Portside

Scott Houldieson had some questions. He had worked at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 551, since 1989, but in the late 2000s the company was in a financial hole following the Great Recession, and the leaders of the UAW told him and his fellow coworkers that they were going to have to give up some of the benefits that had long made auto work a good blue-collar job.

Houldieson understood that times were hard; he’d seen the quarterly reports showing gigantic losses for the company, even if it wasn’t facing bankruptcy like its competitors, but something still didn’t compute. The workers were conceding not only on wages and benefits like pensions, but on other issues too, which seemed to have devastating, long-range implications: namely, Ford wanted to introduce tiers into its contract with the union. Tiered pay schedules, in which workers receive unequal pay and/or benefits while doing identical labor, are anathema for a union, breeding resentment and mistrust in an institution reliant upon solidarity.

“To me, tiers are the dumbest concession you can make to try to save a company from bankruptcy, because they’re not hiring anybody,” Houldieson told me. “They’re laying people off!” It got him thinking: what, exactly, was the underlying reason the union’s negotiators were giving up such a crucial bedrock for any union?

“They were just too tight with the company,” Houldieson concluded. That realization was a result of extensive research, which led him to become the editor of his local’s newspaper. He pinpointed the joint employer-union programs instituted in the 1980s as illustrative of the issue: they brought the union into a partnership with the bosses, and that was a problem.

Houldieson was speaking to me from the other side of victory, achieved shortly before we met in the Huntington Place convention center in Detroit, Michigan, in March 2023. The occasion was the union’s special bargaining convention to determine its priorities for what were then upcoming contract negotiations with the Motor City’s Big Three automakers—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler)—for whom some 150,000 members work.

In the years since the 2009 contract, Houldieson had become one of the most recognizable dissidents in what is still one of the largest industrial unions: from a peak of around 1.5 million members in 1979, the UAW now has 400,000 members and 600,000 retirees. In 2010, he met members of New Directions, a small but dogged reform effort within the one-party state that was the UAW, in which the Administration Caucus (first formed by the union’s most famous president, Walter Reuther) monopolized control of the union and its resources through a system of delegate elections for the union’s leadership.

From there, Houldieson joined the ranks of dissidents, scattered across not only the country’s auto plants but in other sectors represented by the UAW, too: most prominently, higher education, which now comprises some 100,000 of the union’s active members. These reformers wanted a more democratic union, one which would not, as Houldieson saw it, be so friendly with the bosses. In late 2020, these members formed Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a reform caucus that sought to challenge the old guard in the name of uprooting what they considered to be a “corporate culture” that had infected their ranks. Houldieson was chosen to be the caucus’s chairperson. Their first goal: direct elections for international leadership.

Unions are not only about improving members’ pay and benefits. At their best, they’re schools of democracy. Whereas the U.S. political system is stubbornly unresponsive to workers’ desires and policy preferences thanks to its capture by the rich and powerful, in a union, every worker’s voice matters. It is here that people denied the opportunity to lead in so many realms of society are given that chance: contribute and you will earn the respect of your brothers and sisters; persuade your fellow worker to your position and you can start winning what’s most important to you and maybe even help change the course of history.

But the UAW in which Houldieson came up was far from this ideal, woefully lacking in democratic processes. The union had become a top-down affair, and as is often the case, that went hand in hand with misconduct. When members founded UAWD, the union was reeling from a far-reaching corruption scandal that had landed about a dozen UAW officials, including two former presidents, in prison. A federal monitor appointed to oversee reform suggested the union hold a referendum on direct elections; in 2021, that referendum passed with 63 percent of ballots in favor. The next year, the UAWD backed a reform slate that challenged for seven of the fourteen seats on the international executive board, including the presidency. It won all seven, but the seventh—between Shawn Fain, an electrician turned union staffer from Kokomo, Indiana, and a UAWD member, and Ray Curry, the incumbent president and an Administration Caucus member—was so close that it had to go to a runoff. Fain was only declared victor and sworn in the day before the convention kicked off in Detroit.

But democratizing a union doesn’t just mean reforming the means by which top leadership is elected; changing a union’s culture is a lot harder than swapping in a new president. As I made my way through the long days and nights in Detroit that week, evidence of entrenched resistance accumulated: an old-guard supporter trying to fight one of my interviewees as we chatted in the convention center; rumors of property theft and other tampering; whispered discussion as to whether old-guard staff would cooperate or sabotage new leaders; an animosity that was potent enough that Fain addressed it when speaking with me, admitting to a “divide in the room” on the convention floor, one he diagnosed as a difference in “philosophies.”

Yet there were encouraging signs. It was clear that Fain was a genuine member of the UAWD, stopping by the caucus’s makeshift headquarters inside a convention room (at one point, he teared up while professing pride in his membership). The convention itself set goals that signaled a sea change might really be underway: the union would prepare to come to the Big Three bargaining tables with ambitious proposals, immediately beginning a contract campaign to bring the union’s membership—many of them checked out and demoralized by the UAW’s prior approach—back into the fold, harnessing their energy and forging it into a weapon that could force the companies to fold, even if that would take a strike.

Everyone knows what happened next: the union struck all of the Big Three at once, though not by simultaneously calling out all 150,000 members covered by the contracts. Instead, the union engaged in what it called a “stand up strike,” in which specific plants walked out in waves, escalating every few days to turn the screws on the executives when they failed to make what the union considered sufficient progress at the table. The approach, reminiscent of guerrilla warfare, rested upon trust in the membership to “stand up” when called upon to do so. Quite literally: insufficient progress at the table would lead Fain to call a local’s leadership, directing them to walk their members off the shop floor, sometimes with hardly an hour’s notice. They couldn’t have pulled this off were channels not open for information and pressure to flow both ways, with leadership confident in not only members’ willingness to fight, but also in the contract priorities for which they were eager to do so.

