An American union struggles for recognition
What is a hard-working American and what does he need?

I. The successful start: a historic victory against US auto capital

1.

In 2023, the American auto union UAW — United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America — astonished domestic and foreign observers with a six week industrial action against America’s proud “Big Three” auto companies — GM, Ford, Stellantis. No wonder.

After all, it was demanding a wage increase of more than 40 percent over the next four years as well as the abolition of the “two-tier” pay system which stipulates lower wages — almost 50 percent less per hour — and a lower pension for all workers hired after 2007. In addition, “cost of living allowances” — a type of annual compensation for inflation — are being brought back. The UAW demanded all this to reverse the drastic concessions that had been extorted from it a decade and a half ago when the Obama administration averted the bankruptcy of its employers in the wake of the financial crisis by mobilizing a huge amount of government loans. That was the price for the bailout of its jobs, i.e., its suitableness for the continued enrichment of its employers: either the workers accepted the massive reduction in their wage level or they would lose their livelihoods entirely when the companies collapsed. The union bowed to the blackmail and in doing so handled its role as a representative of the interests of its wage-earning members in a way that rendered its role absurd. In order to preserve their jobs, it had agreed to cut back its expectations of these jobs.^[1]

Today, the union clearly sees its order of business very differently. It justifies its record-breaking demands on the one hand with the record profits that the three companies have been making for several years. The distress that the companies were in back then is over, times are good, so they should do something good for their workforce too, or at least do much better by them. Their distress has only gotten worse. What prestige journalism in America has discovered —

“While autoworkers weren’t the only rank-and-file employees to see their pay drop in the past three decades, after adjusting for inflation, they were hit especially hard. In fact, they’ve seen their paychecks plunge further from 1993 to 2023 than any other of the 166 industries we tracked. … In the past year, workers in motor vehicle manufacturing earned about $32.70 an hour on average, or 30 percent less than they did at their 2003 peak, after adjusting for inflation” (Washington Post, September 22, 2023) —

is put by union leader Shawn Fain a bit less statistically:

“Living paycheck to paycheck is hell. Choosing between medicine and rent is hell. Working seven days a week for twelve hours a day for months on end is hell. Having your plant close down and your family scattered across the country is hell. Being made to work during a pandemic and not knowing if you might get sick and die or spread the disease to your family is hell.” (quoted in Jacobin, September 16, 2023)

This is the downside of the extremely successful bailout of long established American companies: the former elite of the American working class, with their self-image of being “middle class” as “blue-collar workers,” have now largely sunk to the status of “working poor.”

2.

Equally astonishing is the fight that the UAW is waging to enforce its demands. This applies above all to the truly unusual tone of its new president, Shawn Fain: he not only uses tough rhetoric against his immediate opponents in the wage struggle, but also speaks without shame of a “working class” that has been victimized all over the country by a “greedy business elite” and must therefore wage a “class struggle” to “take back” from this “real enemy” what it is owed.

This militant sense of justice forms the soundtrack to a somewhat innovative labor struggle. Instead of, as usual, targeting just one car company to reach a pilot agreement and then using this agreement as a model for negotiations with the other two car companies, this time the UAW dares to take industrial action against all three companies at once. At the same time, union members and the public are kept constantly informed about the status of the negotiations; this is intended and understood to be a demonstrative rejection of the traditional “backroom deals” and all-too-concessional cronyism between management and union representatives. From now on, the workers and everyone else should always know what the union negotiating team is demanding and being offered and, above all: which companies are blocking what and for what reason. Despite the breadth of its industrial action, the union is trying to exert pressure on the companies in question ‘surgically’ so as to preserve the strike fund and still leave a path open to settling the dispute on the union’s terms before an industry-wide work stoppage is necessary.^[2]

