Episode 247: Strikes by Autoworkers

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Welcome to our new episode of "This Is Democracy." This week we are going to discuss the history of unions in the United States, and we're going to look at the current strike by auto workers, in the United States. These are auto workers who belong to one of the oldest and most important unions, but one of many unions in the history of the United States, the United Auto Workers.

And we are fortunate to be joined by one of the leading historians of workers' unions and race in the United States. This is our friend, Professor William Jones, who is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota.

He's the author of, many articles and two really important books. The first, "The Tribe of Black Ulysses: African American Lumber Workers in the Jim Crow South," and then, more recently, "The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights," a book that puts the March on Washington, which everyone has heard of, especially because of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.

Will's book puts the March on Washington in the context of labor history as well as civil rights history, which is really important. Will, thank you so much for joining us today.

Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

And of course, we have our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. Uh, Zachary, what's the title of your poem today? "From the UAW Picket Lines." Wow, we're gonna get an on-the-scenes account from you, Zachary? Or at least an imagining of one, yes. Okay, well let's hear it.

So here we are, waiting on the picket line, for the world to change, for the times to rhyme. They sold us the lie that if we just worked hard the dough would fry and line our pockets with bread.

Pretty soon we were left the only ones not caught up in the net or dead on a cot. They told us when we asked that they had nothing to say. Forget tomorrow. Clock out today.

But we will not be told that our futures were sold in Washington or in Detroit where the rivers fold, and wash our cars out to sea.

We will not be told to keep standing still, when the steels arrive from the mill, and we have the parts to rebuild the heart of what made this country go. We will not be told to accept our fate, to wait and say nothing forever. If anything yet we're far too late, but better too late than never.

What's your poem about, Zachary? My poem is really about, how, the ravages of the global economy in the past few years have hit at the heart of manufacturing jobs in the United States and have led to a lot of dissatisfaction, with, not just with government but also with big corporations, in Detroit and across the country. And how labor action can hopefully move towards solving those problems or at least, finding a better solution for workers.

And that's your point about late but still important, right? Exactly.

Will, this moment we're living in now that Zachary captures, I think, a bit in his poem, is that how you would frame the current labor action against the automakers? Is that really what it is? Is it about automation or what's really at the root of this?

Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a number of things involved, and yeah, automation is an important part of it, and the struggle over jobs and the sort of number of jobs and employment. I think there's really three main issues at the heart of this, this current strike

One is the issue of the two-tier employment system that the Big Three auto workers have adopted, which is a product of concessions that were made by the UAW during the recession in 2009 when the auto companies were really in bad shape. And the UAW agreed to allow them to essentially start hiring workers, new workers under different systems, under lower wages, less, in some cases no benefits, healthcare benefits, pensions. And the idea was that, you know, when the auto companies were in bad shape and needed some help in recovering, the UAW, the workers agreed to take these concessions.

But now the Big Three are doing very well, and the feeling is that they, you know, the workers should not consider, continue to take these concessions. Some of the issues are around wages, and I think the union has framed that in the broader context of, I think a conversation we've been having over the past several decades about rising levels of economic inequality, the ways in which the wealthy have done well at times when the less wealthy, when the 99% has seen their living standards and their income decline.

And then the third one I think is this issue of jobs. It's related in part to automation. It's also for the auto industry, particularly related to the transition to electric vehicles, which, you know, are easier to manufacture and so they require less labor and there's a concern about the ways in which that shift to a, you know, a lower labor demand is going to affect the current workers. Right. And they're concerned about that.

Will, that's really helpful in framing this, and I wanted to come back to your first point because I think that's one that at least to my reading of the news has received a lot less attention. The fact that the auto workers not only gave up certain benefits to help the automobile companies during the 2008 recession, but also that they actually agreed to create a two-tiered system. Can you just say more about that, how that's worked and what the expectations were when that was negotiated in 2008? Right. Well, I mean the expectations were that this was going to save an industry that was really on the brink of collapse and so that, you know, which, in a sense, that has happened. The way it works though is that you get, you know, something that you hear a lot in interviews with workers on the picket lines is they'll say, you know, like they're standing next to workers who do the same jobs under the same conditions as them who earn, you know, in some cases half of what they earn with no benefits.

