The UAW is Flipping the Script on Organizing
But Will They Invest the Money to Make it Work?
On January 10th, the United Autoworkers announced publicly they were launching an organizing drive at the Alabama Mercedes auto plant. 1500 workers at the plant, over 30% of those in the likely bargaining unit, had already signed cards calling for the company to recognize the union.
The union rolled out this eye-catching video as well, detailing the 30-year history of the Mercedes plant, as well as the financial problems employees increasingly faced at the company, even as profits at the firm continued to skyrocket.
This is part of the new UAW leadership’s plan, announced after it settled strikes at the Big Three automakers with historic financial gains for employees, to organize 150,000 autoworkers employed by 10 foreign-owned transplant auto companies such as Toyota, Hyundai, and Mercedes, as well as electric vehicle firms like Tesla, Rivian and Lucid.
Since the UAW now only represents 146,000 hourly workers at the Big Three's U.S. auto factories – where they once represented 1.5 million auto workers in the 1970s before automation and massive subcontracting- that means the goal is to double the number of autoworkers in the UAW.
Announcing that the union, rather than targeting a single plant, will organize the whole non-union auto sector is a dramatic shift in both strategy and ambition. The strategic shift is explored below, but the big question is whether the UAW will commit the financial resources to match the ambition of that goal.
That 30% of the plant has already signed up with the union might sound impressive, but most experienced union veterans were surprised the union didn’t wait on a public announcement until they had a majority or even a super-majority of workers, as has been typical in recent organizing campaigns across unions. The traditional idea has been that when you are organizing a union, you need to start publicly with a massive numerical advantage since the minute there is a public announcement, employers will launch blistering retaliation and legal delays that erode those numbers through attrition and make gaining new members extremely hard.
The Problems with Single-Plant Organizing: The Tesla Example
The UAW’s recent experience at Tesla exemplifies the hurdles unions face. The NLRB has repeatedly cited Tesla and Musk for illegal or improper anti-unionizing activities, such as interrogating employees and disciplining or otherwise discriminating against employees because they support unionizing. When the UAW began publicly organizing at Tesla’s California plant in 2017, one of many disputes arose when Tesla workers began wearing UAW insignia on their t-shirts- and were punished by management for doing so. After filing a complaint with the NLRB, an administrative law judge (ALJ) took two years to eventually rule in favor of the workers, followed by company appeals with the full NLRB taking another three years to rule again in the union’s favor in 2022. This was again appealed by Tesla’s management, this time to the federal courts where the rightwing Fifth Circuit overturned the NLRB decision, saying Tesla could in fact punish workers for wearing T-shirts with UAW insignia on them.
The full 5th Circuit is separately considering Tesla's appeal of another NLRB decision that said CEO Elon Musk violated federal labor law by threatening to take stock options away from employees if they voted in a union. A three-judge 5th Circuit panel in March had affirmed the labor board's decision, but seven years later, the workers are still waiting for a legal resolution on that issue.
While Tesla workers never even attempted a vote, workers at a VW plant in Chattanooga Tennessee in 2019 and a Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi in 2017 had failed votes after facing similar levels of delay and intimidation during their organizing campaigns.
Moving to Multi-Company “Momentum” Organizing
This is the context for the new UAW strategy, led by Shawn Fain, who was elected President of the union on a reform slate promising bold new initiatives after the previous leadership was indicted for financial corruption. Rather than organize one plant, waiting out harassment and legal delays, and then move on to another, as has been the traditional UAW strategy (which hasn’t organized a single foreign auto plant) --- the new strategy is to build momentum and worker power by moving fast and spreading organizing energy across multiple plants and companies.
In announcing the new organizing strategy, the union established benchmarks for public action and organizing for recognition that is encapsulated in this handy poster:
The emphasis on early publicity at 30% of workers signing cards with big rallies when the union hits 50% is no doubt to encourage other non-union plants to begin organizing as well. The UAW seems to be trying to leverage the momentum-based organizing strategies used by Starbucks and Amazon union organizers in recent years while grafting it to the power of the UAW’s strike fund and the ambition to build the union density to cover most of the currently non-union auto sector. Along with the announcement of union cards collected at Mercedes, they have also announced they were taking another run at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee and have collected 2000 union cards there.
While there has been a lot of excitement about Starbucks organizing hundreds of stores across the country, the cold reality is they still don’t have a contract at any store. Winning an election is only the first step and studies find that half of all unions don’t have a contract after their first year and as many as a third never get a contract. Starbucks union still only represents a small minority of stores nationally, so their leverage is limited compared to what the UAW can bring to the fight.
The UAW comes to this new organizing with a tool they haven’t had in years: the breakthrough contract at the Big Three that is already forcing non-union companies to act to try to prevent their workers from joining the UAW. Tesla has joined Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, and Volkswagen in announcing wage hikes in the wake of the UAW contract settlement, which delivered pay increases of 25% or more during the 4.5-year contract.
The UAW’s plan to “demand that the company recognize our union” when 70% of employees sign cards - and only go to an NLRB vote if the company refuses - is potentially game-changing in the context of organizing multiple plants at the same time. Unions have used multiple ways to pressure companies to recognize unions without going through the NLRB in recent decades, including threats to strike if a company didn’t recognize the union or agree to foreswear delays in holding an NLRB election.