This is how the UAW wrestled an agreement from the Big Three that has been widely hailed as a historic victory. Base wages will rise by 25 percent over the next four years and annual inflation compensation will be reinstated. This amounts to an increase of 33 percent at the top, 67 percent for entry level wages, and even 165 percent for temporary workers who will now be automatically considered permanent employees after 90 days of service and remunerated according to the terms that apply to permanent employees. The two-tier wage system mentioned above is to be abolished so that the principle of “equal pay for equal work” will be reinstated in the companies, and the time to advance from entry-level to top wages will be reduced from eight to three years. The union chalks it up as a very special achievement that the loss of jobs has not only been prevented, but turned into the opposite: the Stellantis Group has committed to expanding its investments, which the union attributes to the success of its struggle:

“Once again, we have achieved what just weeks ago we were told was impossible … We have not only secured a record contract, we have begun to turn the tide in the war on the American working class. Going into these negotiations, the company wanted to cut 5,000 jobs across Stellantis... By the end of this agreement, Stellantis will be adding 5,000 jobs.” (UAW, October 28, 2023)

What the union is taking credit for is and remains an investment decision by the company which is always made at its own discretion. Of course, the union also knows that the companies are aiming to save on labor costs, i.e., on workers and their incomes, with their constant increases in productivity, and that the transition to electric cars forebodes a particularly worrying leap in this regard: at the current state of production technology, it is said, companies can manage with around 40 percent fewer employees. Such future prospects make the other, unprecedented achievement of the collective agreement all the more valuable, according to the union: it has contractually guaranteed the right to strike against factory closures during the term of the collective agreement if the companies do not comply with investment and employment commitments which have also been contractually guaranteed; and in the case of layoffs that “cannot be avoided” for “operational reasons,” the companies must negotiate with the union on the relevant welfare plans.

3.

From the outset, the UAW has insisted that its industrial action should stand for more than just the struggle of this specific workforce for this specific collective agreement. It sees its innovative approach to the struggle not just as a new, more adroit negotiating tactic, but also as an expression of a new union self-image which it explicitly wants to be seen as a fundamental rejection of its previous practices. This union wants to be the militant organization of a rank and file that actively advocates and mobilizes for its interests. The new president, Shawn Fain, comes into office as a representative of precisely this new task: as a member of a marginalized left-wing reform caucus within the UAW called UAWD (Unite All Workers for Democracy), he becomes the first union leader to be directly elected by the grassroots. The election was preceded by years of discontent with the union leadership’s ongoing concessions to the demands of the auto companies and a corruption scandal that resulted in thirteen high-ranking union officials — including two UAW presidents — being sent to prison.^[3] The underdog Fain achieved a surprise victory — and left no doubt about his desire for reform and its dimensions:

“Something’s happening in this country, something we haven’t seen in a long, long time: the working class is standing up. … We put our faith in the membership, and the membership spoke. The members chose to end company unionism. The members chose to fight… So the stand-up strike wasn’t just about the Big Three. It was about the entire working class. It was about proving one thing: that the working class can win. We don’t win by playing defense or reacting to things. We don’t win by playing nice with the boss. We don’t win by telling our members what to do, what to say, or how to say it. We win by giving working-class people the tools, the inspiration, and the courage to stand up for themselves.” (Shawn Fain at the “Labor Notes Conference,” April 19, 2024)

The UAW is therefore chalking up the victory in Detroit as the opening victory — in a fight that should teach the entire American working class to fight once again for the justice it has been denied for too long. What kind of fight this is and what it comes up against — that’s what the next and, from the UAW’s point of view, existentially important arena will teach.

