Afrigather This text is a part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s dwelling for opinion and information evaluation. It was initially revealed at The Conversation.
Having negotiated “record 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 completed.
The union intends to try once more to influence the remainder of the U.S. auto trade’s employees to join the union.
“We’re going to arrange like we’ve by no means organized earlier than,” said UAW President Shawn Fain.
As labor scholars who’ve studied union finances, we consider it is a formidable goal. On prime of the intense corporate resistance from the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, there’s the excessive price 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 automobiles 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 competitors or the U.S.-based electric vehicle manufacturers belong to a union. Every of the Massive Three has joint ventures with numerous foreign-based corporations to supply batteries. The employees at only one of these joint venture plants have voted to hitch the UAW.
At this time, the UAW represents 43% of the U.S. automotive workforce in automobile manufacturing. The opposite 57%, roughly 190,000 employees, are employed by Toyota, Honda and different overseas corporations, and Tesla or one other domestic electric vehicle manufacturer. Nonetheless, compared to different industries, the diploma of unionization within the automotive trade stays about four times as high as for the workforce as a whole.
Intermittent campaigns to influence autoworkers at nonunion factories in locations like Fremont, California, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, have failed over the past four decades.
Employer obstacles
Many U.S. employers have a protracted history of attempting to avoid unionization.
One such tactic is offering nonunion workers with a number of the advantages of belonging to a union, reminiscent of raises or higher advantages, with out the fee of union dues. Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Subaru and Nissan all announced plans to increase pay for his or her U.S. workers 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 corporations to hitch the union he leads.
The UAW chief additionally quips that when the union’s new contracts expire in April 2028, it will likely be negotiating with “the Big Five or Big Six” as an alternative of simply GM, Ford and Stellantis. In different phrases, he’s predicting that the UAW may have gained organizing campaigns by then with two or three extra of the automakers producing the most vehicles in the U.S. – reminiscent of Toyota, Honda and Nissan.
UAW’s monetary standing
In our e-book, “Trade Union Finance: How Labor Organizations Raise and Spend Money,” we clarify that unions remained in comparatively sturdy monetary form from 2006 by means 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 lift its dues by 25% in 2014 to offset declining member-based income.
The UAW has but to reveal what it spent on the 2023 strike towards the Detroit Three. Primarily based on reported striker numbers and dates, we estimate that it price the union roughly $86 million simply in funds to employees eligible for $500 weekly payments from its strike fund.
That most certainly left the union with almost $750 million in its strike fund, which held roughly $825 million before the strike began.
Financing union organizing
Organizing employees employed by automakers that resist unions, such as Tesla, might be costly.
The union has to pay organizers and canopy the organizers’ bills, and it’s liable 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 total payroll. This degree of expenditure pales compared to the greater than $45 million the union spent on strike benefits for its members who went on strike that yr – none of whom had been employed within the automotive trade.
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’ve 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 means of donations made to at least one one other.
One essential precedent for that is from the UAW’s earliest days. In 1936, one yr after the union obtained its begin, John Lewis, on the time the pinnacle of the Committee for Industrial Group, gave the nascent United Auto Workers $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 have to pay any federal income tax, though that exemption doesn’t apply to the cash they spend on electioneering and lobbying. In contrast to charities, which within the U.S. are designated as 501(c)(3) organizations, donations to unions are not tax deductible for donors.
2: Workforce 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 out there 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 influence workers 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 means of a crowdfunding campaign by elevating cash on-line from donors.
Such a crowdfunding marketing campaign may also draw donations from nonunion autoworkers who favor unionization, or anybody else who desires to see extra autoworkers belonging to a union.
Progressive ways
Spending extra money on labor organizing won’t suffice. The UAW can even have to depend on creativity and revolutionary pondering.
The challenges concerned with successful over nonunion autoworkers shall be much more formidable than its process in negotiating the 2023 contracts with the Big Three.
We consider that the UAW could be sensible to once more use the element of surprise because it did with its 2023 strike towards 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 towards the Massive Three, shape the narrative by means of the deft use of social media. That tactic helped the UAW garner grassroots help and keep public opinion on its side.
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