The UAW Strike Offers Hope for a Better Future for Workers and the Planet
By Jim Miller
This last week we saw positive news on the labor front with the coalition of unions representing Kaiser workers agreeing to bring a new contract back to their membership for a vote that significantly improves their pay and begins to address staffing issues. If ratified, it will be a big win for the union movement and part of a new, bolder push by workers across the country to address long standing inequities.
As I noted in a column about that action and the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) strike, the UAW’s struggle has the potential to be a game changer for both that union’s members and the push for a just transition to a green economy.
With General Motors agreeing to include workers at plants making batteries for electric vehicles (EV) in the UAW’s national labor agreement, some observers think it likely that the rest of the “big three” automakers will follow suit, but it remains unresolved as of this writing.
As the Guardian observed about the UAW:
Biden should be thanking the UAW for handing him a golden opportunity: to prove that the green jobs his administration is creating will be good, union jobs, too, and that climate policy will bear dividends for the working class . . .
Optimistically, the UAW strike could be a chance to dismantle the rightwing myth that reducing emissions hurts working people – not by pointing to the jobs that will trickle down from the bosses of the energy transition, but by standing with the unions fighting to make those jobs better.
Since Biden’s visit to the picket line and the news that there was movement on making sure that EV production was done under a union contract, the UAW has intensified and threatened to broaden its strike activity even further without falling into a predictable pattern, showing a kind of aggressiveness not seen for decades in that sector. Partly this is due to the militant, class conscious attitude of the new leadership of the UAW that has moved past the passive business unionism that has hamstrung much of labor for a long time.
As the New York Times has pointed out of the new face of the UAW, he is not the bosses’ best friend: “’Billionaires in my opinion don’t have a right to exist,’ says Shawn Fain, who is leading the United Automobile Workers in a multifront labor battle against the Big Three carmakers that has little precedent and is making a lot of noise.”
This approach stands in stark contrast to the corrupt business unionism of his predecessors who shamed the legendary UAW in such a way that their CIO forebearers were surely rolling in their graves:
Before Mr. Fain took over in March, the U.A.W. leadership did not so much scorn the billionaires as strive to emulate them. One executive spent $2 million in embezzled funds on gambling, cocaine and fancy cars. Another bought $13,000 worth of cigars in one day. A federal investigation won 17 convictions against the leadership . . .
Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian, said he saw Mr. Fain as a throwback.
“He is using more forceful rhetoric than any U.A.W. leadership in a long while, reaching back to the 1930s and 1940s,” Mr. Lichtenstein said. “The idea of mutual accommodation with the companies is gone.”
If, as Bruce Springsteen sings longingly, we have been “waiting for the Ghost of Tom Joad,” perhaps that spirit has finally materialized in the form of Mr. Fain. With some perseverance and continued solidarity, his UAW might just be writing a better future for American workers.