United Auto Workers
The United Auto Workers, fully named International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, is an American labor union that represents workers in the United States and southern Ontario, Canada.
It was founded as part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s and grew rapidly from 1936 to the 1950s. The union played a major role in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party under the leadership of Walter Reuther. It was known for gaining high wages and pensions for automotive manufacturing workers, but it was unable to unionize auto plants built by foreign-based car makers in the South after the 1970s, and it went into a steady decline in membership; reasons for this included increased automation, decreased use of labor, mismanagement, movements of manufacturing, and increased globalization. After a successful strike at the Big Three in 2023, the union organized its first foreign plant in 2024.
UAW members in the 21st century work in industries including autos and auto parts, health care, casino gambling, and higher education. The union is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan. As of February 24, 2022, the UAW has more than 391,000 active members and more than 580,000 retired members in over 600 local unions and holds 1,150 contracts with some 1,600 employers. It holds assets amounting to just over $1billion.
History
Background and founding
The UAW was born out of an organizing drive by the American Federation of Labor. The AFL had traditionally focused on organizing skilled workers practicing specific trades, an approach known as craft unionism. Because most automobile workers were not skilled, as of the early 1930s, they were largely not unionized. This changed following the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933. AFL president William Green decided to begin recruiting unskilled and semi-skilled workers. He planned to organize workers at each factory into a temporary "federal labor union", whose members would then be divided up amongst the AFL's various craft unions. He sent William Collins to Detroit to begin the effort. Collins was hampered by an insufficiently militant program, a lack of organizing funds, fear of retaliation among the workers, distrust from Black and foreign workers, and strong opposition from the automobile companies. By 1935, the majority of members of the FLU had been recruited by militant local activists taking their own initiative at plants outside Michigan. These militant local unions opposed the AFL's plan to divide their members into different craft unions. They began advocating for the immediate creation of an automobile workers' union covering the entire industry. After the Toledo local led an unauthorized but successful strike against General Motors, the AFL caved to pressure and called for a convention.The UAW's founding convention began on August 26, 1935 in Detroit. The total membership of its constituent unions was 25,769. The AFL attempted to keep control of the union by pushing through a charter that denied the rank-and-file the right to elect their own officers. Militant local unions quickly managed to overturn that situation, and the struggle alienated the UAW from the AFL leadership. The UAW joined John L. Lewis's caucus of industrial unions, the Committee for Industrial Organization, in 1936. When the AFL expelled the industrial unions in 1938, it joined the new Congress of Industrial Organizations.
Organizing the Big Three
The UAW's fortunes began to improve after it began organizing on an industrial basis. The union found rapid success with the sitdown strike, a tactic where workers "sit down" at their work stations to occupy a factory. Sitdown strikes enabled small numbers of workers to interrupt the assembly line and stop production across an entire plant. Likewise, it projected power outwards from the factory across the entire supply chain: "just as a militant minority could stop production in an entire plant, so if the plant was a key link in an integrated corporate empire, its occupation could paralyze the corporation." After winning sitdown strikes at General Motors plants in Atlanta and Kansas City, the UAW began to demand to represent General Motors workers nationwide. Their efforts culminated in the famous Flint sit-down strike, which began on December 30, 1936. By January 25, strikes and the effects of production shutdowns idled 150,000 workers at fifty General Motors plants from California to New York. Strikers repelled the efforts of the police and National Guard to retake them. On February 11, 1937, General Motors agreed to bargain with the UAW, and eventually recognized the UAW as a bargaining agent under the newly adopted National Labor Relations Act. This recognition marked a turning point in the growth of the UAW and organized labor unions more generally. The next month, auto workers at Chrysler won recognition of the UAW as their representative in a sitdown strike. By mid-1937 the new union claimed 150,000 members and was spreading through the auto and parts manufacturing towns of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.The Ford Motor Company was the last of the "Big Three" automakers to recognize the UAW. Henry Ford and his security manager, Harry Bennett, used brute force to keep the union out of Ford. They set up the Ford Service Department to spy on and intimidate workers. At the Battle of the Overpass, Ford Service Department personnel beat union organizers in front of news photographers. Despite Ford's attempts to destroy them, photographs of the incident reached the press and helped turn public opinion against the company. However, Ford continued to refuse to sign a contract. The UAW's cause was hindered by its weakness with Black workers. Older Black workers felt loyalty to Henry Ford because he had hired and paid them well at a time when other auto companies would not. Furthermore, many feared that Black workers were being asked to risk their jobs but would be "pushed aside and ignored" once the union had secured their votes. It took four years of organizing efforts for the UAW to win the right to represent Ford employees. On May 21, 1941, following a strike at Ford's Rouge plant, a decisive majority of employees, including most Black employees, voted to join the UAW. The UAW extracted a better deal from Ford than from other automakers, including pay increases, a closed shop, and rehiring of pro-union workers. The agreement also included a non-discrimination clause drafted by Shelton Tappes, a Black foundryman who had served on the UAW negotiating team.