So they, you know, there's a sort of a fundamental sense that this is unfair, but there's also a recognition that this is a really dangerous situation when you're trying to build solidarity between workers, and it sort of pits workers against each other. And has the potential to really divide the workforce in a way that I think this strike is aimed at, you know, overcoming and sort of uniting.

Well, that point, Will, it seems to me leads really to the bigger historical question, which is what role have unions played? Why does the UAW exist? I get this question from my students all the time. Maybe that's just a function of those students being in Texas. I don't know. But, what you're describing seems to me to actually be an anathema to what unions historically have been about. Is that correct?

Yeah. I think in some respects, it's certainly anathema to the history of the UAW. And, you know, just as an aside, my students here in Minnesota, where there's a very vibrant labor union, they personally often have very little contact with the labor movement. And so, you know, I'm sure that it's more intense in Texas, but across the United States, people have very little sense of what unions do and where they come from.

The UAW is you know, comes from a particular history of one of the industrial unions of the 1930s. It was one of the founding unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which is, you know, half of the AFL-CIO. The other half, the AFL, is much older, and it actually comes from a tradition that is in some ways based on drawing lines among workers or between workers. I mean, it was a sort of built by skilled workers who really kind of circled the wagons around their own particular skills, and were very exclusive. So many of the AFL unions, you know, they would limit their membership to men. They would, some of them actually explicitly said that you could not be a member of them unless you were white. So they were exclusive, and the idea was to try to draw a very narrow line and control the labor market and the access to skills within a particular labor market. The CIO unions, like the UAW, took exactly the opposite approach. They felt, "If we can organize as many people as possible across as many different lines of skill and status, across lines of race and gender, we can be more powerful if we have everybody in the same union."

And so that's really, the UAW really exemplifies that history. It emerged in the 1930s, organizing auto plants where the, which were really deeply divided, right? You had very, very highly skilled machinists, working alongside, you know, janitors, alongside, people who were, who had very little experience. You had, you know, people of many different, you know, immigrants from all over the world. People of different races, men and women working in the same factories. And the UAW was one of the first unions to say, "We're going to try to put everybody in the same union." So this idea of the concessions really cuts at the heart of that idea, of the two-tier system, and gets really to the heart of the history of the UAW.

Zachary? And what has been the recent history of industrial unions in the United States? Where in the sort of long history of American labor do you see this particular strike fitting?

Yeah. Well, I mean, so since the 1970s, we've seen a really dramatic change in the way in which labor laws have been enforced. We've again seen a weakening of the enforcement mechanisms. We've seen a sort of emboldening of employers to really ignore the labor laws, which are, in some ways sort of inherently weak, as there aren't very many enforcement mechanisms or serious enforcement mechanisms in them. At the same time, we've seen a decline in the number of workers who are employed in the core industries in the United States, partially due to automation, partially due to the globalization of manufacturing, the rise of the service economy.

And the auto industry has been, you know, at the core of that, right? They've been, we've seen declining numbers of people. It's not so much that the, you know, the cars use fewer workers. It's that a lot of the parts that are used in cars are manufactured overseas. So increasingly, auto plants in the US are really assembly plants. They're, you know, taking things from all over the world and putting them together into a finished product, and that takes fewer workers than if you have to make those products from scratch. And that has really challenged unions like the auto, the UAW. They've responded in a number of ways.

One way they've done, responded is to sort of branch out and organize other workers. I think about 20% of the UAW are actually academic workers. They're graduate students. They're contingent faculty at, mostly in the UC, the University of California system.

They've also made the, you know, they face this problem of, you know, do you sort of make concessions and do you, you know, recognize that you are in a place of weakened you know, clout and respond to that by making concessions? Or do you in as, you know, in the language of the sort of the people who run the union movement now, or the UAW now, do you fight back? And one of the important things about this strike is it occurs after the election of Shawn Fain who ran against a sort of entrenched union bureaucracy that had really been responsible for a lot of these concessions. He ran on a reform slate that was supported by people who have been fighting within the UAW for many years, for decades, to try to push the union toward a more aggressive stance in trying to push back against some of these concessions. So that's a strategic change that, you know, and I think we'll see how it plays out.  I think the strike, you know, raises that. We don't know how the strike's going to end.

Will, your discussion of the election of a new UAW leader brings up an important issue. I often hear people say very derogatory things about unions, and I think some of this comes out of the rhetoric of the 1970s and '80s that unions are corrupt and that unions are run only for the leadership. That's obviously not true, but why do you think that's said so often, and what's your response to that?

