The union is abandoning its traditional members for new recruits in higher education, causing it to embrace left-wing causes its members don’t care about.
The union is abandoning its traditional members for new recruits in higher education, causing it to embrace left-wing causes its members don’t care about.
W hen the United Auto Workers called a strike vote against the carmaker Stellantis last week, it came as a surprise to many workers that the union was actually engaging in standard union activity. That’s because the UAW has increasingly given the impression that it cares as much or more about issues that don’t affect autoworkers, such as Israel’s war in Gaza and student-loan forgiveness. There’s a simple explanation: The union is abandoning its traditional members for new recruits in higher education.
“Auto Workers” may be in its name, but the “A” in UAW increasingly stands for “academic.” The union has organized more than 100,000 graduate students, adjunct professors, and others in higher education. Academics now make up more than a quarter of the UAW’s membership, and they also represent the union’s biggest growth potential. Automakers aren’t creating hundreds of thousands of new American jobs, while higher education has many potential employees to unionize nationwide.
Hence the UAW’s focus on issues that have nothing to do with making cars and trucks. One of us (Terry Bowman) works at Ford Motor Company’s Rawsonville components plant. Many workers at that facility are confused and concerned about the UAW’s priorities. Colleagues want to know why their union is wasting dues money while ignoring the real issues they face on the job.
The war in Gaza is a case in point. At the Rawsonville plant, workers aren’t pushing for an immediate cease-fire, nor are they bellyaching about university crackdowns on student protests. But UAW leaders are. In December, the UAW became the first major union to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. In May, UAW president Shawn Fain declared, “This war is wrong,” and he also criticized the “intimidation of those exercising their right to protest” on campus. In August, the UAW stated that ending the war required the Democratic Party to let a Palestinian American address the August convention. Why do UAW leaders care about a war on the other side of the world? Because graduate students do.
The union’s new academic members attend institutions that are motivated by ideology, and they have the leisure to play politics. UAW Region 9a, which represents the college crowd in the northeast, has strongly endorsed campus protests. In the University of California system, UAW members who protested received payments from the union’s strike fund, even though the strike was mostly over pro-Palestinian protests. Meanwhile, autoworkers are doing productive work, and when they strike, it’s over wages, benefits, and working conditions.
Nor are autoworkers heading to the picket line for student-loan forgiveness. But the UAW thinks that topic matters, once again at the insistence of graduate students who have never been to a factory. Last year, after the Supreme Court struck down the Biden-Harris administration’s first scheme to “cancel” student debt, UAW leaders oddly called it an “anti-worker decision.” That’s news to workers at the Rawsonville plant, many of whom have already repaid thousands of dollars in college tuition and have no desire to work overtime to pay off the student loans of those who chose to go to college and willingly took on debt.
Those academics and autoworkers may be in the same union, but demanding that the latter support the former is a perversion of solidarity. When most people hear “solidarity,” they think of autoworkers at one plant standing with autoworkers at another plant, since they broadly share the same concerns. At the Rawsonville plant, workers are losing shifts and pay because of cutbacks in electric-battery production. At other plants, workers are being laid off as the industry is forced into the costly and increasingly unpopular transition to electric vehicles. For autoworkers, this is a real crisis. So why is the union talking about cease-fires and student loans?
Of course, the UAW says it still fights for autoworkers. It points to the strikes against the “Big Three” last fall, which resulted in hefty new contracts, and the potential strike against Stellantis. But workers themselves can be forgiven for thinking that the union has lost its way. Even when it claims to fight for workers, it often undermines their interests by making automakers uncompetitive and pushing production to nonunion states, overseas, or south of the border.
Maybe those unionized graduate students, no doubt steeped in the socialism of modern higher education, are exerting a bigger influence than people realize. Either way, the UAW should rename itself the “United Academic Workers,” because that’s where its interests increasingly lie. The UAW is now a union divided, and as Abraham Lincoln famously said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Terry Bowman, who is represented by UAW Local 898, works at Ford’s Rawsonville Components Plant and is a board member of The Institute for the American Worker.
Jarrett Skorup is the vice president for marketing and communications at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.