine and transmission plants, however, have little obvious role in an electrified future.

Ford put out a statement on October 3 pledging that “none of our employees, including powertrain employees, will lose their jobs due to our battery plants during this contract period.” (The union is seeking an agreement through May 1, 2028.) But just last year at a Detroit conference, Farley touted how EVs would require 40 percent less labor than gas cars.

Credible researchers say it’s not yet clear whether EVs will actually cut jobs, since the industry is still experimenting with the work process. A recent study by engineers at Carnegie Mellon University estimated the whole EV supply chain will take slightly more labor than gas-powered cars, if batteries and all other components are included.

Electrifying the Organized

The Big Three will produce only a fraction of the EVs and batteries made in North America. Most EVs on the market today are made by workers at nonunion plants operated by companies like Hyundai, Volkswagen, and the very anti-union Tesla. New entrants like Vietnam-based VinFast are building US plants, too.

But the UAW strike is making waves among nonunion autoworkers. Fain told NBC News the UAW is “looking at organizing half a dozen auto companies in the coming years. Pretty soon we won’t just be talking about the Big Three — more like the Big Five, Big Seven, Big Ten unionized automakers. We’re just getting started.”

Contrary to popular belief, employment in the US auto industry has grown about 30 percent since the early 1980s to 1.3 million workers, while UAW membership in the industry shrank from over half a million to 160,000. Anti-union manufacturers expanded rapidly in the South, while the Big Three outsourced more parts by the year to nonunion companies.

UAW wins on cost-of-living adjustments and higher wages may help drive up wages even for nonunion workers and hopefully draw their interest to join.

“I think organizing those [nonunion] plants needs to be our number one priority after we get done organizing the Big Three,” says Ryan Ashley at Ford’s Cleveland Engine. “With how significant the gains are looking in this contract, they’ll see it. And it’ll help.”

_{Keith Brower Brown is a department steward in United Auto Workers Local 2865 and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.}