Well, I mean, it's said, it is in part true. I mean, there is a truth to the fact that there has been corruption in unions. I think like any large institution, there's room for corruption. I think it also has gained strength from the position that these big industrial unions have found themselves in, where they, it's been very difficult for them to actually deliver for their members, so there's this, you know, a sense that they don't get much done. You know, they've done an important, they've played important roles in at least holding the ground. But I think, you know, that's something that's very hard for people to see, and so there's a sort of, yes, sense that these are institutions that are on their back, and it's hard to sell them even to their own members.

On the other hand, I think it's important to keep in mind that unions have really been central to any advances that we've had toward economic equality in the United States and in other respects in terms of other forms of equality. So, you know, the UAW came out of the 1930s, but it really, I think, played its central role in the United States in US politics in the 1950s and '60s, the sort of heyday what some historians call the heyday of American liberalism. It was the UAW that pushed for universal, for healthcare programs, for workers, to provide health that employers, this sort of employer-based system that we now have. The UAW actually initially pushed for a universal healthcare program. When the auto companies pushed back vehemently against that, the UAW said, "Well, okay, then employers need to step up and provide healthcare for workers."  They pushed for, you know, all of the sort of liberal provisions of what we might call the welfare state of the 1950s, was pushed for by industrial unions like the UAW.

The UAW also played a really critical role in the civil rights movement. It was one of the unions that, you know, provided consistent funding for the major campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. The UAW sent money to help support the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the March on Washington. The president of the UAW, Walter Reuther, spoke at the March on Washington, you know, just before Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. So this, these are institutions that have really been vital to American democracy and to the sense of sort of creating a more egalitarian United States.

I'm so glad you explained that Will, because it is striking and I think undeniable that moments in our history when unions have been stronger, we have seen less economic inequality in moments such as the 1970s and '80s. When we see unions receding in American history we see more inequality. So there's at least a correlation there, as my economist friends would say. That's right. That's, I mean, if you, one chart that I like to show my students is if you chart the level of income inequality in the United States over the past century, and you chart union representation rates, they're in exact reverse correlation, right? That as unions have declined, we've seen wealth inequality grow.

Will, do you think that's why it appears that there is at least some kind of renaissance of unions in the United States? You see Starbucks workers, Amazon workers, and various others talking about unions in ways we hadn't seen before. Is that part of the story?

I think it is. I mean, one of the really remarkable things that we've seen in the Gallup polls is that, so in 2010, the Gallup poll, you know, Gallup poll every year since the '40s has asked people whether they think unions are good or bad, sort of a basic public, you know, opinion poll of unions. In 2010, that number reached its all-time low. It actually, for the first time, since they started asking it, it dipped below 50%. Wow. Last year, that number reached 70, over 75%. And so in the, you know, since 2010, we've seen the, that public approval of unions go from its historic low to close to an all-time high. And I think, you know, there's a number of reasons for that. I think, you know, there has been growing attention to income inequality. You know, 2010 was around the time that we saw the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street movement. There was this sort of conversation around wealth inequality. There were the big protests in Madison, Wisconsin, that you and I both witnessed. Yes. I think they called attention to the historic importance of unions in a way that we haven't seen in a very long time. Since then, I think we've seen, certainly during the pandemic, I think there were a number of ways in which the pandemic contributed to this growth of unions. One was the sort of outward display of workers who were really, you know, were essential, were critical for the functioning of our society, critical to protecting people from the pandemic and caring for people when they got the pandemic. Those workers were often the lowest paid, the worst treated workers in the economy. Yes. Yes. And that highlighted this contradiction, I think it led to a lot of those workers, going on strike and forming unions.

I think the third thing that I'd point to is actually this reform movement within the union movement that, you know, really goes back to the 1970s, but that people have been working within the unions to make them both, you know, to sort of root out corruption, but also to make them more aggressive and to sort of take on some of these concessions. And that, I think we're seeing, you know, all of the leadership of many of the big unions and of the AFL-CIO comes out of these reform movements that started back in the 1970s. So I think we're in some ways seeing the results of those.

In recent weeks, we've seen both the current president of the United States, and his predecessor visit UAW picket lines or at least speak with UAW strikers. How should we understand the role that this strike, will play and is playing in our national politics so close to a presidential election?

