By ERNIE GOTTA

The United Auto Workers (UAW), following a successful strike in the fall of 2023, won serious concessions from the Big Three automakers and is playing a serious role economically and politically in the class struggle. This includes breaking with past support for Israel by calling for a permanent ceasefire as well as leading a new organizing drive in the auto industry at Volkswagen, Honda, Tesla, etc. This article will briefly highlight the strike, new organizing, and their ceasefire position on the Israeli siege of Gaza.

The strike

The UAW has 150,000 members working at GM, Ford, and Stellantis. About 46,000 workers were called out on strike at different times over a 45-day period. The method used by the UAW was called a “stand-up strike” and started with 13,000 workers going on strike at only a few selected assembly plants at each of the three.

Each week after the strike started, UAW President Shawn Fain addressed the membership and public through live streams on Facebook, where he discussed the progress made in negotiations and announced whether new picket lines would be called out on strike. More than 50,000 union and community members listened to the live stream each week. This is a new level of transparency that didn’t exist, for example, in the Teamster UPS negotiations.

For decades, union autoworkers have made many concessions to their bosses. This strike was an attempt to dig out of the hole made during previous union administrations. According to UAW leaders, the agreement grants 25% in base wage increases through April 2028 and will cumulatively raise the top wage by 33%, compounded with estimated cost-of-living adjustments to over $42 an hour. The starting wage will increase by 70%, compounded with estimated cost-of-living adjustments to over $30 an hour.

The deal also brings two groups into the UAW GM Master Agreement at Ultium Cells and GM Subsystems LLC. The new contract also improves retirement for current retirees, those workers with pensions, and those who have 401(k) plans. The agreement reinstates benefits lost during the Great Recession, including cost-of-living allowances, a three-year wage progression, and an end to wage tiers in the union. It also grants the right to strike over plant closures.

The Fain administration is a reform leadership that came to power through the efforts of the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) caucus. UAWD is itself a new movement, forming in 2019 to build a rank-and-file reform caucus. Fain won leadership with a relatively low level of participation in the elections, less than 13 percent. This was the union’s first direct election in decades. Jane Slaughter wrote in Labor Notes, “This is nothing short of an earthquake in one of the country’s largest manufacturing unions. The last time anyone was elected to the executive board in opposition to the ruling Administration Caucus was 34 years ago.”

The new leadership, only in power for a few months prior to the strike, signaled to the ranks that they were willing to fight for a lot more than previous leaderships and raised expectations. The Fain administration employed militant rhetoric and visuals during the strike. Fain mixed radical words with religious rhetoric in an appeal to the religious and conservative among the autoworker ranks. While waving a Bible, Fain spoke about wrecking the billionaire economy in the interests of the working class. He spoke about international solidarity and wore a shirt during a live-stream broadcast that said, “Eat the Rich.”

Fain said all of the right things in this strike campaign. The “stand-up strike” was meant to recall the past militant autoworker struggles of the 1930s and ’40s, when workers used the militant rank-and-file-led tactic of the “sit-down strike.” By comparison, the “stand-up strike” was part of a more conservative strategy, a tactic used to conserve and not deplete the strike funds of the union.

In contrast, many rank-and-file workers were demanding that everyone go out on strike at once. The “stand-up strike” tactic actually prevented the complete shutdown of the automakers and allowed President Joe Biden to not be embarrassed by his inability to tamp down American workers. The strike may have even helped to revive the Biden presidency in the eyes of the U.S. labor movement after being thoroughly discredited by forcing a massive concessionary contract on railroad workers in 2022.

Regardless of these issues, the UAW showed that serious strikes could win real gains. We are optimistic about the possible openings for the working class that now exist due to the 2023 strike. The strike inspired workers at non-union shops like Tesla and Hyundai to think about joining the UAW. Every non-union automaker is scrambling to give raises to their employees to try to ward off any notion that a union is necessary.

The struggle is international

The strike also had an international character, as delegations from metalworker unions traveled from Europe and from across Latin America to Detroit, Chicago, and Toledo to show their solidarity.

