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LEARNING THE RIGHT LESSONS FROM THE UAW LOSS IN ALABAMA  
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Jane McAlevey
May 21, 2024
The Nation
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_ Mercedes put on an “A-level boss fight.” Which was only to be
expected. So how can the union win next time? _

Mercedes employees Austin Brooks, David Johnston, and Jacob Ryan
attend a rally in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on May 5, 2024., Kim Chandler /
AP Photo

 

Late last Friday afternoon, Shawn Fain, president of the UAW,
addressed workers at the Mercedes SUV plant in Vance, Alabama, after
the union failed in a representation election (2,054 votes in favor,
2,642 against) many had expected
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to win. He told them
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“Justice isn’t about one vote or one campaign. It’s about
getting a voice, getting your fair share.”

When Fain was sworn in as president
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March 26, 2023—after winning the first direct election for the UAW
presidency by just 477 votes—the challenges were monumental. He had
national negotiations for the Big Three automakers coming up in less
than six months and an organization plagued by decades of corruption
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The union was burdened with staff used to taking the easy way out,
allowing members’ contracts to worsen as its leadership indulged
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fancy cigars, fine hotels, and gourmet food.

In the 14 months since his election, Fain has made remarkable headway.
He launched a bold strategy in the Big Three
negotiations—the stand-up strike
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significant gains. Next came the North Carolina Daimler truck
negotiations
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plants in North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, and the decisive
unionization win at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. His intrepid
leadership reaches far beyond the union and has uplifted the entire
progressive movement.

Perhaps for that reason, the VW victory raised expectations that the
UAW could win in Alabama. But Alabama isn’t Tennessee. Alabama’s
top business, political, and community leadership are so hostile to
unions that they implemented every nefarious tactic in the 1993 book
by the notorious union buster Martin J. Levitt
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of a Union Buster
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In it, Levitt outlined a campaign just like the one headed by Alabama
Governor Kay Ivey. “The enemy was the collective spirit,” Levitt
writes. “I got a hold of that spirit and while it was a seedling; I
poisoned it, choked it, bludgeoned it if I had to, anything to be sure
it would never blossom into a united workforce.” He forthrightly
admitted that anti-union consultants are “terrorists…. as the
consultants go about the business of destroying unions, they invade
people’s lives, demolish their friendships, crush their will, and
shatter families.”

As is typical in what union organizers call an “A-Level boss
fight” in its attempt to throttle a union vote, management offers
all sorts of real material gains for workers who announce support for
the union. As Fain explained in his Friday night talk, “Let’s be
clear: Workers won serious gains in this campaign. They raised their
wages, with the ‘UAW bump.’ They killed wage tiers. They got rid
of a CEO who had no interest in improving conditions in the workplace.
Mercedes is a better place to work thanks to this campaign, and thanks
to these courageous workers.” Getting rid of wage tiers, which has
been a key demand of autoworkers for years—made possible by the
gutsy campaigns under Fain—wasn’t just a material gain but also a
structural one. The problem is, at the moment it isn’t a gain backed
by a union contract. So it can be stripped away at any time.

But since such tactics were only to be expected, what else went wrong
in Alabama? What can autoworkers themselves, the UAW, and the
progressive movement take from this defeat? Fain closed his speech by
telling the crowd, “The workers here ultimately will win. Most of us
have lost elections in our lives and I know I’ve always learned from
it. What matters is what you do with that experience.”

Mistake 1: The Lack of an Effective Community Strategy

The first big problem was the lack of a real community strategy strong
enough to counter a Levitt-style battle waged outside the plant
(although in Alabama, the governor, a prominent minister, and former
Crimson Tide football coach Nick Saban were walking _inside _the
plant). To the degree that most unions think about something they
refer to as “_the_ community campaign,” it generally comes too
late. Union staff may complain—with considerable
justification—that the boss’s community work is fake. But sadly,
so is most of what passes for the labor movements efforts: In Alabama,
a pastor from the Providence Missionary Baptist Church, in Marion, the
Rev. Matthew Wilson, sent an anti-union text message
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workers, made a potent pro-management video
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workers, and took a walk through the plant. Saban
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who delivered seven national college football championships to the
state and whose hero status probably exceeds Trump’s, was joined by
lesser-known figures such the Black female head of the Business
Council of Alabama, Helena Duncan. She published a commentary
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January 30, 2024, suggesting that the plant and all “good jobs”
would flee the state if workers unionized.

The UAW functionally didn’t have a community campaign—certainly
not one that could contend with the boss’s. If unions are truly
committed to bottom-up organizing—which the new UAW leadership
is—they need to realize that they are sitting on a gold mine of
potential community power. The workers themselves have the capacity to
build a bottom-up community strategy simply by first engaging all
solid supporters in a one-on-one conversation that asks, “It’s
great we are building majority support. But you know, with Mercedes,
it’s going to take even more to win. Who are some of the local
people you already know? Where do you and/or your family worship, or
what leagues are your kids in doing sports, or what do you and/or your
family volunteer for?” Workers must already be pro-union to have
these conversations. But even with just 2,000 yes votes, the UAW had
plenty of room to build bottom-up from the outside along with
bottom-up inside. These connections can then be mobilized by the
workers to build a powerful counternarrative that can defeat a
boss’s campaign because there’s more workers with connections than
a governor, a minister, and a famous football coach.

