The United Automobile Workers has scored a remarkable string of victories — most recently, a landmark contract Monday for electric vehicle battery workers — as its new leadership seeks to restore the union’s image as the voice of an iconic segment of the American working class.
But vying for headlines is one part of the union representing tens of thousands of university workers, which right now is focused solely on a mission far from building cars and trucks: ending Israel’s war on Gaza.
UAW leaders insist they can smooth over the discrepancy between the twin thrusts of UAW activism — one on college campuses and the other on red-state assembly lines. But it won’t be easy. The UAW signs crowding pro-Palestinian encampments on college campuses, furnished by the union’s international headquarters in Detroit, alone have struck a chord with some union members who are uncomfortable with such outward signs of politics on such a heated issue.
“It’s so bad for the union,” said Isaac Altman, a UAW member and staff attorney in the family court office of the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County, New York, who clashed with his local over a pro-Palestine resolution that called “a little more radical than Hezbollah.” (The resolution called for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the “occupation and blockade of Palestinian land, sea and air by Israeli military forces.”)
The competition for attention can only get worse. On Monday, union negotiators reached a tentative deal with Ultium Cells, General Motors’ joint venture with LG Energy Solution, a Korean company, that could prove a milestone in the automaker’s transition to electric vehicles. It would give huge pay raises and far more safety protections to workers at an electric vehicle battery plant in Lordstown, Ohio, solid evidence that President Biden’s efforts to fight climate change could deliver on his promise that a green future will not let behind the workers.
“It’s a huge deal,” said Dave Green, the UAW’s regional director for Ohio and Indiana. “We’ve tried to have a fair transition and stop this race to the bottom for electric vehicle workers’ wages. This contract is very exciting.”
At the same time the contract emerged, the University of California sued a UAW local in the Golden State that represents 48,000 teaching assistants for striking over pro-Palestinian protests, a less-than-ideal picture, union officials say, such as the new UAW president, Shawn Fain, is trying to organize politically conservative workers.
University union members, now back on the job, have received strike pay — $500 a week — and other support from UAW headquarters since the University of California, Santa Cruz graduate students walked off the job on May 20, not unlike the auto workers who manned the lines in Michigan, Missouri and Ohio last fall.
The union leadership was not kicking and screaming at the Gaza protests. Higher education locals pressed national leadership to get involved, but when, in December, the UAW became the first major union to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, the board vote was unanimous.
Asked about unrest among California and New York union locals over Gaza, Mr. Green, who represents the UAW in the Republican states of Ohio and Indiana, responded with a curt “no comment.”
No doubt, under Mr. Fain’s muscular leadership, the UAW has made strides toward reconnecting with the working class, an advantage for President Biden, whom the union has supported. A six-week wave of strikes against the big three automakers last fall produced the biggest wage increases for auto workers in decades. An 11th-hour deal on the brink of a strike in April against Daimler Truck in North Carolina gave workers 25 percent raises.
Days later, workers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted overwhelmingly to join the UAW, a breakthrough as the union pushes to organize foreign automakers — especially electric vehicle plants — in the union-hostile Southeast region.
It hasn’t been all smooth sailing: Last month, workers at two Mercedes-Benz plants in Alabama voted against UAW representation. On Monday, a court-appointed monitor monitoring the union for corruption accused Mr. Fain and the new leaders of obstructing efforts to access information in violation of a 2020 consent decree obtained by leaders whom Mr. Fain ousted to avoid the acquisition of the Ministry of Justice by the Union.
The tentative contract awarded this week to Ultium Cells, an EV battery consortium in the shadow of a Northeast Ohio auto plant that former President Donald J. Trump promised but failed to save, intended to put the Union back on a positive trajectory. . It includes 30 percent raises over three years for most workers, 112 percent raises for the lowest paid, a $3,000 bonus upon ratification and new positions for health and safety workers.
But just like Mr. Biden, Mr. Fein must also placate pro-Palestinian activists, a legacy of the UAW’s previous leadership that tried over the past decade to increase membership labeling by organizing teaching assistants and other higher education employees. , especially on the politically active west and northeast coasts. For the UAW, the biggest success came in the past seven years, when tens of thousands of adjunct professors and other workers at the University of California, Washington University, University of Connecticut, New York University and Harvard voted to carpool . join. More than a quarter of the union’s 391,000 members now work for universities.
“We’ve set out to rebuild this union and turn it into a fighting union, a union that fights for union organizing and for humanity as a whole,” said Brandon Mancilla, a UAW board member who joined the union through of the Harvard alumni organization. students and has been instrumental in its stance on Gaza. “Of course, when you take on a mission as ambitious and broad as this, you’re going to have issues that a lot of the mainstream doesn’t see as central to traditional unions.”
Not everyone, inside and outside the union, sees it that way. Last month, congressional Republicans got involved when Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, called out the president of a small New York UAW local that represents legal aid workers over the controversial his vote in favor of recess. -fire in Gaza and subsequent accusations of anti-Semitism.
The local itself is badly divided, with some calling the Republican investigation a witch hunt and others suing their own union.
“It completely undermines us with management, it completely undermines us in the court of public opinion, and it distracts from the union doing what it’s supposed to be doing: standing up for workers,” Mr. Altman said. “It’s absurd.”
UAW leaders tried in interviews to link the union’s successes, its resurgent political activism in Gaza and the new conflict with its federal watchdog. An old-line labor union, they said, ruffles a lot of feathers.
“We encourage monitoring to investigate any claims brought to their office, because we know what they will find: a UAW leadership committed to serving members and running a democratic union,” Mr. Fein said.
Mr. Fain thought taking a stand on the issue was in line with longtime union president Walter Reuther’s anti-Vietnam War and pro-civil rights activism, as well as the UAW’s stance against apartheid in South Africa.
“Everything we do is about us as workers having more control over working conditions,” said Rafael Jaime, president of UAW Local 4811 in California and a doctoral student in English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He cited pay, health care and safety, “but also the way we participate in protests on campus,” adding, “We want to have a voice.”
UAW officials downplayed any disconnection. Some white, skilled tradesmen in the South may balk at left-wing activism, officials said, but many Southern workers, especially people of color, agree with calls for an end to the war in Gaza, especially when it’s tied to U.S. tax money, the officials added. Tim O’Hara, who was vice president of the UAW local in Lordstown, Ohio, when the GM plant closed in 2018, preferred to talk about the new Ultium contract.
The Lordstown local has always been “iconic,” he said. “They have now set the standard for the contracts that will be negotiated for the Big 3 battery facilities” across the country.
Mr. Mancilla, a UAW board member, noted that the union had also supported Mr. Biden’s re-election, although many workers are unlikely to vote for him. Activism in Gaza may not be an “everyday conversation” for organizers in the South’s car factories, he said. But he added, “I wouldn’t say anyone is silent about anything. We make no secret of our support for Joe Biden, even though many of our members may have different party affiliations.”