While recognition strikes have not been that common in recent decades - despite the UAW having been largely founded at a recognition strike at Flint Michigan in 1937 - some version of threatening strikes to get both recognition and a contract at the targeted plants may be part of the strategy here. The goal is not just a union on paper but having the non-union auto companies adopt most if not all of the same contract rules and pay as under the Big Three contract. Using multi-plant recognition protests up to and potentially including strikes among the non-union plants could partly replicate the recent multi-company strike strategy used against the Big Three in 2023, which pitted companies against each other in a race to sign contracts and get production back on track, which encouraged settlement of the contract on strong terms for the union.
If the UAW doesn’t immediately move to an NLRB election when they demand recognition, companies do have the option to force a vote themselves under federal labor law and potentially short-circuit any non-NLRB recognition strategy by the UAW. However, a recent change in procedures by Biden’s labor board may make that less attractive as an option and strengthen the UAW’s hand. Under the new Biden NLRB rules, the company has to file for a vote within two weeks of the union demanding recognition, the vote will be held within just a few weeks, and if the company commits any violation of the law during those weeks, the board can cancel any election results and force the company to recognize and bargain with the union.
Will the UAW Spend the Money to Make It Happen?
Changing strategy and taking advantage of better legal rules is all to the good- but the question is whether the UAW will invest the money needed to ramp up the scale of organizing needed to take advantage of them across the non-union auto sector.
Any time a big new union drive is announced, there is hope for the kind of upsurge in organizing that exploded during the Great Depression when unions jumped from representing 11.5% of the workforce in 1934 to 27.6% in 1939.
The CIO organized millions of workers in that period because of left agitation and momentum as shop after shop organized, inspiring the next. But it also happened because established unions like the United Mine Workers and the Textile Workers Union dumped a lot of money into the new CIO unions to hire a large number of organizers to support unions in the auto, steel, rubber, and other industries they targeted. As an example of creative use of those funds flooding into organizing, when the UAW went after Ford, they hired large numbers of organizers, including black organizers in communities to reach black workers, using creative tactics like sponsoring radio programs aimed at black audiences and hosting baseball games and band concerts.
Since I first became a union organizer back in 1988, there have been several large-scale organizing campaigns that promised new mass union organizing - the LA Manufacturing Project, Union Cities, Change to Win - and a few campaigns, like those to organize home health care workers, did expand labor membership significantly in those sectors. But overall, too few resources were invested compared to the ambition and overall union membership has continued to slide over the decades, particularly in the private sector.
Some might question if a diminished union movement, down to just 10.1 percent of the workforce overall and just 6 percent of the private-sector workforce in 2022, has the resources to mount large-scale organizing campaigns.
Here’s the thing. The labor movement has the money.
Ironically, even as unions lost two million members between 2000 and 2021, the financial assets controlled by unions ballooned from just over $10 billion to over $31 billion in 2021.
This partly reflects that union members do receive higher wages and have made significant gains in that period, but also reflects unions benefitting from the investment returns on their assets that all holders of capital have in the last two decades.
Now $31 billion controlled collectively by 14.3 million union members is far less than the personal wealth of even one corporate mogul like Tesla’s Elon Musk - worth an estimated $230 billion - but $31 billion is still enough to have a massive impact if used to marshall the vast potential volunteer resources of worker-organizers across industries.
The question is whether unions are going to just sit on those assets like a hedge fund, what union activist and researcher Chris Bohner of Radish Research calls “finance unionism,” or will it invest those resources in massive new organizing drives that could yield far higher returns – both in new members paying dues but in translating financial wealth into workplace power.
The UAW itself lists over $1.1 billion in assets in its filings with the labor department in 2022 -and others suggest that with a full accounting of appreciation in assets, that number is likely far higher. Then-candidate Shawn Fain in 2022 criticized the UAW leadership then for having “severely underreported that value” as a way to discourage strikes and other active organizing.
The problem is that out of all those assets, the UAW in 2021 spent only $6.2 million on “targeted organizing efforts”, less than 0.62% of even the conservative measure of union assets. The new union leadership seems determined to increase that minuscule amount but, given the ambition of the new leadership, they will need to convince the membership that large sums devoted to organizing is a better bet to grow union resources in the long term through expanded membership than the real estate and financial investments they have been committed to for decades.
Now, a large portion of those assets do need to be reserved as strike funds, a key source of labor power that gave the union the power to win its strikes with the Big Three and will be a strong incentive for non-union workers to join and potentially fight with their employers for a contract. But those strike fund costs are still dwarfed by the assets available; researcher Chris Bohner details that unions have been spending only $78 million a year on strike benefits since 2010 – roughly 0.4% of net assets annually, so there is plenty of financial capacity to support both strike benefits and new organizing. In fact, unions collectively employed 24,540 fewer staffers in 2021 compared to 2010, a 20% decline in its capacity (although with a small post-Covid bump up in 2022), even as their financial assets had exploded.
Putting Hope in the UAW Leading the Way Once Again
The UAW in its Flint Strike in 1937 in many ways birthed the modern labor movement and it would continue to be a beacon for both labor and the broader progressive movement for decades. It tied organizing unions to supporting the civil rights movement, being the major funder of the 1963 March on Washington, for example.
Now it has a new leader who led a strike while wearing a t-shirt saying “Eat the Rich” and talking about the need, repeatedly, to build worker power. Watching this video, you can almost believe this is the guy who will not only devote the resources to organize the non-union auto plants but also help break open the vaults of the whole union movement to launch massive new organizing across the US economy.