A split over the stewardship of the union’s high-profile president, Christian Smalls, has led a rival faction to file a lawsuit seeking an election.
Unite All Workers for Democracy, the reform caucus in the United Auto Workers, just won sweeping victories in leadership elections. Now they’re looking to transform the UAW, one of the largest unions in the country, into a democratic fighting machine.
The UAW has 400,000 members and a strike fund of a billion dollars. The new leaders campaigned on a militant approach to organizing, internal democracy, and solidarity against tiers, similar to the leadership shakeup in the Teamsters in 2021. The Members United slogan was “No Corruption, No Concessions, No Tiers.”
Amid the upsurge of successful union representation elections overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, workers are still struggling to secure their first contracts—and real change in the workplace.
Employers are using heavy-handed tactics to prevent workers from organizing, and U.S. labor union density is falling as a result.
Ahead of the election at Activision Blizzard, the National Labor Review Board will define union scope
Between 2019 and 2021, the overall percentage of U.S. union members stayed flat. But the percentage of workers ages 25-34 who are union members rose from 8.8% to 9.4%, or around 68,000 workers, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
At last weekend’s Teamsters for a Democratic Union convention, nearly 400 rank-and-file Teamsters convened to discuss taking power in their union and organizing Amazon.
The Covid-19 pandemic undercut feelings of job security at cultural institutions. Now there’s an uptick in efforts to organize.
Some say the NLRB’s forthcoming rulings could even serve as a backdoor for enacting provisions included in Democrats’ Protecting the Right to Organize Act.
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