EXCERPT - Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South
Written by SP Editor
Innovation
Innovation is not divorced from history but requires a willingness to trade the security of familiar routines for the wager of speculative futures; it transcends the past rather than relitigating past defeats. Seen through the lens of innovation, the 2019 [Chattanooga VW-UAW] election drew the wrong lessons from 2014, overcompensating for its tactical disadvantage by allowing the opposition to define its campaign. Still reeling from the 2014 defeat, it retreated into a defensive posture, circling the wagons to defend its ranks against an all-powerful enemy. By 2024, the collective trauma of 2014 had receded, and the UAW was ready to move forward, not backward.
Scholars of organizational creativity often observe that innovation comes from unexpected places.22 In the case of the UAW, the innovative spark came initially not from the Organizing Department, which is formally tasked with expanding membership rolls, but from its National Collective Bargaining unit, which oversees expired contracts.
Indeed, as with all unions, functional units are organizationally distinct. But prospective members are not likely to be much interested in the UAWs organizational charts. Instead, they draw commonsensical connections between the UAW’s past performance and future results. By explicitly linking strong contracts with new organizing, Sean Fain, UAW’s new president, broke sharply with his predecessors, who had tended to present “new organizing” at transplants as distinct and siloed off from the UAW’s core obligation to represent its existing members.
In 2014 and 2019, the “problem” of the southern transplants was firewalled within the Organizing Department. The 2023 strikes showed that efforts to grow the organization cannot be divorced from self-sustaining operating expenses (not least because the organization cannot survive without increasing its membership rolls as automation and outsourcing continue to chip away at its Big Three base. Put differently, bargaining representatives knew their success at the negotiating table was crucial in advertising the union’s accomplishments to would-be members, while givebacks and concessionary con-tracts weakened the union’s sales pitch.
From an organizational studies perspective, siloed thinking, noncollaborative work processes, and inertia had confined the organizing-related responsibilities to the department assigned to these tasks. Under UAWD (Unite All Workers for Democracy) reforms, the necessity of organizing permeated all levels of the organization and became an inescapable priority, no longer the exclusive province of designated organizers.
The UAW’s 2024 election was immediately preceded by the ouster of top leadership by an insurgent rank-and-file caucus, sweeping democratic reforms, and a momentous stand-up strike. Though these events were exogenous to Chattanooga, they had a tremendous impact on the organizing campaign. The connection between the UAW’s reinvention and the organizing campaign at VW is less a question of direct transfer of tactics than of ambient spillover. Striking for recognition at VW, while technically feasible given the multiple unfair labor practice charges, was never seriously considered. However, the heightening of contradictions and escalation of tactics contributed to an expanded sense of what might be possible.
More than an atmospheric vibes shift, the stand-up strike signaled to prospective members at VW that the UAW was an innovative organization, no longer content to sink into familiar patterns and quite unlike the moribund union they had twice voted against. The UAW’s transformation was not immediate, nor was it total, but it still represented a real break with the past, sufficiently meaningful that even former opponents could not help but give it a second look.
Legal restrictions narrowly circumscribe acceptable conduct for organizing workers in the United States, limiting the possibilities for innovation during a conventional organizing drive. For this reason, many unions seek not to rewrite the playbook but to make slight alterations well within the scope of widely accepted “best practices.” Certainly, the UAW continued to rely on the methodical deployment of tried-and-true tactics, accompanied by meticulous recordkeeping that would be familiar to anyone versed in labor organizing. In these senses, the UAW drew on a back-to-basics approach rooted in the unglamorous but time-honored task of worker-to-worker organizing that had been so glaringly absent in 2014.
Still, in at least one important respect, the UAW ran an innovative campaign that shattered expectations and demonstrated real tactical agility despite the risks of testing an unproven strategy in a make-or-break situation. Just as it had changed its approach on the fly to calibrate pressure on particular companies during its stand-up strike, the UAW departed from its habit of one-off campaigns and presented VW as the opening salvo in a broader campaign against transplants. Even as the vote neared in Chattanooga, the UAW was already preparing for another vote at Mercedes, some four hundred miles away, and fielding requests from workers at six other plants by its own accounting.
VW workers saw themselves as the connective joint between the Big Three contracts and the remainder of the transplants. They were rightful heirs to the Big Three contracts and the forward line of an extended campaign against the remaining transplants and battery makers. The one-plant at-a-time approach had meant ignoring interconnections between global companies. The new sectoral focus was a crucial reframing of the campaign that repositioned Chattanooga against a different backdrop.
Industrial psychology has long observed that laser focus on a task ironically leads to less innovative outcomes, and strategic management scholars have suggested that the same applies at an organizational level. As long as the UAW retained its exclusive focus on organizing southern transplants, it could, at best, tweak a narrowly prescribed and bounded set of tactical approaches.