II. The next stage: the fight for union recognition across the American auto industry

This is not about a direct struggle against the car companies to correct the conditions of wages and labor productivity, but about its state-imposed prerequisites. If the union wants to step into action as a negotiating authority at all, it must obtain majority support from the workforce — that’s what American law requires.^[4] The UAW has been failing to overcome this hurdle in the southern states for decades, and to such an extent that the workforce in this large region is seen as almost impossible to organize. The result is the almost complete lack of union representation in the factories located there, which together make up a large and rapidly growing sector of the American auto industry — more than half of all industrial jobs in America are now located in the ‘non-union’ southern states.^[5]

That’s now supposed to change. The UAW has announced a campaign that will gradually make it a recognized negotiating partner at all of the nation's automobile manufacturers — starting with the VW plant in Chattanooga, where it failed in its last two attempts in 2014 and 2019,^[6] and ending with the Tesla factories in the southwest with their fanatically anti-union miracle boss.^[7] The union is taking the offensive with great confidence; Shawn Fain assumes that his union will no longer negotiate the next contract with just the “Big Three,” but with the “Big Five or Six.” The union will demonstrate what it considers to be its strongest arguments and why freedom-loving, hard-working Americans in particular need a union.

1.

First of all, discontent predominates in the non-union factories of the South. The workers there are obviously working under conditions and for wages that foil everything they go to work for in the first place. The short version: the money they earn is not enough for the life it has to finance and the work is destroying them.^[8] This is certainly not a Southern peculiarity; the relevant reports show at best a particular variant of the general contradiction of having to live off a type of work that is not set up or paid for their living. With their work, workers are rather a contribution to the growth of the company’s financial wealth, for which they represent a deduction with their livelihoods; the benefit of their work ultimately grows by having them do as much of it as possible while getting as little from it as possible. Wear and tear is the essence of this work, and therefore the predictable result.

2.

As much as the union makes sure that it raises awareness about the bad working and living conditions of its clientele: the union certainly doesn’t need to tell its addressees about how auto workers are worn out by their work and hardly earn anything. But the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way — that’s the union’s main point which distinguishes its agitation from merely run of the mill grievances. It’s based on the conviction that the corporate attack on the physical, time, and material needs of the workers is an attack on their actual rights and that their employer’s factories are a moral crime:

“We found ourselves facing a new enemy, a new authoritarian threat… right here at home in our workplaces, and that enemy is corporate greed. For decades, corporate greed has threatened to destroy the working class. Workers are told that their rights end at the workplace door and told to shut up or starve. For decades, workers have been led to believe there’s no other way.” (Fain, April 19, 2024)

This raises the question: why do the companies get away with such insolence, and why do hard-working Americans, who are free and proud of their rights, put up with this? Fain’s reference to the alternative being to “starve” at least hints at an answer: because the workers in their dependency on the companies have no choice but to meet the companies’ demands for profitable work. The workers are not just dealing with “authoritarian” arrogance and personal “greed,” but rather a really existing power relationship. This has its basis not in the dubious morality of businessmen, but in the — not at all undemocratic — basic principle, protected by the legal force of the state, of private ownership of the means of production which gives the employers material command over the work efforts of the propertyless workers, and with it the power to decide the workers’ conditions of existence. This power is, of course, not exercised dictatorially, but in accordance with the principles of a free, competitive society: over truly free, self-confident individuals who are responsible for nobody but themselves and their families and who compete to get by and for their own advancement. However, as wage workers, they are excluded from the means and conditions necessary for this because they are in the hands of those who employ them. A company does not dictatorially negate the self-interest of its workforce, but rather instrumentalizes it for the aim of an enrichment that contradicts the workers’ purpose. Because they themselves have no means from which to earn money through their work, they themselves with their work become the means for the company to accumulate money. Fain translates the systemically required cynicism of this free market relationship of subordination into a kind of propagandistic swindle through which American wageworkers let themselves be talked into an attitude of passive subservience. But if modern businessmen talk anything like they do in Fain’s polemical caricature, then their persuasiveness certainly does not lie in the high-and-mighty form of address, but in the renowned “dull compulsion of economic relations” (Marx, Capital, ch. 28) which in practice commit wage workers, who are free but without means, to a readiness to increase capitalist wealth.

