A postmortem in Jacobin:
King says the UAW won’t stop trying at Chattanooga. It took seven years to organize Ford so they’re sure as hell not going to stop now. They’ll be right back there after the NLRB-mandated one year cooling-off period because organizing the transplants is the only way to regain power.
Their dedication is noble, but the UAW’s organizing strategy is not going to work. Friday’s loss has made the UAW look more toothless than ever. It showed (again) that the union needs a fundamentally new approach to organizing autoworkers and rebuilding its organization.
Rank-and-file autoworkers have been saying this for decades. They understand that power doesn’t come from friendly campaigns and negotiating with management. It doesn’t come from neutrality agreements and promises to behave responsibly and keep the bottom line in sight at all times. As long as the UAW leadership follows this definition of power, they will keep losing until they disappear.
Power comes from rank-and-file workers getting angry and doing something about it. It comes from people organizing themselves from the inside-out and the bottom-up. It comes from unions having a place in the community. If the UAW wants to increase its power it will stop focusing on high-profile plants where victory will improve its image and prestige and instead, start organizing supplier workers who are desperate for a union. Granted, the UAW has had a few successes at Tier 1 suppliers over the past few years, but the bulk of its passion and organizing budget have gone to organizing the transplants.
More than 70 percent of production workers in the US auto industry are employed by suppliers. Thousands of autoworkers in the supplier sector are toiling in sweatshop conditions (some of them right in Detroit), working seven days a week for lousy wages and no sick pay or healthcare. The UAW needs to show that it will use what muscle it has left to help out workers who don’t add to its bottom-line, whose unionization won’t make a punchy press release or the front page of the New York Times. This will show autoworkers everywhere that the UAW is not just about its strike fund and trying to hold on to what it’s got. It will prove that the UAW is willing to go all in on risky bets, to organize workers who need help regardless of whether their plant is strategic, or likely to close down.
The UAW needs to examine its fighting roots and remember where power comes from – rank-and-file workers.
Perhaps some food for thought.
