DETROIT — Two years ago, a controversial federal aid plan saved the imperiled U.S. auto industry, now rebounding strongly. And according to the final report last week by the Congressional Oversight Panel, it
turned out to be a relatively good and cheap deal, especially compared to the bank bailout.
But autoworkers, who took an unjustified beating during the public debate, are still are paying a price, even if most “Big Three” production workers who were on layoff — not counting all who left the industry — will soon be rehired.
The auto aid in a way also saved the United Auto Workers (UAW) as well, even though it has shrunk from a peak of 1.5 million members in the late 1970s to 375,000 or fewer today, and less than half of them work in the auto industry.
But the UAW demonstrated at its quadrennial collective bargaining convention that opened in Detroit on Tuesday that it has not only survived. It is developing an ambitious plan to revive its fortunes, to rebuild power, to expand organizing through an aggressive global strategy, and to recover what union members lost in the crisis.
Union president Bob King, elected last summer, told delegates representing industries from agricultural implements, aerospace and auto to casinos, universities and public service that, above all, the union had to build again the power it once had if workers are to win social justice.
“If you have little bit of power, you get a little justice,” King said. “We can not deliver justice we desire if we do not organize everyone in the industry” and establish the kind of pattern bargaining that once existed in the auto industry.
Now around 40 percent of the American auto assembly work is in non-union “transplant” factories that foreign transnational companies own and mainly operate in the South. Three-fourths of parts production workers are non-union, many of them working for foreign transnational companies that have unionized workforces in their home bases and most other countries.
When the industry moved south, King said, “We did not respond promptly enough…(and) as we let power slip, they took us on…. We don’t have justice we deserve because we lost the power.” Now the transplants represent the main constraint on autoworker contract negotiations that start in July, King says, effectively setting the pattern as much as the union does.
But with the company regaining profitability and executives reaping handsome rewards, likes the $56 million in stock and options recently given to Ford CEO Alan Mulally, King intends to restore some of the estimated $7,000 to $30,000 each auto worker gave up in wages and benefits in the 2007 contract and the 2009 bailout. That included many bonuses, annual performance increases, cost-of-living adjustments and much more.
Some local leaders, such as Bill Parker, president of a Detroit-area Chrysler local, believe the key concession to address is the emerging two-tier wage system. They want to end the lower tier of pay, roughly half that of established workers, that exists primarily for newly hired workers, and to provide a path to regular employment for a least a couple thousand long-term, lower-paid temporary workers. Now there is no guarantee either group will converge with other workers, thus undermining solidarity needed to maximize union power.
“Where we’ve made concessions, we’ll work to get them back,” King said, emphasizing that long-term temporary work is “wrong in America” and that “nobody believes in two different wages for the same work.” But, he added, “I think it’s going to take a period of time to win back all we’ve given up. Part of that is rebuilding power.”
With an increasingly global auto industry, the UAW is working more closely with unions and global union federations to organize auto workers and raise standards, from providing funds and organizers to help independent unions in Mexico to seeking help from unions that have contracts with the foreign, non-union transnational factory operators in the U.S.
While the union will continue to work on organizing parts makers, the ambitious new plan involves persuading non-union employers to accept a set of rules for fair elections. If companies refuse, and especially if they resort to the usual threats, intimidation and discipline or firing of pro-union leaders, the UAW plans to launch global campaigns against them, secretary-treasurer Dennis Williams announced. The campaigns will attempt to “re-brand” the companies with potential customers as violators of human rights, particularly the right of workers to organize protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Labor Organization charter, and other international agreements.
King hopes to mobilize members and retirees more aggressively, deepen ties with progressive allies (King, for example, brought the UAW, in the past sometimes at odds with environmentalists, into the BlueGreen Coalition), and build a global network of supportive union, student and other activists who can take the union’s message to the public in the world’s major established and emerging car markets. With actions regularly at dealers, at major sporting events car companies use for promotions and elsewhere, this popular mobilization will tell people that any auto company fighting against fair elections is a human rights renegade — a message that resonates more powerfully in nearly every other country than in the United States.
King brought on as acting organizing director Richard Bensinger, former AFL-CIO director of organizing and one of the labor movement’s most creative organizers, who has worked for several years on developing fair election processes. The vast majority of even anti-union workers see typical NLRB elections as unfair, he told delegates, and corporate human relations managers insist they only want to leave the decision to workers. “We’re calling their bluff,” he said.
Williams had proposed one new tool for the campaign – a Global Organizing Institute, based on the Organizing Institute training program Bensinger started in the early ‘90s. GOI will recruit students, union members, retirees and others from around the world and train them to be organizers of hundreds of campaigners in their home countries. The UAW will pay key staff people and provide funds for the organizations, which could support worker rights in countries other than the U.S., like Mexico.
The GOI brought eight energetic young students or recent graduates from Germany, Brazil, India and China to the convention to talk about their experiences making house calls on transplant autoworkers in Mississippi and other southern states. All had been shocked at what they encountered, especially compared to their image of the U.S.
For example, Brazilian law student Gabriella Zandona was surprised at how hard it was for the union to communicate with workers, and when organizers located workers at home, she said, “They are afraid to talk. They’re afraid to lose their job.” By contrast, in Brazil, when a minimum of seven workers say they are forming a union, it is legally recognized. Before her GOI experience, she said, “I always believed I would find justice in the United States, but that’s not how it works.”
There’s no guarantee the UAW can turn the tide with its new strategy, but it’s more ambitious than any other organizing effort underway in the country. And there’s room for debate about prospects for other aspects of King’s plans, including trying to duplicate German-style co-determination without the force of law behind it. But there’s little doubt that the UAW needs to organize successfully to regain its old power, and building that power will require mobilization above all of members of the union and non-union workers, buttressed by allies from Detroit to Darjeeling, and from Munich to Mississippi.
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David Moberg, a former senior editor of In These Times, was on staff with the magazine from when it began publishing in 1976 until his passing in July 2022. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy.