The UAW counters with the indisputable fact that employers are also dependent — on the work of their workforce:

“‘People say Toyota engines last forever … We know what makes it possible: our hands, our backs, our knees, our work. We carry the proof every day: injuries, surgeries, disabilities.’ Why are they joining the UAW? ‘So our bodies can last as long as Toyota’s engines.’” (UAW representatives in Jacobin, March 25, 2024)

This is a very classic, very wrong reinterpretation of the wear and tear which, according to Fain, puts the “class struggle” on the agenda: the work that is extorted from the workers, according to conditions that the beneficiary of their work sets up and dictates to them, becomes their own input, which the employed workers can be proud of. The clear division of the benefits and damages from their work does not therefore testify to their proper utilization for the purpose of increasing money, which is the only reason the employer has them work, but to the disrespectful contempt for their efforts.^[9] What they imagine to be their work is in fact the product of their use as human tools by their capitalist employer.

3.

That working life is never really fair, that the boss is always greedy and unjust — the agitators of the UAW certainly don’t need to tell their addressees this either. They can assume the ubiquity of the wrong judgment that it can’t possibly be due to the source of income itself that it’s unsuitable; just as much can they be sure of the damages that the judgment is based on. But that justice in the workplace is something that wage earners have to fight for — that takes a bit more convincing. Especially since the UAW under its new boss, as mentioned, is itself placing a lot of importance on the willingness to take up the antagonism that the employers are practicing against their workforce and to strike back against them.

According to the experience-based appraisal of observers, this is precisely the biggest obstacle to the UAW’s ambitions in the South. That the willingness of southern auto workers to fight in unions is traditionally limited is certainly not because American workers are meek people who do not know their rights. Nor is it due to a supposedly typical American penchant for individualism which has no use for a struggle in and for the collective; the everyday life and Sundays of the American way of life, the nation’s military and sports games at home and away, prove the opposite. If there is a national character that has traditionally given union agitators difficulties, then it is the same one they are courting so aggressively: the indestructible pragmatism that simply bends everything to the question of whether it is worth it.

“Is it worth it?” — the question seems like the epitome of materialism. It is asked by self-confident individuals who always act on their own initiative and only for their own benefit. Of course, this question certainly has a very different meaning depending on what is supposed to be worthwhile, i.e., which individual is asking it — whether it is an enterprising resident of Wall St. who is assessing a potential capital investment in terms of its contribution to the risk and return profile of his portfolio; or a captain of industry who is weighing up the costs of technological advances in the exploitation of other people’s work versus the improved yield; or a wage worker whose freedom of calculation is caught up in a question that testifies more to his lack of any alternative to dependence: under which businessman’s command will he allow himself to be driven by necessity? The question is therefore a great equalizer. And in two ways: it turns every different rank in the economic hierarchy and every opposing relationship of economic superiority and subordination into a relationship of the private individual to himself. Each time, the individual is faced with the test of making the best of things on his own — each in his or her own place, no matter how different. For this extremely pragmatic form of materialism, it makes no difference whether one’s own possession of money enables one to dispose of the work of others or, conversely, forces one to put one’s own labor power at the disposal of others. No matter how different and antagonistic the constraints and opportunities may be, the abstract standard called “success!” is always the same.

This is the sort of materialism the UAW pitches its offer to. It addresses the stubborn habit of facing up to existence as a dependent production and cost factor of capital as a self-reliant pursuer of happiness: as a free private individual who uses his means, i.e., his labor power without any other means, according to the standards of his employers; and who is in a competition against his peers in which the company places him and in which he must and wants to prove himself. The UAW appeals to this competitive consciousness with its offer of a union, at least its kind of union, that is worthwhile. It calls on the workers to distance themselves from this competition in the interest of warding off the negative consequences of their competition, and instead to unite together with their peers to form a union fighting unit, to take on the associated risks and the additional costs in order to overcome their powerlessness as individual competitors and to collectively enforce a correction of work and pay conditions. This struggle, which the new head of the UAW calls “class struggle,” is at the same time only demanded and waged so that the workers can then once again cope better, thus make ends meet at all, precisely as competing individuals who repeatedly experience their powerlessness as wage laborers.

