This text is a part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s dwelling for opinion and information evaluation. It was initially printed at The Dialog.
Having negotiated “document contracts” with the Massive Three – and seen the majority of its rank-and-file members approve them – the United Auto Employees says its work isn’t performed.
The union intends to strive as soon as extra to steer the remainder of the U.S. auto business’s employees to hitch the union.
“We’re going to arrange like we’ve by no means organized earlier than,” mentioned UAW President Shawn Fain.
As labor students who’ve studied union funds, we imagine it is a formidable goal. On high of the extreme company resistance from the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, there’s the excessive value of waging costly campaigns in states like Tennessee and Alabama, which have “right-to-work” legal guidelines designed to discourage labor organizing.
However the United Auto Employees seems to have the cash, know-how and institutional infrastructure to launch these organizing campaigns.
The opposite 57%
About 146,000 UAW members are employed by Basic Motors, Ford and Stellantis, the worldwide firm that makes Chrysler, Dodge and Ram autos in North America. That’s down from 407,000 in 1999.
Thus far, not one of the autoworkers employed by the Massive Three’s foreign-based rivals or the U.S.-based electrical car producers belong to a union. Every of the Massive Three has joint ventures with varied foreign-based firms to provide batteries. The employees at solely one among these three way partnership crops have voted to hitch the UAW.
As we speak, the UAW represents 43% of the U.S. automotive workforce in car manufacturing. The opposite 57%, roughly 190,000 employees, are employed by Toyota, Honda and different overseas firms, and Tesla or one other home electrical car producer. Nonetheless, compared to different industries, the diploma of unionization within the automotive business stays about 4 instances as excessive as for the workforce as a complete.
Intermittent campaigns to steer autoworkers at nonunion factories in locations like Fremont, California, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, have failed over the previous 4 many years.
Employer obstacles
Many U.S. employers have an extended historical past of making an attempt to keep away from unionization.
One such tactic is offering nonunion staff with among the advantages of belonging to a union, resembling raises or higher advantages, with out the fee of union dues. Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Subaru and Nissan all introduced plans to extend pay for his or her U.S. staff quickly after the 2023 UAW strike concluded.
Fain calls this wave of raises for nonunion automotive employees the “UAW bump,” joking that UAW stands for “you’re welcome.” His joke has two meanings: It’s a response to the thanks owed for the elevated pay and it’s an invite for employees employed by these firms to hitch the union he leads.
The UAW chief additionally quips that when the union’s new contracts expire in April 2028, it is going to be negotiating with “the Massive 5 or Massive Six” as an alternative of simply GM, Ford and Stellantis. In different phrases, he’s predicting that the UAW can have received organizing campaigns by then with two or three extra of the automakers producing essentially the most autos within the U.S. – resembling Toyota, Honda and Nissan.
UAW’s monetary standing
In our e-book, “Commerce Union Finance: How Labor Organizations Elevate and Spend Cash,” we clarify that unions remained in comparatively sturdy monetary form from 2006 by way of 2019 – a interval that included the financial upheaval of the Nice Recession.
For instance, among the many pattern of 53 nationwide unions whose funds we studied, 49 noticed their member-based revenue from dues and different sources develop by greater than 33% throughout this era.
The UAW’s shrinking ranks led it to boost its dues by 25% in 2014 to offset declining member-based revenue.
The UAW has but to reveal what it spent on the 2023 strike in opposition to the Detroit Three. Based mostly on reported striker numbers and dates, we estimate that it value the union roughly $86 million simply in funds to employees eligible for $500 weekly funds from its strike fund.
That probably left the union with practically $750 million in its strike fund, which held roughly $825 million earlier than the strike started.
Financing union organizing
Organizing employees employed by automakers that resist unions, resembling Tesla, could be costly.
The union has to pay organizers and canopy the organizers’ bills, and it’s answerable for the prices of complying with labor regulation necessities related to holding union elections. We have no idea the precise prices of organizing campaigns or how a lot unions spend on them.
We do know that the United Auto Employees spent $4.4 million in 2022 to pay its organizers, or 5.6% of the union’s whole payroll. This degree of expenditure pales compared to the greater than $45 million the union spent on strike advantages for its members who went on strike that 12 months – none of whom have been employed within the automotive business.
How can the UAW finance an enormous organizing marketing campaign to win over the employees on the likes of Tesla, Honda, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota and Hyundai? We now have recognized three technique of supplementing conventional sources of income from dues.
1: Get donations from different labor teams
Unions are free to assist out one another by way of donations made to at least one one other.
One vital precedent for that is from the UAW’s earliest days. In 1936, one 12 months after the union received its begin, John Lewis, on the time the top of the Committee for Industrial Group, gave the nascent United Auto Employees $100,000 – over $2.23 million adjusted for inflation – for its organizing efforts.
Labor unions can simply settle for donations as a result of they’re 501(c)(5) nonprofits. This designation means they don’t must pay any federal revenue tax, though that exemption doesn’t apply to the cash they spend on electioneering and lobbying. Not like charities, which within the U.S. are designated as 501(c)(3) organizations, donations to unions should not tax deductible for donors.
2: Crew up with different unions
A second strategy is for unions to pool their cash for organizing one other industrial sector.
We’ve discovered that the United Auto Employees, the United Steelworkers and the Worldwide Affiliation of Machinists had a mixed $513 million in working capital – cash accessible for them to make use of as they see match – in 2022. A few of these funds may assist foot the invoice for a concerted effort to steer staff of nonunion automakers to hitch the union.
And the UAW may faucet into these funds to complement their spending on organizing personnel.
3: Experiment with crowdfunding
Third, rank-and-file members of the United Auto Employees, together with different manufacturing unions, may chip in to cowl organizing prices by way of a crowdfunding marketing campaign by elevating cash on-line from donors.
Such a crowdfunding marketing campaign may additionally draw donations from nonunion autoworkers who favor unionization, or anybody else who desires to see extra autoworkers belonging to a union.
Revolutionary ways
Spending extra money on labor organizing is not going to suffice. The UAW may also must depend on creativity and progressive considering.
The challenges concerned with successful over nonunion autoworkers will likely be way more formidable than its process in negotiating the 2023 contracts with the Massive Three.
We imagine that the UAW can be sensible to once more use the factor of shock because it did with its 2023 strike in opposition to GM, Ford and Stellantis. One key to its success was the way it threw the businesses off stability by unpredictably ratcheting up the variety of services the place employees had gone on strike.
Fain and his allies are certain to fare higher in the event that they once more, as they did with the 2023 strike in opposition to the Massive Three, form the narrative by way of the deft use of social media. That tactic helped the UAW garner grassroots help and preserve public opinion on its aspect.
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