Can direct elections restore UAW as America’s most powerful labor union?
The United Auto Workers, once America’s most powerful labor union, a union that led the way in building America’s middle class, has sunk into hard times, with a huge corruption scandal in which 12 union officials, including two former UAW presidents, have been convicted of crimes.
But now many rank-and-filers are hoping the union will regain its moral stature and some of its old swagger through a major push to inject more democracy into the union.
Hundreds of members are backing a campaign to have the UAW hold direct elections for union president, a move they believe will bring more inspiring union leaders, ones they say will fight harder for the union’s rank-and-file.
In recent decades, the UAW has been run by a single party or caucus, with each union president having a powerful say in choosing his successor, and that, dissidents say, led to internal rot – and the wide-ranging scandal in which top UAW officials embezzled more than $1.5m in union money and accepted more than $5m in kickbacks from auto company contractors and Fiat-Chrysler executives.
Earlier this month, a federal judge appointed an independent monitor to oversee the union’s finances and internal elections to help prevent further corruption. The monitor will also oversee a referendum on whether to allow direct elections of the UAW’s president and executive board.
For 70 years, the union’s president has been chosen by convention delegates who have overwhelmingly been from a single group, the Administration Caucus, which was founded by the UAW’s legendary president, Walter Reuther. Reuther led the union during its golden years, when it was celebrated for staging huge strikes and reaching landmark contracts with General Motors and Ford during the 1950s that included generous raises and health and pension benefits that catapulted many workers into the middle class and became a model for unions across the US.
Scott Houldieson, an electrician at a Ford assembly plant in Chicago, says the Administration Caucus has lost its way. Houldieson is president of a new caucus, United All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), which is leading the fight to hold direct elections.
“The Administration Caucus has had control of our union for 70 years. Over the last several decades, it’s gone downhill,” he said, noting that the UAW’s membership has plunged from 1.5 million in 1979 to 400,000 today, because of plant closings, automation and competition from imports and transplants in the south.
Houldieson said: “The corruption scandal is just a symptom of the UAW’s one-party state. We’re hoping that with direct elections, we can break up the one-party state and have checks and balances to not only prevent future corruption, but to get back to our relationship of fighting for the betterment