Union Reform and Social Movements Are Moving Labor Left
The massive United Auto Workers Local 4811 is on strike in protest of the University of California’s repression of pro-Palestine protests. The story of how they got there is a revealing one.
Last week, United Auto Workers Local 4811, the local covering 48,000 academic workers across the massive University of California system, went on strike. The union called the strike in response to what it claims are the university’s violations of the rights of its members to peacefully protest when it forcibly cleared pro-Palestine encampments at some campuses and refrained from protecting protesters at UCLA from a violent right-wing mob. You can read more details about the strike in my recent article for Jacobin.
UAW is officially striking over unfair labor practices (ULPs) related to the charges of violations of members’ rights to free expression. But it is also calling on the university to respect the demands of the protesters by, among other things, disclosing and divesting from investments bound up with the Israeli occupation. For both of these reasons, the strike is politically significant.
Something I didn’t discuss in my Jacobin piece, though, is the interesting recent history of UAW 4811 and how it relates to the rank-and-file reform movement that recently swept the United Auto Workers International and elected Shawn Fain. Local 4811 is the recent amalgamation of two preexisting locals: UAW 2865, representing student workers, and UAW 5810, representing academic researchers and postdocs. I was a member of Local 2865 myself while I was working on my PhD.
United Auto Workers, as a national union, of course got its start organizing autoworkers, but now represents a growing number of workers in higher ed and other non-manual sectors. And there are cultural and political differences between the student workers and postdocs represented by 4811 and UAW members working in auto or weapons manufacturing (as brought out in a recent discussion I had with UAW Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla — which I highly recommend reading). That includes on the question of Palestine solidarity; I think it’s safe to say that UAW’s higher-ed and professional members have probably been the forces pushing most strongly for the union to call for a cease-fire in Gaza and divestment from Israel.
But it would be wrong to see academic workers as uniformly progressive, or as always in sync with the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) reform movement that elected Fain. In fact, when I was a member, Local 2865 leadership opposed one-member, one-vote, the demand for democratic leadership elections that ultimately paved the way for Fain’s election. Later, the local’s president and key leaders around him refused to endorse Fain and his Members United slate for leadership.
I don’t say any of that to condemn those leaders, though I do think they were in the wrong. But I do want to emphasize that overall, contrary to some media narratives, grad-student workers constituted a relatively small number of votes for reform leadership in the UAW. And in the UC system, the direction of causation seems to have gone in the other direction — successful reform in the UAW International, driven by autoworkers as much as by any other group, has helped push 4811 leaders toward greater militancy. Fellow former UAW 2865 member Ben Mabie puts it well: the current UC strike, he says, represents “the possibilities that a union leader like Shawn Fain shakes open even among a local leadership that had only recently sided with the moribund administration caucus in the UAW.”