This is precisely why the strongest argument that the UAW sees on its side, much stronger than all the references to the dictates of necessity or justice, is the success of its union struggle. This is the crucial significance of the ‘historic victory’ in Detroit: it proves that the auto companies’ accounts have more to offer than the company bosses concede when workers unite to fight for a corresponding correction — this has become all the more clear when the nonunion car companies in the South for their part, in the wake of the major wage agreement in the North, are preemptively increasing wages and making concessions on working conditions that they had previously declared to be out of the question.^[10] The UAW wants to take advantage of this success as much as possible; its current, hope-driven strategy is in line with this:

“The UAW’s current organizing drive … [is] using an approach known as ‘momentum-based organizing.’ The central hypothesis, which will now be tested in practice, is that workers across the auto industry have been galvanized by the UAW’s stand-up strike at the Big Three and are now ready to organize. So rather than pick one target in secret and patiently build a campaign there, the union sees its job as amplifying a wave that’s already in motion. That means broadcasting the message that the union is ready to fight and inviting nonunion autoworkers across the country to join the struggle.” (Jacobin, December 12, 2023)

For this program, the union also wants to take advantage of an extraordinary constellation of favorable conditions. First, an economic situation on the labor market which gives wage earners a certain freedom to be downright selective when looking for work — which, of course, simply means that they don’t have to take just any job. But this alone is enough for labor market experts to instinctively judge such freedom of choice on the part of the workers to be — maybe not exactly a case of market failure, but definitely — not normal. After all, employers normally determine the balance of power unilaterally: so goes the revealing information about the lack of any alternative to submission that wage workers are faced with. The labor market — as economic expertise has in its own way of expressing it — is a means for capital to always find workers at the right prices and in the right quantities. The current phenomenon is apparently so rare and was last seen so long ago that its own term had to be coined for it: the “Great Resignation.”^[11]

Second, the NLRB is — still — governed by an administration that is considered friendly to labor. After the agency under Trump carried out an impressively thorough rollback of a number of labor court shackles and also regularly turned a blind eye to regular violations, the current leadership of the board is intervening again in some landmark cases — especially with regard to the legal scope of union activities.^[12]

This shows everything that has to come together for an American union to make a splash not just with its tone, but with its successes.

III. The companies and the governors of the South are fighting back with a dialog that is not entirely free of coercion: Freedom to work through submission to capital

What the UAW’s militant recruiting strategy is up against is a workforce that is also, of course, being talked to and influenced by the other side. The companies, and even more so the local governments, have strong and telling opinions about what hard-working Americans need and what they absolutely do not need — a union, for example.

1.

It’s not exactly surprising that the mainly foreign car companies have no use for the involvement of the unions, as long as they don’t need it. In this respect, the American South is actually a very welcome new home for them.^[13] On this issue, the political guardians of the business location in the southern states are even more dogmatic than the companies themselves:

“We the governors of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas are highly concerned about the unionization campaign driven by misinformation and scare tactics that the UAW has brought into our states...The reality is companies have choices when it comes to where to invest and bring jobs and opportunity… Unionization would certainly put our states’ jobs in jeopardy — in fact, in this year already, all of the UAW automakers have announced layoffs. In America, we respect our workforce and we do not need to pay a third party to tell us who can pick up a box or flip a switch. No one wants to hear this, but it’s the ugly reality… The experience in our states is when employees have a direct relationship with their employers, that makes for a more positive working environment. They can advocate for themselves and what is important to them without outside influence. The UAW has come in making big promises to our constituents that they can’t deliver on.” (Office of the Governor of the State of Alabama, April 16, 2014)

