Tennessee Car Sick Blues

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.

7 Comments

Don Durito on February 17, 2014 at 5:02 pm

Or something like that…

seabe on February 17, 2014 at 5:26 pm

Here’s an article from The Nation that was written in February 2013:

How Two-Tier Union Contracts Became Labor’s Undoing; Establishing lower pay for new hires, these agreements have undermined union solidarity by opening a gulf between generations

Unions are about solidarity. Yelling that younger people should accept lower pay to stand in solidarity with their older brethren is the complete opposite of solidarity.

Don Durito on February 17, 2014 at 8:27 pm

Amen!
centerfielddj on February 22, 2014 at 1:05 am

Establishment of two-tier benefits (lower for new hires) is one of the things which caused my fellow unorganized workers to bring the Union into my workplace.

I agree that when Unions accept two-tier in a contract, it is as good as committing suicide at those workplaces. That’s not solidarity. Younger people have been pounded by anti-Union propaganda, and now you’re telling them they need to pay the same dues and get in return poorer wages, benefits and job security? That’s the recipe for a generation of workers who want nothing more than to decertify their representation as soon as they have the votes.

TarheelDem on February 22, 2014 at 9:56 am

You have to remember that the CIO’s betrayal of the Southern textile workers strike in 1938 created grassroots anti-union sentiment among working-class Southern white families that is no longer rationally conscious but a sentiment that can be fanned by the likes of Bob Corker. Grassroots organizing is not a cakewalk in Southern plants. Smithfield Foods in North Carolina voted a union with the substantial help of black and Latino workers at the pork butchering and ham curing plant.

The other issues are Taft-Hartley; national unions might push for repeal. And the lax enforcement of the Landrum-Griffin Act against employers and outside groups.

In principle, Jacobin is correct. But it is going to take some strong-willed, risk-accepting labor organizers going into deeply hostile territory to be able to do it. And likely it will have to be a broad-based labor organizing effort and not an industry-specific one.

At the moment minimum-wage workers are more open to organizing than are industrial workers in manufacturing plants. “No” votes often are expressions of fear of what could be lost. And the UAW in negotiating in Detroit has been in a thirty-year slow-walking retreat that has sacrificed the wages and pensions of new hires-hardly an effective selling point to new members.

Indianadem on February 22, 2014 at 4:42 pm

I took a quick look at the GM Saturn shutdown and it appears, at least on the surface, that the UAW and GM both had a hand in destroying a good, innovative product. I’m on my third Saturn and it was built in Tennessee, but I’ll never have the opportunity to buy another. Maybe the VW workers remember that just a little as well.

Don Durito on February 22, 2014 at 7:50 pm

Richard Seymour’s take:

In this case, though, the wider hegemonic strategies of the Right (involving anti-union campaigns, local political elites, GOP politicians, and so on) achieved what management chose not to attempt to achieve, precisely by linking in to opposition within the plant among not just a section of junior management, low-ranking supervisors and so on, but also the better paid, skilled workers. It was the latter who organised anti-union campaigns inside the plant – sections of the workforce itself, vehemently opposed to any union presence, more so than VW management!

Union mishandling played a role in this, of which more in a moment. However, to grasp how they fucked up so badly, it is necessary to see how they were fighting on a terrain that was far more structurally loaded against them than they perhaps realised. The real question is not why unions fuck up in their bureaucratic, back-room way, but why workers were so available for the Right. This sort of outcome cries out for a neoliberalism-in-their-souls form of analysis.

Part of the explanation is the fact that VW’s hegemonic regime was already working comparatively well. Wages were relatively ‘high’, conditions were better than anything most workers in that region were likely to see, the company offered good car deals which is not insignificant, and so on. The material situation offered spaces in which the Right could insert its narrative – you risk losing these comparative advantages if you sign on with UAW, because UAW will cause the plant to go bust, just like in Detroit, and they’ll give away all your money to Democrats while doing so. There was even a basis for a classic reactionary-populist strategy, since the union had a recent history of making big concessions to employers, and its agreement with management demonstrated a commitment to keeping the company’s cost advantages intact: UAW’s conniving with management shows that they don’t care about ordinary workers the same way that Grover Norquist does.

But, of course, and this is one place where UAW seem to have gone badly wrong, the Right understood that workplace class struggles condense and reproduce the tendencies of established by struggles outside the workplace. They mobilised; they sought a ‘community’ response, in a state disproportionately dominated by Republican-voting white evangelicals, who see unions as an auxiliary of the Democratic Party and thus of gun control and abortions. The Right fought a battle through popular opinion, mobilising entrenched common sense assumptions in a field of struggle much wider than the workplace or a few media outlets. UAW, by contrast, seem to have fought a narrow campaign, resisting the urge to get involved in community organising, politicise their campaign, raise ‘divisive’ issues or talk about anything other than how great their relationship was with VW management. Their approach to organising was not just bureaucratic and top-down, not just tactically conservative, but actually oblivious of a large part of the fight.

Hegemony begins in the workplace, alright. One side won because they understood this; and the other side didn’t.

