Learning the Right Lessons From the UAW Loss in Alabama

The UAW functionally didn’t have a community campaign—certainly not one that could contend with the boss’s. If unions are truly committed to bottom-up organizing—which the new UAW leadership is—they need to realize that they are sitting on a gold mine of potential community power. The workers themselves have the capacity to build a bottom-up community strategy simply by first engaging all solid supporters in a one-on-one conversation that asks, “It’s great we are building majority support. But you know, with Mercedes, it’s going to take even more to win. Who are some of the local people you already know? Where do you and/or your family worship, or what leagues are your kids in doing sports, or what do you and/or your family volunteer for?” Workers must already be pro-union to have these conversations. But even with just 2,000 yes votes, the UAW had plenty of room to build bottom-up from the outside along with bottom-up inside. These connections can then be mobilized by the workers to build a powerful counternarrative that can defeat a boss’s campaign because there’s more workers with connections than a governor, a minister, and a famous football coach.

Mistake 2: Straying from Its 30-50-70 Model

Perhaps the most exciting recent announcement by the UAW was Fain’s commitment to pour $40 million into organizing the unorganized over the coming two years. The union’s national website listed a bevy of resources for workers, starting with the outline of a new model they call the 30-50-70 strategy. After 30 percent of workers sign cards that authorize an election, the campaign goes public. At 50 percent, workers then rally with President Shawn Fain and other leaders. At 70 percent, they demand recognition for the union from the employer. In the Mercedes plant, the union filed for an election on April 5 and held a rally and issued a press release claiming that it had a supermajority of support inside the plant. But in conversations with organizers over the past month who didn’t want to be identified, the concept of a supermajority seemed elusive.

For example, the union released what would normally be a “majority photo poster”—if not a “supermajority” photo poster—that had just 700 worker pictures on it. That means they were short of a 55 percent majority by 2,091 workers. When these posters are done—actually showing a supermajority—they can be a key tool in winning campaigns. Supermajority posters show, not tell, that most of the workers are united. But there was never any supermajority literature produced in the UAW campaign. Instead of following their supposed strategy, it seemed the senior staff fell prey to a belief in “Momentum”—the theory that a “whirlwind” created from the gains in the national Big Three negotiations, followed by the Daimler truck success, and the VW vote—would propel the UAW to victory.

Mistake 3: Having an In-Plant Organizing Committee with Activists, Not Leaders

At the time the UAW released the 700-picture poster, organizers said the union had people from outside the plant phoning the workers—a common, failed strategy. When asked why it relied on distant phone banking, the answer was that there were still too many unassessed workers, and they were trying to get a feel if those were breaking yes or no. This is evidence of the campaign’s failure to correctly identify and recruit the genuine organic or natural leaders to the in-plant worker organizing committee. Assessing the strength of the campaign among the plant’s workforce should be the job of a properly built worker-organizing committee—not outsiders.

Organizers also said that when they filed for the election, they had at least one worker committee member per department covering 90 percent of the facility. It’s great that the new leadership now understands the need for worker-to-worker committees in the plant. But that’s true of any private-sector fight: Union staff is forbidden from setting foot on the employer’s property—from parking lots to grass that might be a mile from the plant. Union staff can actually get arrested for this—which is a bad look and a gift to the boss’s campaign. Even if the union actually had 90 percent of the departments covered, it couldn’t have had the right workers on the committee. Pro-union activists, no matter how important to the campaign overall, can’t make up the organizing committee. The hard work of workers’ correctly identifying their most respected department and shift leaders, then recruiting them, is the only way to win against stiff union-busting campaigns.

One reason the activist-committee approach worked at the VW plant a month earlier is that the UAW had what’s called a “neutrality agreement” hammered out between IG Metall, the German autoworkers union, and VW. Such an agreement might have prevented the kind of egregious behavior Mercedes engaged in—but there was no such agreement with Mercedes. Instead, the union announced that it was engaging with the German government to pressure Mercedes under a new German law around companies’ behavior in the supply chain—a prime example of magical thinking. Having worked in Germany for years now, it’s clear to me that relying on the German government to fix the behavior of management in the US is like watching an underfunded and overwhelmed—yet well-intentioned—National Labor Relations Board try to tame Amazon, Starbucks, or Elon Musk.

The Future: We Need the UAW to Keep Winning

It’s unfortunate that so much of the progressive movement’s hopes were riding on the Alabama UAW election. The highest price was paid by the Mercedes workers themselves—who endured Levitt-ish hell being rained down on them in a fight they deserved to win. Which makes it all the more important that we learn the lessons of this defeat. Next time he union needs to focus on leaders, not activists. It must develop a bottom-up, worker-led community strategy that kicks off when the union begins to talk with workers. There likely won’t be any more VW-like neutrality agreements with other foreign-owned US-based automakers, but the UAW can still win big. As Shawn Fain himself said last Friday, “What matters is what you do with that experience.” Everyone will continue to cheer this new UAW leadership on, as we should. Their task is not easy, and they are fighting for all of us. But simply put, there are no shortcuts.