Mistake 2: Straying from Its 30-50-70 Model

Perhaps the most exciting recent announcement by the UAW was Fain’s
commitment to pour $40 million
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organizing the unorganized over the coming two years. The union’s
national website listed a bevy of resources for workers, starting with
the outline of a new model they call the 30-50-70 strategy. After 30
percent of workers sign cards that authorize an election, the campaign
goes public. At 50 percent, workers then rally with President Shawn
Fain and other leaders. At 70 percent, they demand recognition for the
union from the employer. In the Mercedes plant, the union filed for
an election
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April 5 and held a rally and issued a press release
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that it had a supermajority of support inside the plant. But in
conversations with organizers over the past month who didn’t want to
be identified, the concept of a supermajority seemed elusive.

For example, the union released what would normally be a “majority
photo poster”—if not a “supermajority” photo poster—that had
just 700 worker pictures on it. That means they were short of a 55
percent majority by 2,091 workers. When these posters are
done—actually showing a supermajority—they can be a key tool in
winning campaigns. Supermajority posters show, not tell, that most of
the workers are united. But there was never any supermajority
literature produced in the UAW campaign. Instead of following their
supposed strategy, it seemed the senior staff fell prey to a belief in
“Momentum
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theory that a “whirlwind” created from the gains in the national
Big Three negotiations, followed by the Daimler truck success, and the
VW vote—would propel the UAW to victory.

Mistake 3: Having an In-Plant Organizing Committee with Activists, Not
Leaders

At the time the UAW released the 700-picture poster, organizers said
the union had people from outside the plant phoning the workers—a
common, failed strategy. When asked why it relied on distant phone
banking, the answer was that there were still too many unassessed
workers, and they were trying to get a feel if those were breaking yes
or no. This is evidence of the campaign’s failure to correctly
identify and recruit the genuine organic or natural leaders to the
in-plant worker organizing committee. Assessing the strength of the
campaign among the plant’s workforce should be the job of a properly
built worker-organizing committee—not outsiders.

Organizers also said that when they filed for the election, they had
at least one worker committee member per department covering 90
percent of the facility. It’s great that the new leadership now
understands the need for worker-to-worker committees in the plant. But
that’s true of any private-sector fight: Union staff is forbidden
from setting foot on the employer’s property—from parking lots to
grass that might be a mile from the plant. Union staff can actually
get arrested for this—which is a bad look and a gift to the boss’s
campaign. Even if the union actually had 90 percent of the departments
covered, it couldn’t have had the right workers on the committee.
Pro-union activists, no matter how important to the campaign overall,
can’t make up the organizing committee. The hard work of workers’
correctly identifying their most respected department and
shift _leaders, _then recruiting them_,_ is the only way to win
against stiff union-busting campaigns.

One reason the activist-committee approach worked at the VW plant a
month earlier is that the UAW had what’s called a “neutrality
agreement” hammered out between IG Metall, the German autoworkers
union, and VW. Such an agreement might have prevented the kind of
egregious behavior Mercedes engaged in—but there was no such
agreement with Mercedes. Instead, the union announced that it was
engaging with the German government to pressure Mercedes under a new
German law around companies’ behavior in the supply chain—a prime
example of magical thinking. Having worked in Germany for years now,
it’s clear to me that relying on the German government to fix the
behavior of management in the US is like watching an underfunded and
overwhelmed—yet well-intentioned—National Labor Relations Board
try to tame Amazon, Starbucks, or Elon Musk.

It’s unfortunate that so much of the progressive movement’s hopes
were riding on the Alabama UAW election. The highest price was paid by
the Mercedes workers themselves—who endured Levitt-ish hell being
rained down on them in a fight they deserved to win. Which makes it
all the more important that we learn the lessons of this defeat. Next
time the union needs to focus on leaders, not activists. It must
develop a bottom-up, worker-led community strategy that kicks off when
the union begins to talk with workers. There likely won’t be any
more VW-like neutrality agreements with other foreign-owned US-based
automakers, but the UAW can still win big. As Shawn Fain himself said
last Friday, “What matters is what you do with that experience.”
Everyone will continue to cheer this new UAW leadership on, as we
should. Their task is not easy, and they are fighting for all of us.
But simply put, there are no shortcuts.

_JANE MCALEVEY has been a UAW member for a decade, including
participating in the largest academic strike—against the UC system
in 2022 (she’s also a member of the UAWD, a group within the UAW
working to transform from corrupt to democratic). She’s been a
columnist for The Nation and was the magazine’s strikes
correspondent from 2019 to 2023. Her books include A Collective
Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy and Rules
to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations, cowritten
with Abby Lawlor (March 2023). She is currently a senior policy fellow
at the University of California’s Institute for Research on Labor
and Employment._

_Copyright c 2024 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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* UAW
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* unions
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* Alabama
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* organizing
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