United Auto Workers Divests From Israel

Maximillian Alvarez: To talk about this historic move by the UAW and what it means, I am really grateful to be joined on the show by four guests today. Andrew Bergman is a worker at General Motors in Detroit. He’s a member of UAW Local 22 and co-chair of UAWD. Navruz Baum is a paralegal in New York, a member of UAW Local 2325, and a member of the UAWD Steering Committee. Margie Thornton is an attorney in Colorado, a member of UAW Local 2320, and a member of the UAWD Steering Committee. Mike Davis is an auto parts worker in Ohio, a member of UAW Local 2021 and a member of UAWD. Andrew, Navruz, Margie, Mike, thank you all so much for joining me today. I want to start our discussion with this historic vote by the UAW and its membership to divest from Israel. As union members and as working people in America, why is this an important issue for you, and what does the passing of this resolution mean to you?

Navruz Baum: First of all, there’s currently an ongoing genocide in Palestine. Workers are being killed and murdered everyday by Israel. They’re doing this with the active assistance of the U.S. and financial assistance from, up until very recently, institutions like the UAW. And so, just as people of conscience, it was really important for us not to be complicit in this ongoing genocide. Secondly, as members of the working class who want better living conditions, money that goes to Israel to bomb people, bomb children in other countries, is money that is not going to health care, to housing, to food, to support us. Lastly, I would just say that as members of the working class, as rank-and-file members of the UAW, it’s really important that we have a say in how these resources are being used. So we’re not content with having some bureaucrats decide where all this money that we’ve paid in dues is invested, wherever they think it makes sense for their politics or the highest return. We believe that as workers, as members of the UAW, we deserve a say in where this money goes.

Alvarez: Mike, could you say a little bit more about that process of raising these important issues from your local to the rest of the union? What does that look like for listeners who maybe don’t know how that works?

Mike Davis: Sure, so after the locals submitted hundreds of resolutions, the committee, which is chosen by the international staff, goes through them, and they decide which ones are going to be presented to us. Unfortunately, at this year’s convention, only five of [the resolutions] that were actually written by local unions were presented to us. The rest of them, if any of them wanted a chance to be heard, had to be called out of committee, and calling stuff out of committee is hard. There are 1000 delegates; we had to get 144 delegates to vote for it to come out. 

They did everything they could to make sure that this wasn’t going to be as democratic as we would like it to be. It felt like it was four years ago when we sat in there, and we had the entire administrative caucus working against us, 40 UAWD members. This time we went back there, and there were even fewer of us. I think there were 25 of us UAWD delegates who were there. We had the same amount of hatred coming to us, but it was from two different groups. We had the old guard with their like 300 or so voting bloc, and then we had Shawn Fain’s new administrative caucus with 400 or 500 people. So you had two groups of people that were really shitting on us instead of one; that was the big difference.

Margie Thornton: We had three priority amendments that we wanted to make sure that we at least got to speak about on the floor. We had an amendment that spoke about fighting layoffs using work sharing; that’s the first one that we tried to pull out. We did not have enough delegates stand to pull it out of committee, but we did get to read it aloud, and a lot of people were interested in the language. That was the first loss, but we learned from it. Then Mike went, and he tried to pull out our divestment amendment, and we weren’t able to pull that one out. 

Then we had Shelly from Local 2325. She pulled out our fighting ICE amendment, which we were able to pull out as well, and we did get to debate that one. I think it was interesting seeing the reaction to that one. We thought it was more controversial, but when people were debating the amendment, there was not a single person who stood up and disagreed with the premise of fighting ICE. We had people saying, ​“Fuck ICE, but is this legal?” It went back to the legality. I made a point of information: ​“Who is deciding our policy for the union, is it the lawyers or the membership?” I was ruled out of order, but people were able to hear that. Then we were finally able to bring out the divestment amendment with the more concise language, where we were only divesting. We were able to pull that one out. 

Baum: We pulled them both out of committee on the second day and the debate on both was on the fourth day. What happened between the second day and the fourth day, when divestment passed but ICE failed, is that there was a lot of organizing against our ICE amendment. Leadership saw divestment as safer than illegal strikes against ICE, and so different factions didn’t organize against that. Some factions still did, and then we were able to pass it.

Bergman: That debate was just a few hours before the divestment debate. I don’t think we win the divestment resolution by less than 40 votes if we don’t have that debate about ICE. That shifted the whole compass and political orientation of the convention. So I want to give you a sense of what our strategy was because this wasn’t an accident. We did not predict all of this. We didn’t know if we were going to get anything out of committee. I think everything we’ve been describing shows that our strategy made sense, which was that we weren’t going to come with very narrow reforms. We said we were going to come with class struggle politics.

Alvarez: We’ve been talking for the last hour about the nitty-gritty debates that happen within a union as large as the UAW. When you’re talking about this, I wanted to just end on the blunt question, and any thoughts you wanted to share and leave listeners with: can labor unions be more than just labor unions, and should they be?

Baum: I don’t know if they can be, but they have to be. We have a lot of interests, we have a lot of needs as workers, and higher wages are one of them. More vacation days are good for me, but so is not being deported by ICE, so is not having my money fund a genocide on the other side of the world.

Bergman: We need to be more than just focused on some narrow notion of workplaces. As all these crises you’re talking about occur, as Navruz said, nobody cares narrowly. ​“Oh, I got paid more, but I don’t have a house because it got destroyed in a flood. It’s okay.” Nobody thinks this way. We don’t categorize our lives into little buckets and then say, ​“Well, it’s great that my union did this over here, but I literally don’t have a place to live.”

Our orientation when we adopted this idea of class struggle unionism has five principles: militancy, democracy, independence, working class solidarity, and worker control. When we were in mandatory overtime, folks were pissed that we didn’t have control over the clock. You could be there, and it could say we were going to be there for a nine, and then it would get raised to a ten or a twelve. We didn’t have any control over that. That is enraging in the same way that it’s enraging that you don’t have control over where your dues go. You don’t have control over whether you can have a data center down the street. You don’t have control over how to clean your water or how you get electricity.

I don’t think that it makes any sense to think of these things as separate. So we use worker control as a little bit of a lightning rod, but also because I think it actually speaks to most people. I think our hope in UAWD is that we transform the UAW, so it can be the fighting working-class institution that it’s capable of being.