https://portside.org/2026-02-23/learning-uaws-national-organizing-push

The United Auto Workers’ (UAW) 2023 “stand-up strike” against Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis delivered historic gains for our members. But just as significant is what came next. Before the strike even ended, thousands of nonunion autoworkers — primarily in the South — began signing union cards on their own, using website links from defunct campaigns. No staff. No plan. No infrastructure. The strike was the spark. Workers used it to light their own fires.

For decades, launching a union drive at a Southern auto plant required months — or even years — of deep groundwork. Now workers were self-organizing at a scale we hadn’t seen in decades. We believed we had entered a movement moment, a rare opening when momentum spreads faster than fear and collective action becomes contagious.

To seize the moment, we launched Stand Up 2.0, a national campaign to organize multiple nonunion auto plants across the country. Our strategy was to experiment with new organizing approaches (namely, momentum and worker-to-worker organizing as compared to traditional structure-based organizing) that treat mass-scale union organizing more like a social movement than building a guerrilla army.

Organizing Models and Methods

“Momentum-based organizing” relies on trigger events — high-profile actions that polarize the public and generate waves of participation. It scales up quickly by prioritizing mass sign-ups, rapid mobilization, and decentralized leadership. Worker-to-worker organizing — where the primary responsibility for building the organizing committee and the campaign needed to win is placed on workers themselves rather than professional organizing staff — is a perfect match for the momentum model.

In contrast, “structure-based organizing” is slower and more methodical. It emphasizes systematic leadership identification, committee building, supermajority public support, and carefully planned escalations to build confidence and overcome employer resistance. It is also staff-intensive, with the ideal ratio often being one skilled staff organizer for every hundred workers.

Auto plants, especially in the US South, are one of the fiercest terrains for workers to try to challenge corporate power. The prevailing wisdom — one that I had consistently pushed for years — was that what was always required was a rigorous structure-based approach. But that’s not the road we took following the stand-up strike.

When Shawn Fain and other reformers were elected to UAW leadership, it was to fight and grow the union. That’s what we did, delivering the stand-up strike and historic contract gains that opened the door to organizing the South. But decades of business unionism, lack of belief in organizing, and a staff culture shaped by patronage and nepotism had left the union unprepared to meet that moment.

Many UAW organizing staff had never been trained in foundational structure-based skills — structured organizing conversations that agitate workers around their issues, identifying and recruiting natural leaders, running effective volunteer organizing committee (VOC) meetings, or building toward actions that demonstrate supermajority public support. Astonishingly, some had spent over a decade on staff without ever running a campaign through a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election.

Simply put, that significant deficit in experience and skill in the department left us unprepared to organize the massive influx of workers hungry to organize. Given the scale of interest and the depth of the staff gap, we were forced to ask hard questions: Could this mass interest in organizing be transformed into a mass movement? Could we bend some of the rules of structure-based organizing in tough boss fights and still win? Could raw momentum and worker-to-worker organizing outpace and overcome employer opposition — and if so, how much?

Given the fierce urgency of the moment — thousands of workers were wanting to organize in auto plants right now — we devised a strategy based on our experience in the recent stand-up strike, which saw tens of thousands of UAW members get strike-ready at breakneck speed, and the UAW’s incredible success in higher education, where tens of thousands of graduate workers, postdocs, and researchers had won union elections — often in blowouts — through campaigns rooted in worker-to-worker methods that required minimal staff. We were going to see how far we could get before the movement moment came to an end.

Stand Up 2.0 was launched with the goal of unifying workers across states and companies into a single movement with shared benchmarks as coordinated trigger points: go public with the union at 30 percent of workers signed up, rally at 50 percent, and demand union recognition and file for an election at 70 percent. In addition, every two weeks, staff convened digital movement meetings where rank-and-file VOC members shared best practices, cheered each other on, and walked through common problems. It helped build a national culture of solidarity and reinforced the worker-to-worker model of teaching and leaning on each other.

By the campaign’s official launch on November 29, 2023, nearly three thousand workers had already signed union cards on their own. By the end of January, that number had ballooned to over ten thousand across thirteen nonunion companies.

This wasn’t chaos or spontaneity, and this campaign was not pure improvisation. It was based in part on recent, real-world success. And it demanded what I call strategic fluency — the ability to assess terrain, anticipate resistance, and choose the right mix of organizing models and tactics to win. Winning under pressure isn’t about loyalty to one method. It’s about knowing which tool to use — when, where, and how.

What follows are three case studies — higher education, Volkswagen, and Mercedes — that chart Stand Up 2.0’s trajectory: the successful model we learned from and leaned on, the landmark victory, and the limits we hit. At Volkswagen, we achieved a historic breakthrough — the first time in UAW history that we won a union election at a foreign-owned auto company in the South. At Mercedes, we came the closest we’ve ever been to winning at a final assembly plant in Alabama, ultimately suffering a narrow and hard-fought defeat.

Union density in the private sector is in terminal decline — and if the labor movement hopes to survive, let alone build real power for the working class, we must find ways to organize at scale. Together these three campaigns reveal strategic choices, organizational strengths and weaknesses, and structural challenges that shaped the outcome of the UAW’s first attempt at mass-scale organizing in the twenty-first century. This is the first time these details have been made public — not just as a postmortem but also as a call to action. If we want to seize the moment, labor can’t keep going small. We have to learn from our experiences and keep going on offense like never before.

The Success of Worker-to-Worker Organizing

Over the past two years, higher education has delivered some of the most decisive union election victories in the country. Across the United States, graduate workers, researchers, non-tenure-track faculty, and postdocs have organized by the tens of thousands.

UAW’s higher education organizers have developed an organizing model that is so effective and efficient that over the twenty-four-month period of 2022 to 2024 they successfully ran twenty-four campaigns that organized over 30,000, in which workers collectively voted on average for their union by a margin of 92 percent.