The Members’ Handshake: UAW Turns Over a New Leaf
by Chris Viola
“We should’ve done this when they were going to close our plant,” a union brother said July 12, as we were watching fellow members shake hands with newly elected UAW international leaders.
In November 2018, General Motors announced that five plants, including my own Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly, would be “unallocated,” meaning no new work for the foreseeable future. Local 22 had a response, holding a vigil for our families to lament the loss of our jobs, prayer being our only legal means, they said, of holding a meeting on company grounds. The leadership of UAW Region 1 attended, but not much more outside our local, a choir, and some press that had to stay outside the gates.
Collective bargaining agreements between the union and the companies typically have language to secure work for the duration of the contract. So while we had contractual protection from a “plant closure,” we did not have protection from not having work allocated to our plant and the plant closure that would naturally happen after the fact. These sneaky euphemisms are rife in the corporate world. You don’t work at an office, you work at “Apple Park.” You’re not a barista, you’re a Starbucks “partner.” You’re not a tier-two worker, you’re “in progression.” Our plant wasn’t closing, it was just “getting sent to a farm where it will have plenty of room to play.”
But the new UAW leaders were not content to wait for bargaining with the Big 3 (General Motors, Ford, Stellantis) to galvanize the membership. The new administration decided to challenge some of the symbols set in place over the past few decades. A new handshake ceremony was set to supplant the old one. In the new one, top UAW officers including President Shawn Fain and a ton of staff showed up to shake hands and speak to workers during shift change at three plants, one of each of the Big 3 in Metro Detroit.
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As for the old ceremony, this article, surprisingly not written by three auto CEOs in a trench coat, laments its passing: “Unfortunately, talks with General Motors began on a sour note last week when UAW President Shawn Fain abandoned decades of tradition by refusing to begin negotiations with a simple symbolic handshake with a GM official as a sign of harmony that both sides will engage in fair and objective gives and takes.”
Perhaps there was harmony at the bargaining table in the past: corporate executives and union leadership cracking light-hearted jokes, showing each other pictures of their families, all the while determining the acceptable percentage of the workforce that would be able to pay rent or a mortgage and actually be able to afford one of the vehicles made by the hands of their union siblings.
When I was hired as summer help in 2006 I was earning $18.26 an hour, with a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) of $1.68, which reflected the inflation accumulated since 2003. This was the first time I felt like I was making real money. Up until that point I had worked as a dishwasher, line cook, desk receptionist, stocker, and retail salesman. When I was finally hired as permanent in 2007 at the age of 24, that was probably the first time I felt like an adult: able to pay off a few thousand dollars I had accumulated in credit card debt, able to move out of my parents’ house, able to drive a brand new vehicle and not a hand-me-down that already had well over 100,000 miles on it.
New hires today make less than I did back then, as low as $15.78 with no COLA (lost in 2009 as part of the “restructuring” by the government after the bailouts), and I cannot imagine they’re able to feel any of that.
I detail all of this because it provides a snapshot into the conditions that led up to six challengers winning in the first round of UAW elections in fall 2022 and the other two winning in a run-off. The corruption scandal of 2017–2019 was what got the feds involved and provided the opportunity to change our election system. While there was outrage over the corruption amongst the rank and file, I feel that ultimately the decline of pay, benefits, and working conditions over the decade, plus steadily growing profits by the Big 3, are what really drove the desire for changing the top levels of UAW leadership.
This new handshake ceremony is only the latest in challenges to tradition. After an incredibly close election, less than a day after being sworn in President Fain presided over the 2023 convention where bargaining priorities were to be debated and voted on. He and others knew that there were still tensions amongst the membership, especially at a convention where delegates had a close relationship with previous President Ray Curry.
