Count Starts Today for First Member Vote in UAW History
by Chris Viola
The count started today: UAW members have voted for their top officers, the first time in the union’s history that they’ve had the right to do so. Observers from the two counterposed forces contending for leadership are observing the count of mailed-in ballots in Dayton, Ohio.
DSA member and UAW member Chris Viola works at GM’s Hamtramck plant making electric Hummers. While laid off last year he organized full-time with Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), the rank-and-file group that has been pushing for one-member-one-vote since 2019. He talked about the campaign to win this fall’s vote.
Q. What is your job?
I work at Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly, which is now known as Factory Zero for General Motors. I’m currently in the repair department and we fix issues with vehicles as they come off of the assembly line and before they are shipped to the dealerships.
Q. How did it come about that members got the right to vote?
After the corruption scandal involving 15 high-ranking members of UAW leadership, the UAW entered an agreement with the US government to resolve the case through a Consent Decree. That eventually led to the election this fall, a secret ballot where all members in good standing could vote on each position in the International Executive Board (IEB). The IEB consists of 13 positions: president, financial secretary, three vice-presidents, and one director for each of the nine regions.
Q. Who are the contending slates?
The majority of the current leadership has been running as the Curry Solidarity Team, named for our current president, Ray Curry. He has been in the role since July of 2021, after replacing Rory Gamble who filled the role when Gary Jones was accused of embezzlement. Most of their slate have been in their current roles for about a year or less, but had various roles within our union leadership before and during the scandal.
Myself along with the reform caucus within our union, UAWD, are supporting the slate “UAW Members United,” which is made up of seven reform-minded candidates who have all had bargaining experience. You can read all about them here.
I’ve had the most experience with LaShawn English, who is running for director of Region 1 in the Detroit area. I was invited to her local meeting to table for Bernie Sanders during the 2020 Democratic primary. Every local has a CAP Committee, which is tasked with things like interviewing political candidates for the purposes of endorsement and getting information about elections to the membership. Her CAP Chair has been a Sanders fan for decades, and came to my house for a Bernie Mapping Party I threw as a volunteer in January of 2020, so I was invited along with a staffer for the Bernie campaign, along with staffers of other candidates like Warren and Bloomberg. Being able to meet with other auto workers on their home turf is a big opportunity to learn about them and their issues and form bonds. It means a lot that the president of a local trusted their committee chair enough to invite a volunteer to come talk to their membership. Usually these types of things are more controlled by higher leadership, which I think ends up sanitizing the experience and reduces some of the impact.
One of the things LaShawn English and our candidate for president Shawn Fain fought against in their own locals is the 3/2/120 schedule which a few plants here have. So instead of three shifts at 8 hours, they have “crews,” one of them working nights twice in a row and days twice in a row. With this schedule, A crew works days Monday through Thursday 6:00AM to 4:30PM, B-crew works nights Wednesday through Saturday 6:00PM to 4:30AM, and C-crew works the night shift on Monday and Tuesday and day shift on Friday and Saturday. So while under a standard 3-shift system, workers would get paid time and a half to come in on Saturday, the “crew” system puts two shifts on Saturday for normal shift pay instead of for time-and-a-half.
Scheduling issues are a major battleground in labor these days. Kellogg’s workers who struck last year were seeing 80-hour work weeks during the early months of the pandemic and beyond. Rail workers are subject to the “Hi-Viz” attendance policy which renders them all on-call 24–7. Paper mill workers in Alabama are subject to what’s called a “Reverse Southern swing shift,” which has workers on third shift for 7 days and two days off before moving on to second shift for seven days then a day off, and then mornings with a few days off, before starting it all over again.
The schedules employers subject their workers to seem to be developed in a lab to be completely hostile to anyone wanting a normal life where people can see their families and have a life outside of the shop, factory, or office. A lot of workers like the baristas at Starbucks have realized that organizing a union is one way to fight back against bad scheduling practices, but a lot of these schedules have found their way into unionized work as well. Having the right leadership helps.
