New Orleans The American Prospect recently ran a lengthy piece reported by respected columnist, Harold Meyerson, on the internal conflict within the United Auto Workers (UAW), one of the major US unions, now and historically. While painful to read about a labor union’s internal strife, which is usually kept more successfully behind closed doors, it was good to see a union and its workers taken seriously. Furthermore, Meyerson is not throwing bricks at the front door of Solidarity House in Detroit, but a sympathetic supporter trying to unravel and sort out the pieces and players in this puzzling current evolution from the heights of what had seemed to all as a victory by reformers, led by Sean Fain, that also led to organizing success for a while. There are many lessons that can be drawn from this piece that are worth all of us committed to workers gaining power through their unions need to remember.
Unions, like the UAW, are huge institutions, long removed from their movement histories. They are also fundamentally political institutions formed and led by leaders who gain power and influence over years by mastering the personalities and culture of the institutions sufficiently to win elections. Once elected or appointed, similar to any political entity, they have to maintain their base and in most cases campaign to keep their jobs in the future against other aspirants, who they have bested in the past or that have arisen in the present. Organizing is important, but the existing membership often takes precedence politically. Looking at the internal and external challenges they face, it’s critical to keep this in mind without inspecting any of this with rose-colored glasses.
Chris Brooks is a lightning rod in this story. I know Chris, though only marginally. He reached out for me when he was a community organizer in Chattanooga. Tennessee. We had some conversations and exchanged some emails. He went from there to Labor Notes, the self-proclaimed advocate of rank-and-file workers within unions and workers struggles generally. His success in various efforts led Fain to bring him on to manage his campaign for president. Once he won, Fain made him chief of staff, which is a natural reward, though a different kind of challenge, since he had assumed a mandate to create change in an organizational culture that was well known as insular.
The UAW has a long tradition of staff appointments in representation and organizing going to people who have been on the tools. Having won the right to have stewards, who were fulltime and paid by the company to enforce the contracts and represent the workers, a usual progression for those ambitious and wanting to do more was to try to move from the plant to a staff position. With auto workers making six-figures due to good contracts and overtime, staff positions had to be competitive within the union accordingly, but this also discourages hiring new blood from outside at more than a hundred-grand in wages. All of this makes staff deeply rooted and easily threatened when a reformer is elected and brings in outsiders at the top of the union who want to clean out any deadwood or committed opponents. In the best of situations, Brooks’ job would have been impossible on a short timeline. Surely, he made some mistakes, but tensions and conflict on this mission would have been inevitable.
The story goes into detail about the competition and tensions between the president and the secretary-treasurer with one moving faster and one trying to keep ties to the past procedures. When it came to the obstacles she put in the way of organizing new plants, it was impossible to not come down on the side of Fain. He didn’t control the full board, but they supported him on these disputes for the same reason. They wanted the union to grow. Something is also made of the fact that their organizing success among university teaching assistants, which added 100,000 to their ranks with more than 60,000 paying dues, being such a different mix of workers compared to auto and other industrial workers that it created cultural and political differences internally, but, as many have noted, most big US unions are general workers unions, and all of them either grow, are forced into mergers if losing members, or die, so who wouldn’t try to mix and match.
Because of past leadership corruption and the fact that Fain’s election was the first by a membership vote, rather than through delegates, the role of the federal monitor was also huge in this conflict. If Meyerson’s report is accurate, and it rings true, the monitor’s interference in internal matters for, in some cases, his own personal reasons has been critical in fueling the fire of the conflict at the top and throughout the union, including overruling Fain and the board’s decisions.
What a tragic mess! Not long ago, I was at a Labor Notes convention in Chicago where Fain was feted as the hope for labor’s future. Now he’s caught in a quagmire. Brooks is long gone. The conflict is unabated, and Meyerson’s report will throw more wood on the fire. The resolution may or may not come if Fain is re-elected, but regardless of that outcome, the hope that the UAW might lead a labor renaissance is also in flames now.