Communists provided many of the organizers and led some key union locals, especially Local 600 which represented the largest Ford plants. The Communist faction had some key positions in the union, including the directorship of the Washington office, the research department, and the legal office. Walter Reuther at times cooperated closely with the Communists, but he and his allies formed strategically an anticommunist current within the UAW. The UAW discovered that it had to be able to uphold its side of a bargain if it was to be a successful bargaining agency with a corporation, which meant that wildcat strikes and disruptive behavior by union members had to be stopped by the union itself. According to one writer, many UAW members were extreme individualists who did not like being bossed around by company foremen or by union agents. Leaders of the UAW realized that they had to control the shop floor, as Reuther explained in 1939: "We must demonstrate that we are a disciplined, responsible organization; we not only have power, but that we have power under control.".
World War II
dramatically changed the nature of the UAW's organizing. The UAW's executive board voted to make a "no strike" pledge to ensure that the war effort would not be hindered by strikes. A vehement minority opposed the decision, but the pledge was later reaffirmed by the membership. As war production ramped up and auto factories converted to tank building, the UAW organized new locals in these factories and airplane manufacturers across the country and hit a peak membership of over a million members in 1944. That same year, Lillian Hatcher was appointed the first Black female international representative of the UAW.Postwar
The UAW struck GM for 113 days, beginning in November 1945, demanding a greater voice in management. GM would pay higher wages but refused to consider power sharing; the union finally settled with an eighteen-and-a-half-cent wage increase but little more. The UAW went along with GM in return for an ever-increasing packages of wage and benefit hikes through collective bargaining, with no help from the government.New leadership
won the election for president at the UAW's constitutional convention in 1946 and served until his death in an airplane accident in May 1970. Reuther led the union during one of the most prosperous periods for workers in U.S. history. Immediately after the war, left-wing elements demanded "30–40", which is a 30-hour week for 40 hours pay. Reuther rejected 30–40 and decided to concentrate on total annual wages, displaying a new corporatist mentality that accepted management's argument that shorter hours conflicted with wage increases and other job benefits and abandoning the old confrontational syndicalist position that shorter hours drove up wages and protected against unemployment. The UAW delivered contracts for his membership through negotiation. Reuther would pick one of the Big Three automakers, and if it did not offer concessions, he would strike it and let the other two absorb its sales. Besides high hourly wage rates and paid vacations, in 1950, Reuther negotiated an industry first contract with General Motors known as Reuther's Treaty of Detroit. The UAW negotiated employer-funded pensions at Chrysler, medical insurance at GM, and in 1955 supplementary unemployment benefits at Ford. Many smaller suppliers followed suit with benefits.Reuther tried to negotiate lower automobile prices for the consumer with each contract, with limited success. An agreement on profit sharing with American Motors led nowhere, because profits were small at this minor player. The UAW expanded its scope to include workers in other major industries such as the aerospace and agricultural-implement industries.
The UAW disaffiliated from the AFL–CIO on July 1, 1968, after Reuther and AFL–CIO president George Meany could not come to agreement on a wide range of policy issues or reforms to AFL–CIO governance. On July 24, 1968, just days after the UAW disaffiliation, Teamsters general president Frank Fitzsimmons and Reuther formed the Alliance for Labor Action as a new national trade union center to organize unorganized workers and pursue leftist political and social projects. Meany denounced the ALA as a dual union, although Reuther argued it was not. The Alliance's initial program was ambitious. Reuther's death in a plane crash on May 9, 1970, near Black Lake, Michigan, dealt a serious blow to the Alliance, and the group halted operations in July 1971 after the Auto Workers was unable to continue to fund its operations.
In 1948, the UAW founded the radio station WDET 101.9 FM in Detroit. It was sold to Wayne State University for $1 in 1952.