Q. How would you describe the differences between the Administration Caucus (AC), which has run the union for 70 years and which all the members of the Curry Team belong to, and Members United?
They both claim to want to engage the membership for a bottom-up process of rebuilding our union. I think the way that the convention back in July was handled tells me everything I need to know about how committed the current leadership is to that idea.
The convention is ideally a week-long meeting of delegates from every local, although not every local has the funds to send anyone and many opt out. UAWD members and other delegates actually brought issues to the table for discussion, which I think blindsided current leadership. A lot of delegates said this was the most democratic meeting they’ve been to. But that wasn’t due to anything the AC did, unless they’re referring to listening to some speakers for most of the day and voting on a block of resolutions at the tail end of the convention after spending a couple of hours listening to people .
Members United candidates would prefer to minimize keynote speakers and get down to brass tacks. Yeah, you might not like what someone wants to talk about, but that’s what meetings are. Shawn has said we shouldn’t exile members for speaking their minds when they don’t agree, and I think that scares a lot of people who aren’t used to any conflict, but if we’re going to be an organization with anything at all resembling a democracy then we need to embrace it. We need to provide room and have members feel empowered to bring real issues from their local up so everyone can hear them and decide what to do.
Q. How has the AC managed to stay in power for so long? When they’re so bad.
Power was consolidated under Walter Reuther, who served as our president from 1946 until he died in 1970. Before that, there were a lot of different tendencies in our union and others, but McCarthyism provided a backdrop for anyone who disagreed with anything the Reuther Administration Caucus did at the time to be red-baited and driven out. Over time we traded in worker militancy for lobbying and ended up redirecting the faith of workers to elected officials and not enough in themselves, which I think has set us up for betrayal by members of the Democratic Party.
We ended up convincing ourselves that negotiations are a zero-sum game, the decline of the American manufacturing worker is an inevitability, and it’s ridiculous to expect anything better.
There have been attempts to correct course in the past, such as the New Directions movement with Jerry Tucker, but there were a lot of conditions working against them at the time, so that even when they got a reformer elected they were rendered ineffective since he was just one voice in the machine run by the AC. One-Member-One-Vote is a huge change and is allowing us to run a partial slate of reform-minded candidates and I hope we get them all in.
Q. Turnout for the vote last fall on whether to adopt the one-member-one-vote system was very low. Why was that and do you expect it to be higher this month?
It was definitely low, and I don’t see it picking up for the election. A lot of people have been conditioned to not expect much to change regardless of the outcome. You probably know people who don’t vote in state or national primaries or even the general election. You may have even begged some of them to vote very recently. If you press some of them you might find out that they likely see government and political parties operating as a business, where most of the decisions are made by some sort of board, only holding the election as a formality. I find these conversations the most frustrating when I’m doing any kind of organizing, because I see a version of myself in them. I was certainly in their shoes not long ago, and it’s not as though I don’t entertain the thought every now and again.
I think this is by design. People in power would prefer to retain power, even if it’s diminishing. Thinking that someone else should be in power is the first threat to that. Going back to the convention, one of the speakers accused some of the more vocal delegates of being “disrespectful of the union.” I think this encapsulates the reaction a lot of people receive when they show up to a meeting and have a question or an objection. Leadership wrings their hands over low participation, but if you go to a meeting and get nothing out of it, or worse, treated as though you are just there to cause trouble, what’s the likelihood you’re going to come back?
This is one of our major tasks going forward. How do we beat apathy in our union and get people to see it as an organization that can fight for them and the issues they have in the workplace and beyond? I don’t see it happening without the help of UAWD and other reform-minded people.
Q. What are people in your plant saying about the election?
I’ve only heard one other person bring it up without me prompting, and it was just a snide comment about a flier. People usually don’t talk about it. Myself and another at work flyered for Members United but I’ve seen a lot of flyers around the shop for Curry Solidarity Team, which I would bet has a majority of support in my plant at least amongst leadership. The ability to vote was popular amongst the membership of my local and throughout our union itself, but turnout was low for the referendum vote and seems to be even lower for the election itself.