The most convincing argument against being represented by a union is therefore a simple reference to the jobs that only exist when they are profitable for the employers. This leaves no doubt that the freedom from union interference is a decisive, if not the decisive, reason that the auto companies — as well as the links before and after them in the value chain — bring about their enrichment by making use of the labor of Americans in the southern states in the first place. Only in this way — with what critics call the ‘Alabama Discount’ — does the special benefit of the region’s customary poverty unfold. And the local governments have in fact done quite a lot to ensure this: they have long had a “right to work” law that allows members of union-represented workforces to refuse to pay union dues.^[14] In the interim, they have based an entire industrialization strategy on the usefulness of union-free labor relations, luring companies with low costs for construction land and energy as well as with lavish subsidies. So when auto workers consider whether it is worthwhile for them to be represented by a union, they should — so the threat goes — take into account everything that will be ruined if the freedom-loving employees do not go along with their employers’ calculations. Resistance is futile, the reality is simply “ugly” — which of course does not speak against this, but rather for the incontestability of the requirements of the wealth whose growth they by all means want to promote. What this success dictates ultimately turns every union success into a surefire defeat for the workers: so at least everything is done to make it clear that the workers are definitely not dealing with the mere despotism of greedy businessmen, but with the entire established logic of prosperity which makes their poverty an objective necessity — in other words, according to this cynical logic, a piece of prosperity itself. Only in this way, as a bad alternative to the even worse alternative of an otherwise customary southern wage or even no wage at all, is working for global automotive corporations worthwhile.

Such naked threats with the objective logic of the free-market system are complemented by the cynicism that union membership costs money, which the workers complain they already have too little of. Added to this is a brief but sufficient clarification about the freedom of the wage earners. Earning little and being ordered around by the boss of the company — that’s freedom; being called upon by one’s own union to fight for one’s own interests — that’s paternalistic and a disruptive meddling by unauthorized persons in the familiar relationship between companies and their workforces. Unions are per se “troublemakers” who invent contradictions where there are none, because an entire region with an unshakable feeling of “us” is in the process of embarking on a capitalist awakening. The lesson is rounded off with a reminder of the decisive aspect of southern patriotism, namely its particularly consistent narrow-mindedness and bigotry: unions are not from here, they don’t understand how we do things here — no appeal is too cheap. As if that is supposed to be especially revealing of what such an ideal of community is good for.

The bottom line is a peremptory celebration of what in essence makes for a free, hard-working American: self-confident adaptation to the dictates of others. His reward is a purely idealistic one, but one that no one can take away from him: being a free member of a successful community.

2.

In the battle for the hearts and minds of those in the workforce eligible to vote, the capitalist and state agitators have the great advantage over those of the union in that they do not have to stop at false arguments. And they make it clear that they do not want to rely on the cited objective constraints of business and the amicable characteristics of the home region to persuade the well-understood self-interest of the workers to make the right decision. They help out with various “union-busting” tactics — all the means of intimidation and outright law breaking which in practice make it clear how little do freedom and unilateral command, individual aspirations and being forced to fit into the bigger whole, contradict each other. The companies hold regular mandatory meetings at which workers have to listen to anti-union propaganda of the above kind; union agitators are fired wherever possible — fines and lawsuits are OK — or not even hired or allowed on the premises. For their part, the local politicians do not leave it up to the freedom of business, but follow up wherever they find the companies not being steadfast enough — e.g. with a ban on the voluntary recognition of union representation even without an official election by the workforce.^[15] If the companies have to comply with the wish of a majority of employees for union representation, then it’s only by way of an official vote; the opportunity to campaign against the union with all the means described above should be used by the companies so that the employees realize that it is not worthwhile to organize union resistance against the demands of their employers.

*

The interim results of the union campaign so far: a victory at VW in Chattanooga, a defeat at Mercedes in Tuscaloosa.

© GegenStandpunkt 2024