Don Durito on February 17, 2014 at 5:02 pm

Or something like that…
seabe on February 17, 2014 at 5:26 pm

Here’s an article from The Nation that was written in February 2013:

How Two-Tier Union Contracts Became Labor’s Undoing; Establishing lower pay for new hires, these agreements have undermined union solidarity by opening a gulf between generations

Unions are about solidarity. Yelling that younger people should accept lower pay to stand in solidarity with their older brethren is the complete opposite of solidarity.
- Don Durito on February 17, 2014 at 8:27 pm
  
  Amen!
- centerfielddj on February 22, 2014 at 1:05 am
  
  Establishment of two-tier benefits (lower for new hires) is one of the things which caused my fellow unorganized workers to bring the Union into my workplace.
  
  I agree that when Unions accept two-tier in a contract, it is as good as committing suicide at those workplaces. That’s not solidarity. Younger people have been pounded by anti-Union propaganda, and now you’re telling them they need to pay the same dues and get in return poorer wages, benefits and job security? That’s the recipe for a generation of workers who want nothing more than to decertify their representation as soon as they have the votes.
TarheelDem on February 22, 2014 at 9:56 am

You have to remember that the CIO’s betrayal of the Southern textile workers strike in 1938 created grassroots anti-union sentiment among working-class Southern white families that is no longer rationally conscious but a sentiment that can be fanned by the likes of Bob Corker. Grassroots organizing is not a cakewalk in Southern plants. Smithfield Foods in North Carolina voted a union with the substantial help of black and Latino workers at the pork butchering and ham curing plant.

The other issues are Taft-Hartley; national unions might push for repeal. And the lax enforcement of the Landrum-Griffin Act against employers and outside groups.

In principle, Jacobin is correct. But it is going to take some strong-willed, risk-accepting labor organizers going into deeply hostile territory to be able to do it. And likely it will have to be a broad-based labor organizing effort and not an industry-specific one.

At the moment minimum-wage workers are more open to organizing than are industrial workers in manufacturing plants. “No” votes often are expressions of fear of what could be lost. And the UAW in negotiating in Detroit has been in a thirty-year slow-walking retreat that has sacrificed the wages and pensions of new hires-hardly an effective selling point to new members.
Indianadem on February 22, 2014 at 4:42 pm

I took a quick look at the GM Saturn shutdown and it appears, at least on the surface, that the UAW and GM both had a hand in destroying a good, innovative product. I’m on my third Saturn and it was built in Tennessee, but I’ll never have the opportunity to buy another. Maybe the VW workers remember that just a little as well.
Don Durito on February 22, 2014 at 7:50 pm

Richard Seymour’s take:

In this case, though, the wider hegemonic strategies of the Right (involving anti-union campaigns, local political elites, GOP politicians, and so on) achieved what management chose not to attempt to achieve, precisely by linking in to opposition within the plant among not just a section of junior management, low-ranking supervisors and so on, but also the better paid, skilled workers. It was the latter who organised anti-union campaigns inside the plant – sections of the workforce itself, vehemently opposed to any union presence, more so than VW management!

Union mishandling played a role in this, of which more in a moment. However, to grasp how they fucked up so badly, it is necessary to see how they were fighting on a terrain that was far more structurally loaded against them than they perhaps realised. The real question is not why unions fuck up in their bureaucratic, back-room way, but why workers were so available for the Right. This sort of outcome cries out for a neoliberalism-in-their-souls form of analysis.

Part of the explanation is the fact that VW’s hegemonic regime was already working comparatively well. Wages were relatively ‘high’, conditions were better than anything most workers in that region were likely to see, the company offered good car deals which is not insignificant, and so on. The material situation offered spaces in which the Right could insert its narrative – you risk losing these comparative advantages if you sign on with UAW, because UAW will cause the plant to go bust, just like in Detroit, and they’ll give away all your money to Democrats while doing so. There was even a basis for a classic reactionary-populist strategy, since the union had a recent history of making big concessions to employers, and its agreement with management demonstrated a commitment to keeping the company’s cost advantages intact: UAW’s conniving with management shows that they don’t care about ordinary workers the same way that Grover Norquist does.

But, of course, and this is one place where UAW seem to have gone badly wrong, the Right understood that workplace class struggles condense and reproduce the tendencies of established by struggles outside the workplace. They mobilised; they sought a ‘community’ response, in a state disproportionately dominated by Republican-voting white evangelicals, who see unions as an auxiliary of the Democratic Party and thus of gun control and abortions. The Right fought a battle through popular opinion, mobilising entrenched common sense assumptions in a field of struggle much wider than the workplace or a few media outlets. UAW, by contrast, seem to have fought a narrow campaign, resisting the urge to get involved in community organising, politicise their campaign, raise ‘divisive’ issues or talk about anything other than how great their relationship was with VW management. Their approach to organising was not just bureaucratic and top-down, not just tactically conservative, but actually oblivious of a large part of the fight.

Hegemony begins in the workplace, alright. One side won because they understood this; and the other side didn’t.

Tennessee Car Sick Blues

About The Author

Don Durito

7 Comments

Recent Posts

Recent Comments