I think people wanted the option to vote more than they had the ability to learn about the candidates and weigh their options. I’ve heard some promises for information by individuals in the shop or at meetings, but other than flyers for candidates and slates, the only information I’ve seen has been the candidate flyers shared on the UAW website which was also republished in our quarterly publication, Solidarity Magazine.
I’ve heard people at other locals asking for information but were given the explanation that they did not want to influence others’ decisions. I guess a lot of people in leadership didn’t trust themselves enough to give a non-partisan explanation of the issues and candidates. I suppose it’s good to know your limits, but I think this is sort of the heart of the problems plaguing our union.
Q. What would the Members United slate do if they had the power? Or given that the Members United slate isn’t large enough to win a majority on the Executive Board, what can its members do if they’re elected?
The key will be activating the membership. I think a lot of the membership will be pleasantly surprised if anyone other than the Administration Caucus wins any of the contested roles. Any sign that the iron grip is slipping is a good one.
A clear line of communication will be needed for negotiations. When I was on the picket line for the strike at GM in 2019, we’d receive updates but I don’t remember much other than “they’re talking.” We need to get closer to open bargaining as our strategy. So many things are treated as this domain only certain people are capable of handling, but I think that’s the kind of thinking that leads us to the lack of participation and stagnation we’ve found in our union and many others.
It wasn’t until recently that I’ve seen more than one or two people from the IEB on social media. Recently Ray Curry and Secretary-Treasurer Frank Stuglin popped up on my suggested connections on Facebook. I think before the election they were of the impression that social media is this aberration. I can sympathize with that view, but if you ignore it you cede ground to people who don’t. It can be a powerful tool and has been for communicating with each other. Seemingly every local has a Facebook group or two. From what I’ve read in Red State Revolt, Facebook groups were an incredibly useful tool for uniting like-minded people and doing the kind of organizing needed to win in tough negotiating situations. 2023 bargaining with the Big 3 is going to be tough and we can’t ignore any avenue to build the movement we need to win.
Q. What does UAWD plan to do after the election?
I think there’s a high likelihood of a run-off election for president and maybe vice-presidents, which would take a lot of money, time, and effort. Right now, academic workers are on the biggest strike of our union since the strike with GM in 2019. On top of that, 2023 negotiations with the Big 3 are on a lot of folks’ minds. One of the more effective things UAWD did was pass a lot of resolutions in local unions before the convention. Because so many locals passed a resolution calling for an increase in strike pay, we were able to win $400 per week in strike pay before the convention even started. Right now we’re educating people around the upcoming bargaining convention next spring and bringing up resolutions.
No matter what happens after the election, we have to build the union we want to belong to. I think there are gaps in education, news, and inclusion. Teamsters for a Democratic Union has had some recent Zoom calls with labor lawyer Robert M. Schwartz that I think could serve as a model for educating. I think UAWD’s social media and the membership have been doing a good job of keeping each other informed about strikes and other labor actions, and keeping that up and pushing more people into being informed about other labor struggles is important to building a coherent labor movement. For example, I saw a lot of people praising the Biden administration’s deal to avert a rail worker strike, sort of taking the “Democrats good, Republicans bad” line, but this deal was not nearly good enough for the workers and I think the workers need us to get behind them for what I think will be the biggest labor fight in a generation.
We also have to catch up with organizing in the EV space. A lot of workers are nervous about it. When you hear that an EV requires 20% fewer workers, it’s easy to see how that will affect our jobs. Plants will have to endure an amount of time to retool for upcoming vehicles, and thousands of workers will be displaced as a result. The Big 3 American auto manufacturers are entering partnerships with electronics manufacturers and other auto companies, and that’s going to get messy when it comes to negotiations. The companies have gotten a lot of mileage out of saying those workers are employees with a separate entity and therefore they don’t fall under the better master bargaining agreement that we fight for every four years.
We need to put an end to all of these tiers that keep cropping up that some people like to pretend were ended with the strike in 2019. We need to ensure that the transition to EVs is a just transition.
Detroit DSA’s Labor Working Group meets biweekly on Tuesdays.
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