Uniting everyone in any body is a monumental task, but one made much easier by uniting against a common enemy. As Fain laid out in his opening speech: “We’re here to come together to ready ourselves for the war against our one and only true enemy − multibillion-dollar corporations and employers who refuse to give our members their fair share.” The corporate-owned media has had a field day with this statement, or at least part of it. WDIV’s veteran anchor Devin Scillian grilled him a bit on this point as well. I could be mad that they’re leaving out the qualifier from his statement (those who “refuse to give our members their fair share”), but I’ll concede the point that Fain was being a little redundant in his rhetoric and I’m glad that everyone giving him crap fully understands that the very nature of corporations is to refuse the membership their fair share. I’m thankful that this isn’t a subject of debate!
I remember having a conversation with a family member during the 2019 strike at GM where I off-handedly referred to the company as my enemy. I was questioned what I meant by that, as it seemed a bit extreme to them. I explained that at the end of the day I knew which side of the bargaining table I was on. In retrospect, I didn’t have a word for an entity that took away our health insurance early in the strike, even though it was paid up through the end of the month and the union was set to have taken over payments thereafter. I’m not sure what the company was calling us at the time. “Family”? I’ve never gotten into an argument with my parents where they kicked me off their health insurance, but I can assure you I wouldn’t be showing up to their home on holidays and birthdays acting as though nothing changed.
It’s nice that President Fain also takes exception to being called family. Speaking of the EV transition: “Well, I think they’re doing layoffs under the guise of the EV transition, but I don’t believe that’s the case,” he said. “It’s shameful to me, because as I’ve said before, these companies talk about transition to EVs. And they talk about workers and call them family. I don’t know how their family works, but my family don’t roll that way.”
Another major change is the subject of Presidential endorsement. About a month before the AFL-CIO voted to endorse Joe Biden’s 2024 Presidential run, breaking from many unions that make up the AFL-CIO, the UAW announced that they would not be endorsing Joe Biden yet. I’m not sure that an outright endorsement would’ve done much for either party. Our strategy thus far has been to endorse whoever the Democratic nominee is, because the Republicans are just so awful there’d be no reason to endorse anyone else. But I’m not sure how much a rubber-stamp endorsement means to the membership. The tactic of shaming members into voting a certain way has only led to a steady increase over the years of membership voting for Republican party or third party candidates, or not voting at all.
If the Biden administration is serious about wanting to be seen as the most labor-friendly administration ever, they now have the opportunity to make their case by working with UAW leadership to resolve our issues at a national level, and I think that they’ll earn more membership votes that way.
The way the handshake ceremony was announced bucked trends as well. President Fain has made use of Facebook Live and YouTube to talk directly to the membership, a format that gained popularity with UAW rank and file via UAW presidential candidate Brian Keller, who runs the very popular Facebook page UAW Real Talk. In his most recent video Fain stressed that communication would be key to building solidarity, and pledge cards would be distributed to locals to get people signed on to UAWire, the UAW’s email and texting communication platform.
He referred to the shirt he was wearing, which had a favorite Malcolm X quote on the back. “Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won’t do to get it, or what he doesn’t believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn’t believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire…or preserve his freedom.”
At the handshake event I saw a union brother shaking hands with Shawn and talking to him. I have had some disagreements with my brother over the years. For one, he didn’t recommend the referendum that gave us the right to vote, telling me that he likes it when a candidate looks him in the eyes and shakes his hand before asking for his vote. I asked him what he thought of Shawn after meeting him. “I have faith,” he said. “We’re going to win.”
Getting a good agreement and the organizing that comes before and after will be the real test the membership will judge our leadership for. I do think the membership appreciated the gesture of leadership coming down to the shop and being able to look them square in the eye while assuring us that they will fight for us, and asking us to sign a pledge card that says we’re ready to fight too. The corporate handshake ceremony is dead. Long live the handshake with the rank and file.
[The UAW is holding a Strike Solidarity Rally at 3pm August 20 at 27800 George Merrelli Dr., Warren, with all community members welcome.]
Chris Viola is a member of UAW Local 22 and Detroit DSA.
Check out other articles in The Detroit Socialist’s Building Labor Power series here.
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