It worked: after six weeks on strike, the UAW secured historic contracts at all three automakers. Before anyone (myself included) could catch their breath, the union announced its next gambit. The majority of America’s autoworkers are now non-union, so the UAW would try to organize much of the rest of the sector, roughly 150,000 autoworkers at thirteen non-union automakers across the country, the same number as are covered by the Big Three contracts. Presiding over an ever-shrinking membership, tending to the union’s private welfare state without ever looking beyond its borders to the great mass of unorganized workers? No longer.

The UAW’s success in the 2023 strike was not entirely a result of reformers’ efforts: a tight labor market and a multiyear pandemic generated a highly favorable environment. As Fain once told me, workers came to reevaluate what’s important in life: “being able to live; not scraping to get by.”

The efforts to organize non-union workers have been slow in some shops—Elon Musk’s hulking Tesla plant in Fremont, California, will surely take years—but at others, non-union workers have used the UAW’s proven ability to secure strong contracts to launch blitz campaigns. In April, workers at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, shop became the first to unionize a domestic auto plant in the South through a National Labor Relations Board election since the 1940s; Fain called it “the first domino to fall.”

Workers at Mercedes-Benz’s plant in Vance, Alabama, held their own vote the following month, but a union-busting campaign that has led to investigations in both the United States and Germany proved victorious: when the ballots were counted, 56 percent were against unionizing. “Ultimately these workers are going to win,” Fain said following the completion of the vote count. “We have no regrets in this fight.”

Since Fain took charge, the UAW has become far more open to debate and dissent, not only as they carry out organizing campaigns but as the new leaders and the energized membership get used to wielding their political power. The international executive board voted to endorse Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in January, with Fain noting Trump’s long anti-union history in a speech announcing the endorsement (“Trump is a scab,” one of Fain’s go-to lines, has since become a popular refrain). The endorsement provoked dissent in some corners of the union; after all, the UAW had called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza months prior, an aim the Biden administration had failed to achieve. In the lead up to the union’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, the debate continued: should democratizing the union also mean democratizing the process for endorsing political candidates?  What does international solidarity require of a union whose government is party to a genocide?

Fain seems comfortable with such heated debate. When I asked him about the narrow 54.7 percent contract ratification vote at General Motors last fall, he said, “It sends a great message from the membership to the corporate class that, hey, they just got a record contract and they’re still not happy with it.” One gets the sense of a leader disciplined by an abiding faith in union democracy, an understanding that the well-worn labor assertion that a union leader’s power comes from the membership is, in fact, true.

Of course, union reform efforts didn’t start with UAWD. Fain himself traveled to last year’s convention of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a reform caucus in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters that has been the pole of rank-and-file reformers across the U.S. labor movement since its founding in 1976. There, he told the room of union militants that neither his presidency nor UAWD nor the Big Three strike would exist without TDU (as well as Labor Notes, an intertwined organizing and publishing project).

But the UAW’s transformation has resonated. In the past year, a reform caucus has launched in the historically staid International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), where members nearly struck nationwide during their 2021 contract negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Reform campaigns have gained traction, too, in the United Food and Commercial Workers and among rail machinists, efforts bolstered by those workers’ grueling experience during the pandemic. Fain’s use of his bully pulpit to speak not only to his members but to the entire working class is helping fuel pro-union sentiment and organizing drives in an enormous range of industries, fitful though they may be in the face of dysfunctional labor laws and still lacking in the coordination and resources so desperately needed and desired by much of the U.S. public.

The inspiration for democratization isn’t only coming from the outside. Adam Conover, a television writer and member of the Writers Guild of America West board of directors who was on its negotiating committee during last year’s 148-day nationwide strike, told me that he believes it was precisely the WGA leadership’s responsiveness to democratic pressure from members that allowed them to hold out for so long and win so much of what they proposed to the AMPTP.

“We turned our democracy into power, and by doing so, we were able to force the companies to do what we wanted,” Conover said. “Most unions don’t use member power in that way but they should, because having been a part of that process as a neophyte, it was enormously powerful. It was a life-changing revelation for me to experience, and now I’m a proselytizer of it.”

“All we really want is union democracy so we can make decisions on behalf of the membership that the membership sent us to make,” the UAW’s Houldieson told me in Detroit back in March 2023. “We don’t want any more top-down strategy, because look where it got us. The membership doesn’t want to go there again.”

Alex Press is a staff writer at Jacobin. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Nation, Vox, and n+1, among many other places.

This article is adapted from a forthcoming collection, Labor’s Partisans: Essential Writings on the Union Movement from the 1950s to Today, edited by Nelson Lichtenstein and Samir Sonti. Reprinted with permission from the New Press.

Dissent is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Dissent has published articles by Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A. Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin, Czesław Miłosz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chinua Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz, Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and many others.

Dissent is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. We publish the very best in political argument, and take pride in cultivating the next generation of labor journalists, cultural critics, and political polemicists. If this work is important to you, please make a tax-deductible donation today by clicking here.

Dissent would like to thank our generous supporters. In 2023, we received grants of $5,000 or more from Open Society Foundations, the DSA Fund, the Charlotte Foundation, the One World Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. Our 990s are available here.