Once it widened the aperture of its strategizing sessions, the UAW realized that the solution was hiding in plain sight at the Spring Hill, Tennessee, GM assembly plant and other Big Three plants. Only by (temporarily) diverting its attention to the Big Three could the UAW pinpoint its errors and develop a new, more expansive tactical repertoire.
In both 2014 and 2019, with the organization’s calcified structure, antidemocratic governance, and tarnished leadership, it remained stuck in a recursive feedback loop, unable to achieve the velocity that might allow it to escape past defeats. Casting off the shadow of the past required that the UAW turn the reflexive mirror on itself and reconstitute itself from within to open new strategic possibilities.
Motivation
The wave of insurgency and contention that gripped the UAW in 2023 dramatically affected the 2024 election, both through its direct impact and by the fresh life it breathed into an organization many had dismissed as all but moribund. The organization’s internal life was reinvigorated in ways that will reverberate well beyond the current contract cycle.
Connections
Many observers have pointed out that VW drew inspiration from the Big Three strikes. But if the transition between the Big Three victory and a renewed push at VW appeared seamless or automatic to outsiders, it was actually the result of a deliberate strategy. Even before the ballots were fully counted at the Big Three, the UAW had boots on the ground in Chattanooga, testing the waters and working to reform the organizing committee, which had devolved through natural attrition since 2019.
Before the dust had settled on the Big Three contracts, Fain was already announcing “Stand-Up 2.0,” his campaign to organize transplants. Immediately after tentative agreements were ratified, the union announced it would parlay its gains into a comprehensive strategy targeting all unorganized firms, foreign and domestic, EV and internal combustion engine (ICE). However, rather than take on employers one at a time—as it had previously—the union declared its intention to organize all transplants simultaneously.
In practice, this meant that campaigns would be staggered to maximize organizational resources. Still, the UAW signaled it had abandoned its piecemeal approach in favor of a simultaneous push across multiple sites. Backing its talk with action, the UAW organized caravans and Zoom meetings for workers throughout the Southeast to share ideas and stories. Just as the UAW had caught the Big Three off guard by dispensing with the one-at-a-time pattern bargaining strategy in favor of a calibrated rollout of strikes across all three companies, it would now run near-simultaneous campaigns at thirteen transplants and EVs, holding elections on an unannounced and unpredictable schedule. It hoped it could generate similar returns by keeping the transplants guessing, just as it had done with the Big Three.
Indeed, the UAW seemed to negotiate its Big Three contract with one eye gazing across the table at the company bargaining chiefs and the other cast southward toward its future enlistees. Its top priorities included cost of living adjustments, which resonated in the low-wage South, and an appeal to young workers, who were likely to stand at the receiving end of the two-tier wage scale. Again, Fain explicitly drew these connections, saying, “We want to use the Big Three contracts as our framework [for transplants].”
The UAW also suggested it would synchronize contract expiration dates to align with the Big Three in 2028, potentially paving the way for a general strike. Previously, campaigns at transplants had often occurred in off-cycle years, usually at least twelve months removed from Big Three contracts. But Fain connected VW with the Big Three both rhetorically and temporally, showing that “unionism in one company” was a doomed prospect from the outset.
Workers contemplating joining a union do not conduct a simple cost benefit analysis. However, they make a general comparative evaluation, observing pay, working conditions, and benefits in unionized industries to gauge their prospects under a union. In this sense, the Big Three served as the primary reference group for VW workers, putting forward the closest approximation of a unionized future. Fain made this connection explicit. Referencing the wage bump at Toyota, he extended an open invitation to transplant workers: You are welcome to join our Stand-Up movement. If this is what Toyota gives you when the Big Three stand up and fight, imagine what you could accomplish if you join the UAW and stand up and fight for yourselves.
The strike had the added benefit of proximity to organizing targets. By striking distribution centers, the UAW broadened its reach beyond the final assembly plants, establishing a beachhead in the South, which had only a handful of assembly plants but numerous distribution centers. For example, the stand-up strike extended to a GM distributor just outside Atlanta, only about two hours from Chattanooga.
With the stand-up strike concluded, rather than foreign automakers setting the floor for Detroit and undercutting Detroit’s gains, Detroit now set a ceiling for foreign automakers. The strike increased the marginal difference between the Big Three and transplants, incentivizing foreign companies to catch up to remain competitive. Immediately after the strike, other companies rushed to match the Big Three contracts, demonstrating the union’ power. VW workers saw their fate as linked to the other southern factories but also understood the central importance of their struggle as “one of the first dominoes.
A win at VW would set a new precedent, just as repeated losses had reinforced the old one.
Abe Walker is a professor at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina.