The historic UAW strike of 2023 against the Big Three put a new face on one of the largest and oldest unions in the US. The UAW not only managed to face down the largest and most entrenched business interests in the auto sector—they did it with innovative strategy and a commitment to not only win concessions but build political power for a long-term struggle. And the union isn’t taking a break in 2024. Already, the UAW has thrown its weight behind support for a ceasefire in Gaza, and entered the fray of electoral politics by refusing a meeting with Trump. TRNN Reporter Mel Buer speaks with Teddy Ostrow, co-host of The UpsurgeThe Upsurge, along with Brandon Mancilla, director of UAW Region 9A, and Daniel Vicente, director of UAW Region 9, on the union’s recent victories and what we can expect in the year to come.
Studio / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
Mel Buer: Welcome back, my friends, to The Real News Network Podcast. I’m your host, Mel Buer. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season and is finding these first weeks back to work more than tolerable. We’ve got an incredible season of The Real News Podcast planned for you this year with me at the helm, and I can’t wait to share some incredible conversations with you. Whether you’ve got our shows on while you’re making coffee in the morning, put our podcasts on during your commute to and from work, or give us a listen throughout the workday, The Real News Network is committed to bringing you ad-free independent journalism that you can count on. We care a lot about what we do and it’s through donations from dedicated listeners like you that we can keep on doing this work. Please consider becoming a monthly sustainer of The Real News Network by heading over to therealnews.com/donate. If you want to stay in touch and get updates about our work, then sign up for our free newsletter @therealnews.com/sign-up.
As always, we appreciate your support in whatever form it takes. We’ve got a special episode to kick off the season today. As most of our listeners know, we’ve had the pleasure of publishing journalist and podcaster Teddy Ostrow’s incredible work for some time. His labor reporting has been integral to capturing a big piece of the picture of the US Labor Movement in recent years, and his podcast, The Upsurge, shed important light on such high-profile labor actions as the 2023 UPS contract negotiations and the UAW’s 2023 Stand Up Strikes. The Upsurge has sadly ceased production but episodes can be found on the realnews.com and over at In These Times. Given the content of today’s conversation, I’ve asked Teddy to be my special guest co-host. Welcome, Teddy. Glad to see you back here at The Real News.
Teddy Ostrow: Thanks for having me, Mel, and thank you for all those kind words. Now, the UAW had one heck of a year in 2023, and if all goes as planned, we’ll be saying the same thing at the start of 2025. As listeners probably know, in March last year, Shawn Fain and a slate of reformer candidates swept the union’s first one-member, one-vote leadership elections. The group Unite All Workers for Democracy, UAWD, spearheaded the reform campaign and successfully ousted the business unionists that had run the union for nearly 80 years under the banner of the administration caucus.
Then like clockwork, they wowed the world with one of the most successful contract campaigns in decades. They employed a novel strike strategy, what they called the Stand Up Strike, a nod to the GM sit-downs that helped build the union in the 1930s, and in the end, workers from Ford General Motors and Stellantis won significant gains from the company, making up much of the ground lost to decades and decades of concessionary bargaining.
Mel Buer: With workers around the country inspired by the newfound militancy of the UAW, the union leadership has now turned its sight onto organizing the non-union auto industry. Late last year, the union announced simultaneous campaigns at 13 automakers around the country, which, if successful, would bring 150,000 more workers into the union. Those campaigns and the union’s broader vision ahead are what we want to talk about with our guests. Today, we have Brandon Mancia, director of UAW Region 9A, and Daniel Vicente, director of UAW Region 9 on the show. Both are members of UAWD and were elected by members alongside Shawn Fain last year. Thanks for coming on the show, gentlemen.
Brandon Mancia: Thank you for having us.
Daniel Vicente: Yeah, thanks for having us. Nice to be here.
Mel Buer: Right on. To kick things off in our conversation today, I thought it might be helpful to start by taking stock of the work that the UAW and its members have accomplished in 2023. The union’s incredible work during the negotiations with the Big Three and the Stand Up Strikes is top of everyone’s mind when they think of recent UAW victories. So what were some of the big takeaways from last year? Any lessons learned from the organizing that was done?
Brandon Mancia: Shawn Fain got elected at the end of March, so between his election, Dan’s election during that runoff, and the rest of the slate that had gotten elected in December of the previous year, he had to hit the ground running; bringing in a team, making a plan for negotiations, and the very next day after he got sworn in as president, we had our bargaining convention. The convention where the delegates of the union elected throughout the membership would have to set the bargaining agenda for the Big Three contract campaign. So we had to get to work right away. There was no time to sit around and think things through. You had to go ahead and act immediately.
One of the most successful things that Shawn was able to pull off during those early months of his administration was to bring in some talented, visionary, strategic people onto staff, while also empowering voices within the staff, within leadership, within the membership that had not gotten the opportunity to go ahead and pull off something like this contract campaign. And that’s important because this takes a lot of work and it takes unity and it takes a new direction, and Shawn committed to that. But at the end of the day, a contract campaign like the one that we were able to launch against the Big Three was only going to be successful if the membership was at the heart of it and the core of it.
And you had to empower the membership to take the reins and that’s what we did: We launched the contract campaign in which the expiration was… The deadline was a deadline, it was a real deadline, and it was not a reference point. We would strike all three companies at once if necessary if they did not bargain in good faith or they slow-walked bargaining. And they would have to contend with our real ambitious demands, which were restoring a lot of things that were given away through concessionary bargaining. But that’s what the membership wanted. They wanted to fight. They wanted to have a sense of dignity and fight restored.
Mel Buer: Dan, is there anything you’d like to add?
Daniel Vicente: Yeah, Brandon’s right. Shawn Fain and the new executive board had to, in an insanely short amount of time, put together a campaign as quickly as possible to take on three of the largest corporations in the US, some of the most important and historical companies in this country, and they were able to pull it off. But they were able to pull it off because of one guy. Shawn Fain will be the first one to tell you, he’s just a guy. He’s one regular guy from Kokomo, Indiana. The reason we were able to be successful in our Stand Up Strike was because, for the first time in living memory, the UAW leadership engaged our membership in a campaign to fight for what we believed was our rightful due, what was due to us. And that hasn’t happened in decades. Decades.
The previous leadership is not a secret. A lot of them were sent to prison on corruption charges. Brandon and I came out of the reform movement and we ran against longstanding incumbents who were part of that administration caucus. And that caucus, like any one-party system, had become stagnant and stuck in its ways and it fostered an environment where you weren’t allowed to question or rock the boat or try to push for anything aggressive in bargaining. You were supposed to get the contract signed, shut up, and stay in your place. And that’s how the union ran itself. As new directors on the board, we’ve run into a lot of it. We have great people on our staff, it’s that they’ve never been empowered to take aggressive bargaining stances. So it’s a completely new environment for a lot of our staff members.
And frankly, a lot of them are really, really engaged now and are pumped up, and wanted it to be this way for a long time. If anything good came out of the corruption – Which, all those dudes, F those dudes that went to prison, all of them – But if anything good came out of it, it was that it laid bare the completely unacceptable situation that was able to grow inside of the UAW. And it urged people like Brandon, myself, and a bunch of other reform people to get involved, run for local offices, and push for one member, one vote. And when members, citizens, people, and whatever organization get involved, we can make legitimate tangible changes to the systems that exist. The systems were built by people who anticipated engagement.
And when we don’t engage, when we think we can’t change anything, and everything’s a done deal and nothing’s ever going to change, then you’re right, nothing will change. When we get involved, when we engage ourselves in our institutions, our unions, what-have-you, we can change things. And the Stand Up Strike was successful because our people were ready to fight, they just needed somebody to show them how to do it. And Shawn Fain is that dude.
Mel Buer: Before we move on, I do want to talk about the momentum that has been built by this reform movement, what 2024 and beyond looks like, and Teddy’s going to bring up some great questions, but the one point that I want to make is I’m reminded of Jane McAlevey’s book where she talks about unions as a democratic institution. And when the democratic institution is failing, in some way, the way to try and affect change is to get involved and to see if you can push the needle in the other direction.
It’s cool to be a member of the labor movement and see what the reform movement has done, and to see such an incredible victory right out of the gate. It proves the point that if you have engaged members who are willing and able to put in some work and are willing and able to push for reform in an institution like the UAW, you can see some incredible material gains come out of it. It’s fantastic to see that. Brandon?
Brandon Mancia: We’ve never done a contract campaign before, at least not since the years of Walter Reuther. What that means is it’s some very basic stuff. It’s like getting informed of what the contract demands are, holding communication and transparent Facebook lives in which we get updates on what negotiations are and how they’re going. It’s holding rallies, it’s wearing red shirts on Wednesday, it’s wearing pins, and having informational meetings at the shop level. Not waiting for someone to tell you what to do, but actively taking direct action with each other. At the regions, that’s a lot of the work we had to do. You can’t have everything done by Detroit, you’ve got to do it at the shop level, and the local level, too.
And through that, so many members were able to get engaged, whether it was putting on Facebook Live once a week to hear what Shawn had to say or whether it was going to a rally, going to a local meeting, or getting informed about strike strategy and all that. It was a whole movement that was unleashed simply because the members were trusted to understand the importance of their demands and how important this contract was going to be. It was going to be an existential fight. If we didn’t reverse a lot of these concessions, win strong contracts, and get the cost of living back, what good was this union going to be for if we didn’t chart a future?
So by the time the Stand Up Strike deadline came, members were bought in, they were ready to go to battle and hit the picket lines. It took a membership, leadership, and a team – Around Shawn, too – That understood where the leverage was in the industry. We’ve got wall-to-wall coverage at the Big Three at Ford, GM, and Stellantis. We know their pressure points, we know their money makers, we know what they hate seeing out in the media, and what they would not want to have been publicly shamed about, and we went for it. And they knew that. A lot of folks asked, why didn’t you take everybody all at once? That would’ve been awesome but at the same time, building up that pressure week to week, keeping them on their toes, not knowing what was coming next, making the strike national and not a few plants here and there in the Midwest and the South, they weren’t ready. The companies weren’t ready and they had no choice but to concede.
Daniel Vicente: For our purposes, with all of our contracts we usually have the most leverage in the 11th hour right before the contracts are set to expire because the company, up at that point, they’re following a playbook but they don’t know, are you really going to do it? Are you not going to do it? So there is a crazy amount of leverage in keeping them off of their game because these are businesses, they’re doing multi-billion dollar conglomerates, and everything runs off of a plan. They make long-term plans and short-term plans that risk assessments and all that but the Stand Up Strike had them so unbalanced, they couldn’t get a plan together. They were shipping products to other plants anticipating that we were going to take out transmission plants and then we were laughing because we were not taking out the transmission plants. They had no idea what to do.
Our membership, for so long, was conditioned to believe that “blackout bargaining” was the standard and that’s how you have to do it. For those that aren’t familiar, blackout bargaining is a type of bargaining where your leadership doesn’t communicate with you, the shop floor rank-and-filer, at all during negotiations. They say trust us, we have your best interest at heart and they go behind closed doors and they come out a month or two later and tell you this is the best we were going to get. Brandon and I were shop rank-and-filer guys. So we saw what that was, what the results of that was, and it was garbage. We end up with garbage increases in our wages, we pay more for healthcare, everything you can imagine. And what the Stand Up Strike tapped into was something broader than the United Auto Workers.
There is a feeling not only amongst one generation or the other but working Americans in general, that we went through Occupy Wall Street, we had hope in Obama, and there’s Bernie Sanders; We’ve been waiting for a movement to come along or a political party to come along and be the new standard bearer of the working class and it hasn’t happened. And it’s not going to happen, frankly, from the two long-term parties we’ve had in this country. Where you can make tangible changes to your life in organized labor because you have a voice at the table over how much money you make, how much you pay in healthcare, and how much time you have to spend at work. You get to not dictate terms but negotiate terms of your day-to-day life and that’s something that the Democrats or Republicans can’t give to us right now or they’re not willing to help us out with.
Something is growing. Not just in the UAW, not just in the Teamsters, but across the labor movement and the unorganized in this country that we’ve had quite enough. And it’s getting to a point that working people because we work with each other every day, we don’t always have the same political beliefs, we don’t all have the same type of lives, but we somehow find a way to go to work every day with each other and not be at each other’s necks. If I’m struggling, the guy next to me is probably struggling just as hard. So the talking heads on the traditional mainstream media can tell you the economy’s doing better but milk is still out of control, gas is too high, I spend 60 hours a week in a factory, and I don’t get to see my kids.
The guy next to me who’s a Trump supporter, doesn’t get to see his kids, and the guy next to me who is a SUNY Muslim, doesn’t get to see his kids. Our lives suck equally. So we are starting to band together to say, enough is enough. We’re not waiting for anybody to come save us. We’re going to have to do it ourselves. Right now, what we are able to accomplish in the Stand Up Strike is tangible. You can see that, your paycheck shows you that. So that is what that we were able to tap into and it’s something that we need to foster and to educate and try to organize more because if it’s making our lives better, it’ll make your lives better wherever you’re at.
Teddy Ostrow: That’s such a good point. You’re talking about this synergy that, to Brandon’s point, was in a very short period of time, harnessed by the union, and came through the membership. And I wanted to say my experience as a reporter, reporting on the strike in Michigan, Ohio, and when I saw you, Dan, in New York, everyone was telling me as if they were media prepped, the same thing, saying what you’re saying, saying we need better wages, we need to get rid of this temp issue, and we need to eliminate the tiers. They were saying the whole nine yards, there was unity. And what I’ve heard from observers of the 2018 GM strike, when I was not reporting on the sector, was that it wasn’t necessarily clear to workers and to the media what people were fighting for. And that’s different this time around.
Now, there’s a lot we can say about 2023, but I do think this is a good segue to talk about 2024, and maybe even further than that, we can talk about 2028. But first, tell us now about the campaigns that the UAW launched late last year. 13 non-union automakers, as I understand, 150,000 workers, invited by the union to organize all at once. I saw that 30% of workers at a Mercedes plant in Alabama – In the South of all places, importantly – Have signed union cards. This is a serious wager. The UAW made a serious wager going out on strike last year, trusting the workers, and it seems they’re doing the same here.
They’re making that bet again, except for the non-union sector. We’ve seen organizing campaigns in the past decade at Volkswagen, Nissan, Tesla even, and they’ve either failed or never materialized to anything very far. So first, can you tell us about that strategy that we’re seeing now for 2024 and beyond? Then help us understand what’s different this time around. What are you hearing from current members and also prospective members?
Brandon Mancia: Yeah. The first thing to know is that the UAW hasn’t won a wall-to-wall organizing drive at a major auto company in this country since before Dan and I were born and we’re the two youngest members of the executive board. But for a union not to win at one of these companies for decades is shameful. Yes, there has been an economic transformation in this country since then, yes, the country and its leadership have become more anti-union in that period of time, but a lot of that has to do with us, too. We’ve been disorganized, we haven’t been focused, we’ve been concessionary, and why would folks join a union that leads to concessionary bargaining in tears? That was the big narrative.
All these organizing drives I would ultimately lose, it’s hard enough to win an organizing drive when you’ve got a boss and politicians, especially in the South, who are pouring a ton of money into beating you back. It’s even harder when the union itself is not in a position to stand up for workers and show them that it’s worth joining a union like the UAW. So when Shawn and the team took office, it was very clear that we were not going to be able to successfully organize if we didn’t win the Stand Up Strike and reach record contracts because what good would it be for? So by ending wage tiers, getting a 25% raise, improving retirement security, securing a path to adjust transition as we go to electric vehicle work, all this stuff was essential to be able to set up ourselves to launch organizing drives, and it’s playing out in this way. We did the contract and now it’s organizing.
But I have to be honest with you, that’s not how it’s happening. What happened was in the middle of the Stand Up Strike, seeing how much we were fighting, seeing the gains we were winning, auto workers across these plants across the country started organizing on their own. They were looking for expired cards, UAW cards they could find on the internet, and filling those out thinking that that’s what it would take to join a union. The enthusiasm was there, the self-organizing was already happening, and so right now, honestly, what we’re doing is helping workers that want to inform a union with their union. That’s what we’re doing: We’re supporting workers. So we’ve launched this ambitious campaign to organize all of the companies but it’s because of the traditional model of slowly, secretly, building your union committee and getting to the point of winning an election that it’s not going to work.
The moment to strike is right now. We’ve got to be able to organize and win right now and the companies know that, which is why they’ve matched the wages that we were able to win in the contract campaign for the Big Three workers because they’re trying to preempt all of this. They want to avoid unionization because if they can match 25%, or at very least 11% for year one in raises, that means they have a lot more to give. They know that if we successfully organize, we’re going to have to win even better record contracts at the non-Union facilities right now. So this is the moment. It’s not just the auto sector, it’s workers across the country from higher-ed to gaming to different office workers and other manufacturing sectors. They’re all reaching out to the UAW right now because they want to organize. And this is the moment right now that we have to organize the working class, especially in places like the South where there’s so much work to do.
Daniel Vicente: Yeah. Like I said earlier, the Stand Up Strike seems to have tapped into a general feeling across this country that the system that we live in is not fair. The system’s not set up to provide you a lifestyle or a pathway into a lifestyle that was enjoyed by our grandparents and our parents and was an expectation for generations. That if you work hard, buckle down, and graduate high school, you don’t have to go and get a degree. You can work in a factory or you could get a blue-collar job and you can buy a house and you can have a car, or two cars, and you can take care and build a family. And those pathways, particularly since the economic recession, particularly for auto workers, were not available. They were not available. What’s different this time, as Brandon was explaining, was the last time it was the UAW going out and being like, hey, join us. Look at us. Look how great we are. Look at our very storied history.
It is storied and it is very important but if you’re some worker in a Volkswagen plant down South, what do you care what happened in 1932 or a sit-down strike? What does that mean to you? It doesn’t mean anything. Tangible things; money, wages, healthcare, working conditions, these mean something to you. The other part of it too, is this time going around, it isn’t, look at us, look at us. We’re so great. It’s people who saw what we were doing, fighting for our people, trying to make their lives better, and we’re saying to them, look how much the people around you are struggling. Look how much you’re struggling. Because like I said, we’re rank-and-filers.
I sat at the kitchen table and cried with my wife because I didn’t know how I was going to pay the bills. I didn’t have the heart to tell my kids sometimes, I don’t know how I’m going to get you into this field hockey league or something. That stuff’s expensive. And in order to get that equipment, I’m going to have to pull mad overtime hours, so I’m not going to see you. These are real things that we live through. And then you look at what the CEOs and the bosses are making, it’s astronomically… It’s not even close to your life. It’s not close to your life. And the other part, during the whole Stand Up Strike too, in the regions particularly, we work in the plants, we know these people. We know the middle-level and middle-management types. A lot of these dudes are cool and a lot of them get mistreated, too. And they would be coming to us on the side and saying, keep doing what you’re doing. Keep doing what you’re doing. Because these companies mistreat not just their blue-collar workers, but their middle-management types, too. They mistreat them, they lean on them. We see it every day.
And Teddy, you’re right, it is a wager, it’s a gamble because resources are going into this, and money’s being spent. But the main difference between this new executive board with Shawn Fain is this money doesn’t exist to propel the institution of the UAW. This money exists. The dues that go in, people say all the time, oh, well, the unions want your dues. Dues money goes into the union so that we can organize the working class. That’s why dues money goes in, and we are using that money to try to organize working Americans. We don’t care who you vote for, we don’t care about your religious background, we don’t care what lifestyle you live, we don’t care about your sexual orientation – None of that matters.
What matters on a line, what matters if you’re a nurse, and wherever you work is, can you do the job? Do you make my life easier being next to me, or do you make it harder? Because if you can do the job, I got you, bro. We’re going to have each other’s backs out there because we’re trying to get through this shift and for most Americans, that’s their day-to-day. That’s what we know. So this drive isn’t about, oh, we’re going to come in and we’re going to lead you and we’re going to build this new incident. No. We’re going to give you the tools to elect your own people. You run your own shop, you tell us what you need from us, and we’ll get you the resources and open the doors to try to fight and make your lives better.
If you want to come on and be a part of this team, we’re so proud that you want to come on. We’re so proud of you for taking those steps. Once you’re in here, once you sign these cards, we got your back for life. We call each other brothers and sisters for a reason, because we spend more time with each other than with our families. So if somebody’s coming at you, they’re coming at me. And it’s not something that this new UAW is about; We are tired of being pushed over and rolled over. We do have power but we only have power when we act collectively. And the more people that are organized across all sectors, the more power we will have in this country to force institutional change to how the society is run. Because right now, it’s not fair, it’s not equitable, and people are falling into despair.
We’re seeing that across the US. People don’t see legitimate pathways forward anymore through the traditional political paths and so they’re turned into crazies. The labor movement has an answer for that. We fight to get paid so that we can live stable middle-class lives. Because when people are stable and they have lives where they can see their families and live… Because we’re not lazy. We want to work, but we just don’t want to have to live there. When we have pathways to build a family so we don’t have to sweat it all the time so our kids can be safe, our spouses can be safe, and taken care of, you won’t see these radicals popping up, because who wants to be a radical? People are trying to live.
Teddy Ostrow: You guys have spoken to this already, you’ve hinted at it, and that’s the UAW’s broader vision for the labor movement. And that’s part of what we are trying to also get at not just 2024, but also specifically, concretely beyond that, 2028, which Mayday 2028 is now the new expiration of the Big Three’s contracts. Shawn Fain and the UAW leadership have explicitly called on other unions to come out and set their contract expirations on that date. Of course, there’s a symbolism to Mayday, the importance of the Haymarket affair, but also what this means is potentially setting up the conditions for a general strike of some sort. Can you speak to that specific contractual change, that vision, but more broadly, the vision that the UAW has going forward for the broader labor movement, for the working class?
Brandon Mancia: We want to build a labor movement that is fighting together and the call for lining up contracts, so they expire on Mayday of ’28, is exactly that: to give everyone the opportunity to plan ahead, look at what you got right now, get things in order so that we have a target that is in common for everybody. So we’re doing the work internally within our locals, outside of the Big Three, and lining up contracts in the different sectors, but also outreach and talking to different unions, different national and international unions. Imagine how powerful a strike and the political demands we could have on this country if auto workers, teachers, nurses, and different workers were on strike or threatening to strike at the same time.
That’s the idea. We don’t do enough of that in this country because in the labor room and this country, we’re all segmented, we’re all doing different things. Another great thing that happened last year is that we were on strike, the writers were on strike, the screen actors were on strike, and UPS had a contract campaign that inspired and set the model for everyone. They didn’t ultimately go on strike but there was a lot of energy. And if you found yourself in a certain city or town, you might have some other union also on strike and out on the picket line, and we could link up. So there were so many times where actors were coming to UAW picket lines and UAW workers were going out to other picket lines, and we were visiting each other and talking to each other, and that was incredible. That’s the energy that we want in the labor movement.
And the 2028 plan, the vision there is what if we coordinated for that? What if we intentionally planned around a target date like that so that we all have a deadline to look forward to and are organizing for? And organizing is something you’re in for the long haul. So with all these auto-organizing drives we have going on right now, we’re going to be fighting for years there to win what those workers deserve. So by the time we get to the table with the Big Three, Shawn has said, we don’t want it to be just the Big Three; We want to be the Big Six, the Big Seven, the Big Eight. Whatever it is, we want to be able to come to the table with a lot more leverage.
Speaking of the auto sector, there are some things we didn’t win in this contract campaign. We ended waged tears, got COLA back, got a big raise, and made a lot of strides for transition and ending temp abuse. But we didn’t get pensions back for everybody. We didn’t get post-retirement healthcare back for everybody. Those things are the product of not because we didn’t strike hard enough or whatever. It was because we don’t have the density right now in the auto sector to have big transformative demands. We won those things when we were 80%-90% of the auto sector. We’re not that anymore. We’re around 40%, maybe. So much of the sector is non-union and a lot of those things, our politicians, have failed us. They’ve left retirees behind, they’ve left people sick, and without health insurance where Medicaid and Medicare aren’t enough, that’s not on unions, and that’s not just a company issue. That’s a political crisis in this country that we don’t take care of our people when they’re in need. So we need to be building all of this worker power through the labor movement to make these demands of our politicians too, and not just our company. All of that is behind the idea of building a broader labor movement and 2028 is the date we float it out there for people.
Mel Buer: That’s an important thing to note. I live in Los Angeles, and a lot of my labor coverage from the summer was taking the time to situate myself in the multiple strikes that had upended the city. The city lost billions of dollars in revenue because workers took their power and walked out. And they won record contracts as a result of that. The writers got a great contract, SAG got a great contract, and workers with Unite here are continuing to push the tourism industry to be paid fairly at the hotels that they work at. In the reporting that I did last summer, I did an article on the inter-solidarity that was happening where individuals who were recently activated by hitting a picket line for the first time in their careers, especially younger workers, got a chance to start to understand what that solidarity looks like outside of their own shops and their writer’s rooms and whatever else.
It’s important, the points that you’re bringing up, Brandon, about needing to continue to broaden that outlook. National solidarity across unions. You do see that when you have major labor actions like the Stand Up Strikes, like the teacher strikes of the years past. They can bring an entire sector to its knees and that is a powerful thing to be a part of that and to understand that you do have that political power. Being able to see these calls for general strikes that are thrown out into the internet and people say they want to do this deal, but don’t understand how to start the organizing of something of that nature, to see that become part of UAW policy that this is something that we are wanting to prime ourselves for if we need or should use it, is refreshing to see.
It’s also important to tie this into the international solidarity that you’re also beginning to talk about. This might be a good segue into conversations about international solidarity, especially as it relates to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the occupation of Palestine by Israel. The UAW has come out as one of the largest, if not the largest, national unions to support a ceasefire in Palestine. Something that anti-war labor activists have welcomed, even as a lot of US unions have remained largely silent on the issue. It’s important to note for our listeners that the UAW has through their public positions, heated the call of Palestinian labor unions, displayed international solidarity with workers that are currently trapped under bombardment in Gaza, and has also joined the 100+ international unions and other progressive or activist organizations that have called for a ceasefire in the region.
Why do you think it is an important piece of this, that the union takes such a strong position in calling for an end to violence in this conflict? And how do you think that sits within the broader conversation we’re having about international solidarity and what US labor can do to contribute to that building of that solidarity?
Daniel Vicente: Yeah. For me, it hits close to home for multiple reasons. I’m married to a Palestinian from the West Bank who currently is visiting family over in Jordan, and two of her brothers do still currently live in the West Bank, were able to get over so they’re safe. But the conflict in Gaza is not contained currently just to Gaza. There are raids constantly in the West Bank right now. There is armed conflict happening in the West Bank that’s not being covered as much. But on top of that, I’m also a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and the air campaign against Libya, and I’ve had questions for years. I’m proud of my service, proud to serve with my guys, but for years afterward, it digs into your brain like, what the hell? Or excuse me, what was that about? What was the point of that? Did we achieve US foreign policy objectives? Did we make the world a safer place? Did we do any of that?
What I constantly come back to is, no. No, after 9/11, in my opinion, we wanted revenge. We wanted revenge for a heinous terrorist attack against our country, which is, on a human level, understandable. And for my purposes, I don’t speak for the entirety of the UAW, but for me as a human and as an American, I want to make it clear that I believe that we should and ought to remain allies with the state of Israel. I believe they have a right to exist. I believe they have a right to defend themselves from terrorist actions. But if we are truly their allies and their friends, your real friends don’t tell you what you want to hear when you want to hear it. They tell you what you need to hear when you need to hear it. And we need to be telling our Israeli partners, our elected officials need to be telling them, you are doing exactly what we did after 9/11. We defeated Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and we laid the groundwork for ISIS to come to fruition. You are going to make it worse.
In the campaign that they are carrying out in Gaza currently, it is not a reasonable, well-thought-out military campaign. It is not structured to find the Hamas terrorists that carried out the October 7 attacks. They are, in my opinion, carrying out collective action against an entire people because they want revenge. They have officials in that country straight-up telling in public, that we want them to be repopulated somewhere else. We want them all to immigrate to Egypt or put them in Jordan and put them in Lebanon.
That is to me, my understanding of the Geneva Convention, my understanding of genocide. It checks all the boxes. It checks all the boxes. And there’s a narrative, particularly on the right, that the only people upset by this outrageous campaign in Gaza are coastal, highly educated elites. And that’s not true. It’s simply not true. Regular Americans, middle-of-the-country Americans are seeing it. You can’t hide what’s happening. You’re seeing what’s happening. You are decimating entire areas, populated areas with human beings, to kill one guy. It’s not acceptable. And being real saying, oh, well, the UAW signed a ceasefire agreement. That doesn’t change anything. It’s not going to stop the bomb, you’re absolutely right. It’s not going to stop Benjamin Netanyahu from ordering the IDF to drop bombs but we have to start somewhere.
The UAW has had a long history in our past of supporting civil and human rights issues around the world because it was morally the right thing to do. It was morally right to do. It was right to oppose apartheid in South Africa, it was right to speak out against the Vietnam War, and this is morally the right thing to do. It’s a strange place for us to be because frankly, we represent weapons manufacturers. And I want to say it here, the UAW stands for and believes in a robust military industry for legitimate defense of the US and her allies. For the legitimate defense and support of her allies.
What’s happening right now in Gaza with the Israeli government, not the Jewish people, what the Israeli government is authorizing to happen to Palestinians is abhorrent. It’s a war crime and it needs to be called out on every level. Every union should be calling this out, every civil organization, and every elected government official should be calling this out because the US should not support this. We’re the only country in the world that is supporting the nation-state of Israel in this attack against these unarmed people. And it has to stop.
Brandon Mancia: Yeah. I can add that if the labor movement is going to have its role right now, which is the UAW is a part of building that as the consciousness of this country, it’s going to have to speak out on these wars and acts of genocide. And the labor movement for too long has been silent or ignorant or intentionally ignorant on these issues. It’s straight-up sided with Israel and there’s a long documented history of that connection between the labor movement and the state of Israel. It’s up to the point now where, like Dan said, you can’t hide what’s happening anymore. You have to see it for what it is and you have to call it out. So I commend UE and UFCW Local 3000 for publicly mobilizing this letter, this call for a ceasefire, within the labor movement.
I don’t think UAW needs to get all the credit for labor’s turn on this. We are late to it. But as part of this movement that is engaging the membership, creating a democratic union, a union that stands in solidarity with not only working people in this country but poor and oppressed people all over the world, this was the right thing to do and we’re very happy to see that. Following our call for a ceasefire, so many other unions, especially large unions, not just local unions or individual shops, have also followed the call. 1199’s statement was amazing in terms of linking the struggle for healthcare workers in this country to the bombing of hospitals and healthcare workers in Gaza.
There are so many connections. Think of all the journalists that have been killed. Those are workers, humanitarian workers. The violence has to end and the labor movement is good at negotiating agreements. That’s the path here, it’s peace. So that you can negotiate lasting peace and justice for all people, not more warfare.
Daniel Vicente: If the conflict expands from Gaza to Lebanon, then to, who knows, if the Iranians are already pushing the limits with the Yemeni, the Houthis movement, and Yemen if the conflict expands – And why this is important to us, blue-collar working people – It’ll be our children, us, and our kids that have to go fight that conflict. It will not be the sons and daughters of bankers or senators. We’ve seen this. We know this. This is not something new. It’ll be us that have to do this, blue-collar people, and for our purposes, we do not want to see another conflict blow out of control where we have to send American sons and daughters overseas to a conflict that does not make us a safer nation. It does not meet or achieve US strategic goals in the world of making us a safer or a more just world, it makes it worse, and that’s why it’s important for labor to speak on it because we’re the grunts.
Mel Buer: It’s important to circle back around a little bit, discuss a little bit of what might seem to some outsiders, some of our audience who hear that the UAW represents members who are directly involved in weapons manufacturing or are working for one of the five manufacturers in this country who supply the vast majority of arms to Israel. It seems like an irreconcilable contradiction that, there are members of UAW, but the wider labor movement who are anti-war also have to contend with the fact that there’s a non-insignificant number of people who are benefiting economically as members of the working class in shops that are manufacturing weapons, weapons of war, being a part of the military-industrial complex as it’s called. Maybe if we took some time to untangle this for our listeners. Jeff Shirkey had a great analysis in Jewish Currents last month where he notes that one of the UAW’s big victories in the negotiations with the Big Three was a commitment towards transition within EV plants. He makes the case that there have been conversations in past generations with the UAW that there is such an idea as transitioning away from weapons of war, for example, or conversion initiatives.
So I’m wondering if that’s part of some of the thoughts that you’re having is you’re thinking about ways to better serve your membership but also, maybe begin the conversation of, is there a way that we can divest ourselves from the military-industrial complex and move towards this peacetime economy and economic items that by all intents and purposes, maybe a better job for individuals, a longer lasting job, one that has better benefits, or something of that nature. It’s a roundabout way of let’s have this conversation and see what we can pull out of this for our listeners so they get a better understanding of what’s going on within organizing in the UAW. And how do you grapple with this?
Daniel Vicente: Our historic president, Walter Reuther, before the treaty of what was called the Treaty of Detroit, had a broader vision for what the labor movement could be. That labor should be at the table making decisions for investments in companies but also should be at the table for what society should look like overall. But you’re right, it’s a very strange place to be when you represent weapons manufacturers, that’s their livelihood. But you’re also calling for a ceasefire. We have a lot of work to do to educate our membership as to why it’s important to pay attention to where our products end up.
Many of you would know when ISIS popped onto the scene from what it seemed to us in 2013, 2014, they were all driving Toyotas. I guarantee a Toyota did not want its products associated with that. We have a responsibility to track where our products are used and for what purposes. We need to start looking collectively, not just in the UAW, but across all unions and across the industry in general as to what do we want in this society, what are our priorities as a country and as a people, and we have to have these hard conversations. Transitioning the military-industrial complex into a peacetime thing, that’s decades of work. Again, labor is going to have to be at the table with not just other labor unionists, but with politicians.
We spoke a little bit about if we could legitimately start laying the groundwork as working-class Americans for a general strike, we could start to legitimately influence politicians to change drastically the stances they take when they go back to the capitol when they go to the hill and represent us. We have been conditioned for so long in this country to believe that we can’t change anything. Everything is the way it is. And right now, regular people care first about tangible things. If you can start to get them wins to make their lives better, you can start to branch out and explain to them the broader system and how unfair it is. Not only in our society but in how we treat the world, our global policies, and how we interact globally with the rest of the world, these things need to change.
It’s a hard thing to hear for some Americans because we’ve been brought up and told we’re the best country, in the world, and we’re always this noble nation, the best people. And we could, we can be the best. We could be this nation of progressive forward-thinking, trying to make the world a better place. But facts would suggest that’s not how we have acted, not in my lifetime. So we have to look in the mirror, see, and acknowledge that. It’s like if you have a drinking problem or drug problem: If you don’t acknowledge it first, you’re not going to fix it. We don’t always act equitably or fairly. We did terrible things across the world. The military-industrial complex pushed us to do terrible things in Iraq and Afghanistan. We don’t have to continue down that road. Is there a way to transition armament factories into different types of products? Sure. But that’s going to take more than the UAW. That’s going to take all of us collectively saying enough is enough.
Brandon Mancia: Also, I’ll add to that by saying that the main difference – And I know the Jeff Shirkey piece you’re pointing to which is a brilliant history of that idea – The one thing that’s missing is that the transition to EV was forced upon us. The companies wanted to force the EV transition on us so they could get rid of the UAW and get rid of unions. Shawn called it the race to the bottom so that all workers went down with the transition to the green economy. The idea of the transition in the EV sector was, no, we need to transition to a green economy to make a sustainable planet, but you’re not going to sacrifice workers and working communities and families in that process.
Right now, there is no anti-war capitalism that exists that is pushing an unjust transition to an anti-war economy. So what labor has to do in this moment – And this war is a perfect example of what needs to happen – We need to have a conversation about what movement we’re building. Is it an anti-war movement? Is it a movement for peace? Is it a movement for a different way for the US to act in the world? These are all the questions that the labor movement used to ask of itself, and it doesn’t anymore. So that’s a much bigger question but it’s not going to come because the companies are doing it. It’s going to come because we as a movement are talking about it. So we’re discussing it as a union and that’s, at this moment, what we’re building towards. But yeah, that aspect is important to remember here.
Daniel Vicente: If I may too, because I’ve seen some people say, well, the ceasefire letter was a nice first start but why don’t you take a more tangible step? Why don’t you shut down those factories? What people have to remember is we have collective bargaining agreements with these companies so if we were to walk everybody out – Which our membership would not be required to do because of an active contract, it would be a wild catch strike, and those people could all be fired immediately – They could lose their livelihoods. And I don’t think anybody listening to that would suggest that anyone should walk out and lose their livelihood and how they pay their bills.
But we do need to start laying the groundwork and thinking and discussing how we, at the next bargaining session for these contracts, how do we get language in there to give us pathways so that we can apply more pressure. How do we take more ownership of how these products are used? These are the conversations we need to start having now. So to walk everybody out or to blockade the front gate, wouldn’t do anything for a rank-and-filer except put your job at risk. If you want to lose momentum, if you want to lose people, and absolutely never have them listen to anything you say, go ahead and threaten their livelihoods and their jobs. I want to put that out there.
Mel Buer: Thank you. I wanted to say, before Teddy moves us into our last bit of conversation, thank you for taking the time to have an honest chat about this and to start to untangle some of the thorny subjects that come up when we talk about this activism and when we talk about labor’s role in these movements. So thank you, and I appreciate that we could have a bit of this conversation. So I’ll pass it off to Teddy but I wanted to make that comment. Our listeners will also appreciate what’s been said so far.
Teddy Ostrow: Yeah, I totally agree with that. But we would be remiss if we didn’t ask a question that was at least indirectly related to the 2024 election. Sorry, everybody, if you’re like me and don’t like to talk about it. Just kidding. A lot of people, or a lot of media have focused on UAW President Shawn Fain having harsh words for both Donald Trump and Joe Biden for different and similar reasons. And Fain made a statement that points to the newly class struggle orientation of the union that the UAW is dedicated to fighting the billionaire class, which includes people like Donald Trump. That we can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires whose interests are opposite those of the working class.
We’ve been talking about the UAW representing the working class, the workers of the union, but also the broader working class. And all of this comes even as the president of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, has met with Trump, which caused an uproar among some members and certainly among the labor left. But on the “other side” we’ve also seen the UAW leadership indicate that it is not going to hand out cheap endorsements to Democrats like Biden, who has done very little to ensure auto workers and other workers have a bright unionized future.
This is pretty atypical for unions who have been somewhat of lapdogs for Democrats for a long time. So I wanted to ask you guys, how do you think the UAW or unions in general should be engaging with electoral politics or with politics more broadly, more expansively? And also, how are you guys handling or would like to handle the admittedly sticky, uncomfortable, political tensions that exist within the union, within many unions, which in the electoral realm at least, includes a substantial proportion of the membership expressing support for a billionaire that is Trump?
Brandon Mancia: Yeah. I can start. The truth is a lot of our members did vote for Donald Trump in the two elections in which he ran. And part of having a democratic union is working through that, talking about that. And there was a reason why Democrats had not been coming to the table for working people for decades and that’s the story we’ve seen in state after state in this country: Is working people, middle-class people, turning to the Republicans because of the betrayal of the Democratic Party. But I do want to be clear that the UAW is not to endorse Donald Trump. Shawn Fain has said as much publicly that every fiber of our union’s being is going to be fighting the billionaire class that enriches people like Donald Trump.
Joe Biden, for all his faults, came to the picket line right after we took a hard stance on him about how he had dashed out these subsidies for the EV transition. He showed up to the picket line. Julie Sue and the Department of Labor have been working with the UAW through the negotiations to work on the just transition. And what did Donald Trump do? Donald Trump went to visit a non-union auto plant, a parts plant in Michigan when he could have easily come to a UW picket line and made his case for members who voted for him, members who didn’t vote for him, and have student solidarity with our strike. He bashed the strike.
So of course, there are going to be members who support Trump or are disappointed with Biden, but the truth is we’re not going to be a union that’s going to stand by a candidate like Trump who, as president, tries to install a dictatorship and keep himself as president and was no friend of working people. He wanted to outsource every job and for all his talk about manufacturing coming back to the US, manufacturing kept going on in decline during his presidency. There was no growth in manufacturing jobs, good middle-class jobs, or good union jobs. So that has to be said.
