Portside

Rank-and-file autoworkers democratized their union, elected president Shawn Fain, and won a landmark strike. Now they will have to win local officer positions, dominated by the old guard, to hold bosses to their word and maintain a fighting union.

Anyone wanting substantive discussion of jobs in last night’s debate was disappointed. But because of the UAW’s organizing and strikes over the past year, both Trump and Harris felt compelled to insist they were the best candidate for autoworkers.

In the United States and Canada, we’ve seen an increase in labor militancy. This upsurge is a chance to inject working-class politics into the political arena, which has so far been mostly unresponsive to workers’ demands.

We speak with UAW president Shawn Fain at the DNC about why the UAW has endorsed Harris-Walz, what is at stake in this election for working people and the labor movement, and which side of the class war Donald Trump is on.

Fain noted that a Detroit rally the UAW had held for Biden earlier this summer had drawn about 2,000 attendees, while a Detroit rally the union that thrown together on short notice for Harris earlier this month had drawn 15,000.

A federal monitor intended to serve as a watchdog for corruption is improperly interfering in the UAW’s public opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza.

After a victory in Tennessee and a loss in Alabama, the UAW is pressing onward in its fight to organize the notoriously anti-union South. The fate of Southern workers — and all workers — depends on the movement’s willingness to think big.

The key to this grassroots unionism lies in the connection between organizing and collective bargaining aimed at improvements in wages, working and living conditions. What was striking, from an Italian viewpoint, was the lack of political discussion.

Should the UAW's southern organizing drive succeed, then its 2023 work stoppage will stand with the great strikes of 1937 and 1946 as a social and political achievement of epic proportions.