“We believe that international solidarity is fundamental for the advancement of workers. If metalworkers in the United States emerge victorious from this strike, it will certainly have repercussions on the struggles of workers in Brazil and Latin America, who are also mobilizing against the withdrawal of rights, the lowering of wages and the ‘new grade’ at GM,” explained Valmir Mariano, vice-president of the Metalworkers Union in Sao José dos Campos, Brazil. General Motors workers from Brazil’s Metalworkers Union, affiliated to the CSP-Conlutas trade-union federation, found themselves on strike in late October 2023 as GM laid off more than 1200 workers. After 13 days on strike, and with a message of solidarity from Shawn Fain, GM canceled the layoffs.

New organizing

Directly following the strike, UAW received thousands of requests from non-union workers to join the union. Today organizing committees are being established at Tesla, Volkswagen, Honda, BMW, and other factories. This organizing drive could potentially bring 150,000 new autoworkers to the union.

The companies are rushing to give wage increases to ward off the union effort. However, workers are seeing through that trick. The UAW said that in one week, at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tenn., 1000 workers of the 3800 employed there signed up to join the union. Volkswagen has led harsh anti-union campaigns like the one in 2019 that defeated the previous UAW leadership’s attempt to organize.

Shawn Fain’s administration released this statement about their current effort, “On Monday, Dec. 11, Volkswagen workers filed federal unfair labor practice charges against Volkswagen for illegally intimidating, interfering with, and spying on pro-union workers. Today, VW workers are filing another federal labor charge against the company for unlawful company policies concerning social media, dress code, and flyering that have a chilling effect on workers’ rights to stand up and speak out publicly about their working conditions and the need to unionize.”

The union drive at Tesla is sure to meet a strong resistance and anti-union campaign from billionaire owner Elon Musk. In Sweden, for example, Musk is facing a strong union backlash after he refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement with union Tesla mechanics. The focus in the U.S. is a factory in Fremont, Calif., that was previously a union shop before it was purchased by Musk. The UAW website calls on workers to join the union, pointing out, “Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, with a net worth of $230 billion. U.S. production has more than doubled since 2020, and Tesla’s sales are booming. The question is, will Tesla workers get their fair share?”

Fain also made his intentions clear in a UAW post on X, “It’s not the UAW and Ford against foreign automakers. It’s autoworkers everywhere against corporate greed. If Ford wants to be the all-American auto company, they can pay all-American wages and benefits. Workers at Tesla, Toyota, Honda, and others are not the enemy—they’re the UAW members of the future.”

Palestine solidarity

The UAW made a historic step forward breaking with the AFL-CIO’s traditional support for Israel by calling for a permanent ceasefire. Brandon Mancilla, director of United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9A, which represents 50,000 active and retired workers announced on Dec. 1, “We opposed fascism in World War II, we opposed the Vietnam war, we opposed apartheid South Africa and we mobilized union resources in that fight. … The UAW International has joined the call for a cease-fire. [We are] calling for an immediate, permanent ceasefire, and [we are] building a global community of solidarity.”

The UAW now joins national unions including the American Postal Workers Union, the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE), the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), and a long list of local unions, including the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), in the call for a cease-fire.

Even though the ceasefire demand is wrapped in a perspective closely aligned with the left wing of the Democratic Party, it presents an opening for all pro-Palestine workers. The UAW and all of the Palestine labor activists are creating a space for those who are in the war industry to discuss how we can fight to end the Israeli occupation and for the right of  Palestinians to decide their own future.

In his excellent article in Jewish Currents, Jeff Schuhrke writes, “For anti-war labor organizers in the United States, unionized weapons workers present a paradox: Serving such members ostensibly requires making weapons industry jobs stable and remunerative, but the principles of global solidarity call for dismantling the war machine altogether.”

The article continues with a quote from Gill, a UAWD organizer, “At the end of the day, those of us advocating for the liberation of Palestine have a shared enemy with those [weapons] workers on the shop floor: the billionaire CEOs who profit off their labor to fuel the war machine.” A commitment to conversion could bring that shared enemy into focus, allowing U.S. workers to take their place alongside the global working class from which they have too long been kept divided.”

Photo: Rebecca Cook / Reuters