Daniel Vicente: I’m so glad that Brandon’s here to give the more reasonable approach. I’ll give you a more factory approach. F Donald Trump, he’s an orange clown. He has no business being the president of the US, and we have to oppose him with organized labor. We have to oppose him with every fiber of our being. And you’re right, in my opinion, there are members – I’m not going to beat around the bush – There are certain elements of our membership that voted for Donald Trump because of the white supremacy part of it. That’s a part of it. That’s a very slim minority of them. The majority of the people who voted for Donald Trump feel that they have been failed, overwhelmingly failed by the traditional political establishment in this country, both Democrat and Republican.
So they felt like, hey, I’ll give this guy a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? I’ll throw a grenade in a room and see what happens. Let’s vote for chaos and see what happens. If that man comes back as president, he is saying what he’s going to do, he’s laying it out. Labor unions are going to be under attack. The NLRB is going to be completely changed. We are going to face massive… And the UAW particularly because he asked us straight up for an endorsement, he is going to come at us specifically. And listen, Joe Biden is not my first choice either. He’s 107 years old. But it is at this point, that the choice comes down to do we believe, legitimately, as Americans and the Democratic principles that this country was founded on, that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, do we still believe that a representative democratic institution is how we should run our country? Or do we think that we should hand it over to right-wing nutbags who want to create some sort of Italian fascist state or something?
It’s not acceptable. We cannot allow it to happen and we absolutely have to oppose him and we have to call him out for what he is. The man is a man, no offense, Brandon, but he’s a Manhattanite millionaire who’s never struggled a day in his life. The dude doesn’t know your struggle. The dude has never had to work in a factory. The dude, as much as I disagreed with John McCain, the dude got five deferments from Vietnam and then trashed a Vietnam veteran, which I will never forgive. I personally will never forgive. The dude’s a clown. The dude is a clown and he’s playing you. I would ask that every working person in this country try to look and look at what his policies did for you and your life, tangible things. Did it make it better? If you are a multinational conglomerate, it certainly made your business better but if you’re a working person, he attacked your lifestyle constantly in his time as president. And if he’s allowed to come back, he’s coming at you even harder. It’ll be Trump 2.0 this time with a vengeance.
Brandon Mancia: I’m a proud New Yorker, and I disown Donald Trump.
Daniel Vicente: God bless you.
Mel Buer: We’re getting to the place where we might be able to wind down this conversation a little bit. So a final thought here and a bit of an anecdote: I did reporting on the Kellogg’s picket line in 2021 and I spent a lot of time with my neighbors in Omaha, Nebraska who represent all manners of the political spectrum. And the reality is no matter who you voted for – And folks, we had lots of conversations on the line, you can catch some of it in my previous reporting from years past – But without fail, especially in the Midwest, being able to sit down and talk politics on a picket line is bread and butter. You know what I mean?
The reality is folks don’t care about who you voted for because the common enemy is the boss who’s taking your pay out of your paycheck. And as long as you can trust the person you’re standing shoulder-to-shoulder with to suit up and show up at a picket line, to be able to stand together against the injustices, the economic oppression that happens in this country, then there’s a way forward. That’s been my stance in terms of electoral politics for a long time, since I’ve been covering the labor movements. I’ve been a member of the IWW for years and I’m a member of the CWA News Guild now, and it’s the same thing.
We have differing opinions about how we participate in politics, but the reality is we can affect our material conditions now. And how we choose to engage with electoral politics in this country is everyone’s decision is their own. It’s a little middle of the road but that would be my thought about that. Before we wrap up though, is there anything that we haven’t touched on? Or something that, Daniel or Brandon, that you are excited about that you want to let our listeners know to watch, to be aware of, as we move further into 2024? Any organizing or anything exciting that you want to share?
Daniel Vicente: For my part of it, Region 9 which is Pennsylvania, Jersey, and Central and Western New York, we’re getting more organizing tips and calls than we can handle at the moment. We don’t have enough heads covering and it’s from all different sectors. If there’s anything that is filling me with some enthusiasm and hope for the upcoming year, it’s what happened during the pandemic, the fault lines were exposed so blatantly for everybody that the system, the society we are in, does not value us. It is not fair. It does not allow us pathways that were enjoyed by our previous generations. We’re organized. People are organizing.
If you’re listening to this and you’re in an unorganized shop, you’re listening to this because you’re interested in the labor movement, you’re interested in these things, and the people around you are that, too. They might not know that this exists. Start having conversations, start talking to people. I know how it is at work, you don’t love everybody, but always remember, what’s good for me over here is probably good for that guy, too. It’s probably good for this lady over here. You spend so much time in these workplaces, you talk to each other and you get to know each other, and you meet people with radically different opinions and ideas from you. And you start to feel for them. You start to know their kids’ names. You start to know their parents or their wives’ or spouse’s names.
If you get nothing else out of this, try to remember that feeling when you see one of your friends at work, they get let go for some garbage reason, for nothing. That’s why we get into unionism because we don’t like seeing our people get messed with. If you’re listening to this because you don’t like seeing your people get messed with and the only way that you can fight back against those who have against us who have not is if you organize and you join a union. I don’t care if it’s the UAW, I don’t care if you form your own union, I don’t care. You join the team. So organize, and join a union because collectively, only collectively, those who have not can fight against those who have.
Teddy Ostrow: You heard it first, Region 9 will be endorsing the love candidate, Marian Williamson. Just kidding. You can wrap up now. Sorry.
Mel Buer: Thank you so much, guys, for coming on today’s show to talk about UAW’s exciting organizing and to have a good conversation about some of the more complex things that we run into when we are talking about organizing in this day and age. And thank you, Teddy Ostrow, for joining me as co-host for this special episode. God, I hope I can bring you back on. It’s been a joy working with you again. But that’s it for us here at The Real News Network Podcast. Once again, I am your host, Mel Buer.
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