Are Unions Getting Off Their Knees?

Noted labor historian Joshua Freeman, a professor emeritus at Queens College at the City University of New York, tells the Voice, “From the mid-1930s through the 1960s, for a lot of people the UAW was a model of an American labor union. It cracked the fortress of the anti-unionism of the giant companies like GM and Ford [in the years leading up to WWII and during the war]. It was very socially progressive. It was squeaky clean in terms of corruption and it set standards along with the United Steel Workers for wages and benefits that lots of other union and non-union workers benefited from. It loomed very large in the American landscape.”

Freeman also notes that under the leadership of one of its founders, Walter Reuther, himself a socialist, the UAW evolved into “a one-party democracy where if you were not nominated by Reuther’s caucus, you did not have a chance.” But now, Freeman says, under the scrutiny of the independent monitor, the shift to direct democracy “is moving away from one of the less positive parts of the heritage of the union.”

Jane Latour is a labor historian and author of Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City. During a phone interview, she tells the Voice, “It was disgusting the way they [UAW leaders] were treating themselves, going to Palm Springs vacations, expensive liquor and cigars, all of this and all that money, and then you as a union member are working on an assembly line—hard deadening labor.”

A TAINT THAT LINGERS

Latour believes that this Soprano-esque union stereotype can turn off young people, who might be open to the idea of being part of a union but hesitate because of these high-profile cases of corruption. She adds that it’s noteworthy that the biggest victory in the latest wave of organizing was won by the independent union Chris Smalls and his team put together to win the vote to organize the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island.  Latour has observed that legacy unions such as the UAW “are often so bogged down in the samo-samo” that it’s hard for them to evolve—for example, in diversifying their ranks in terms of age, gender, or race—while also encouraging rank-and-file participation. “On the other hand,” she says, “it’s those established unions that are also most likely to have the resources you need—because the corporations are so determined to bust the unions and they have so much in the way of resources….” 

Back in 2017, Lehman was hired at Mack Trucks as what was classified as a “tiered” union member, one who, thanks to concessions made by the union going back years, doesn’t get a pension—because, as management implied to him, he was supposed to be “grateful” he had a job. As the UAW’s leverage weakened over the decades, the union, which had built itself on solidarity, had agreed to create a caste system that divided the rank-and-file union workforce into subcategories, described in contract language as “supplement employees” or “temporary part-timers.” This internalized corporate cost containment, which the union signed off on—as long as they could continue to collect the dues.

“I did not get to college—I couldn’t afford it,” Lehman tells the Voice during a recent phone interview. “I went to work for my grandfather’s small excavation business. We had very old equipment, so that’s where I learned how to work on equipment and vehicles like backhoes and bulldozers.” This was in Pennsylvania’s  Lehigh Valley, where the Lehman family business’s customers were folks who were holding out as long as they could before incurring the major expense of connecting to the municipal sewer system.

“Yeah, after digging up yards where the septic system had failed, I moved on to warehouse work and picking auto parts,” Lehman recalls. “Initially, when I got to Mack Truck, I thought this would be the best job I would ever have, but then I read some labor history. I started to see the glaring inequalities, as well as the gap between what the union actually is now on the shop floor versus what it could and should be based on the conception of what the union was supposed to be.”

HARD COAL-COUNTRY LESSONS

That “lucky to have a job” Rust Belt reality was driven home every day in Pennsylvania’s nearby coal country, where the extraction business devoured entire generations of men, who died prematurely or were disabled with black lung disease. Says Lehman, “We have coal-mining-region folks that drive to work at Mack—those areas are now so depressed because they were based entirely on coal and we have the whole coal worker situation—that’s capitalism, just stripping the value out of everything and leaving.” He adds, “I see all the issues of the working class as related. That’s why we need a global alliance of rank-and-file workers around the world. I have spoken with workers around the world, in Germany, India, and Mexico.”

In our interview, Lehman also described how Ford recently pit unionized auto workers in Germany against their peers in Spain, when the multinational announced that they were shifting to producing electric cars and would be closing a plant in one of the two countries. “Ford told the unions to give their lowest bid for their labor. In this kind of environment we need to all be connected, wherever we are, to fight these multinationals,” he concludes.

Spain “won,” and the German plant will close in 2025. 

Today’s UAW includes workers not only in the auto industry but in the government sector, legal aid, higher education, hospitals, and nonprofit organizations. The union has more than 400,000 active members and more than 585,000 retired members in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. There are 600 local unions under contract, with more than 1,000 different employers.

Many of the places where UAW members work are extremely hazardous, workplaces where one missed step can lead to serious injury or even death. Back in June, Steven Dierkes, 39, a father of three and a UAW member, fell into a vat of molten iron just a few days after he started working at Caterpillar’s Mapleton, Illinois, foundry. Lehman contends that the union and the automakers failed to do sufficient contact tracing, and were too soon to return to production. 

According to archived UAW press releases over the course of the pandemic, union leadership appeared to be taking a hard line for worker safety at the time—on paper, at least. “Our members will not suffer any consequences for doing the right thing to protect us all by self-reporting,” wrote then-UAW president Rory L. Gamble, in May 2020. “It is up to all of us to ensure that we have swift reporting of any gaps in our defense against this pandemic.” A  UAW memorial webpage from early in the pandemic lists dozens of rank-and-file members who lost their lives to Covid.

Despite the high stakes in the current UAW election, it’s not clear just how engaged the active and retired members will be. Last year, by the wide margin of 140,586 to 89,615, members voted to have the national leadership selected by a direct rank-and-file vote for the first time in the union’s history. But the total number of voters still accounted for less than a third of the UAW’s active workers and retirees.

All UAW members in good standing as of October 31, 2022, are eligible to vote directly for their leaders. This includes members who are part-time workers and reinstated members, as well as retired members. If you are a UAW union member, in order to have your vote counted your mail-in ballot must be received by November 28. (It is strongly encouraged that ballots be mailed by November 18.)

Just how resurgent the American labor movement will be largely depends on how engaged the rank-and-file becomes in the legacy unions that are its foundation.   ❖

Bob Hennelly is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist who covers labor and politics for Salon, Work-Bites, City & State, and InsiderNJ. He hosts the Stuck Nation Radio Labor Hour on Pacifica’s WBAI, 99.5 FM, and is the New York City Hall reporter for WBGO, 88.3 FM, NPR’s jazz station in Newark, New Jersey.