Yeah, that was really fascinating. I thought, you know, in both cases. I mean, I think it's important to point out that Donald Trump did not go to a UAW plant. He went to a non-union plant. He was also invited by the employers who were, who are sort of a vehemently anti-union, parts manufacturers. So I think that's important to keep in mind.

Biden, on the other hand, was invited by the president of the UAW, and spoke very powerfully. For the first time in history, a union, a sitting president really took a very strong position, in favor of the union, and I think really, you know, framed his remarks in the tone that the union is saying, that this is about wealth inequality, that the CEOs of the auto manufacturers have done very well, and the workers deserve to do well also. And you know, I think that that signaled that this conversation is going to be, is clearly going to be a really important part of the coming election. And I think for a first time in a very long time, we're seeing, you know, the politics of unionization, and of wealth inequality really being at the heart of the conversation leading into this presidential election.

Will, there's a lot of talk and you've been part of this discussion too about working class voters. From, you know, the period of Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt's presidency forward, there was a presumption in part because of the connections between the Democratic Party and some of the major unions that working class voters would be Democratic voters. Then the Trump movement seems to have reversed that, at least in some areas, perhaps particularly in the Midwest. How do you see that issue today? Are working class voters MAGA voters? Are they Trump voters? Are they Democratic voters? What would you say?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's important to keep in mind who, you know, what we mean when we say working class voters. I mean, there's a very, I think a very small sort of narrow segment of working class voters who are overwhelmingly white and male, they're largely rural, who have, you know, who are, have become Trump voters. Many of those voters have been conservative voters for a very long time. I mean, they were, you know, going back to Reagan, even going back to before that, to Nixon.

The working class is extremely diverse and the working class as a whole still is decidedly Democrat. But if you, if you look at a particular, you know, segments of workers, I thought it was actually interesting that, you know, Trump, spoke, gave his speech when he went to Detroit in Macomb County, which is the sort of classic place where, the sort of origin of the term Reagan Democrats. The sort of long-term Democrats who had turned to the Republican Party with the, in 1980 to vote for Reagan. So I think, you know, I think Trump's politics are often sort of framed in the context of the 1980s. Right. And he seems sort of stuck back there. But I think that was definitely part of his, thinking and going.

 Is it fair to say that the white male elements of the working class that we associate also with traditional unionism, the traditional people working in Henry Ford's plants and others, is that a smaller and smaller part of what you'd call the working class today?

Well, in some respects it's always been a small part of the working class. They've been the working class that has been most visible. I see. But certainly, I mean, in, like, if you look at core industrial jobs, I mean, if you look at the pictures of UAW picket lines, you know, they look very different. It's lots of women, and lots of Black and Latino men. So in that sense, the sort of core sort of UAW, which has always been a racially diverse union, right? But it's become, its sort of core constituency has become more racially and gender diverse. Certainly gender diverse. Right. That makes sense.

So Will, we always like to close our episodes by bringing together the enormous reservoir of information and knowledge that guests like you are sharing with us, and we're fortunate to be able to participate in that and to benefit from your knowledge. We like to bring together this historical knowledge with a forward-looking perspective. Based on this really deep and complex history of unions and workers in the United States that you have such a strong command of, what would you say to a President Biden, or it could be to a Republican presidential candidate, what would you say to them about how one could be both pro-worker and pro-growth? It seems too often we see these as dichotomous positions in our history, that you have to either be for growth or for unions. Of course, many periods of economic growth have been periods of union growth and union prosperity in our society as well. So how can we bring those two together looking forward today?

Yeah. I mean, as you said, I would point to history. I mean, if you look at the post-war period when the UAW was at its most powerful, that was also the point in which the U.S. economy was growing more rapidly than it ever has, before or since. And so I think that, you know, again, it's correlation. But it raises the question as to whether there is a fundamental sort of tension between growth and, you know, better wages, better working conditions, sort of a more prosperous working class.

I think also I'd point to, you know, a lot of that conversation goes around the sort of sense that sort of better wages for auto workers is going to be damaging for consumers, right? That, like, if we raise wages for auto workers, you know, it's gonna raise the cost of a car. We hear this in a lot, you know, if we pay fast food workers too much, it's gonna, you know, shut people out of McDonald's, right? And I think it's important to keep in mind that in each of those cases, the actual cost of labor is just a fraction of the cost of making any product. I think the cost of labor, the labor cost for making a car is around 10 to 15% of the total cost. So there's a lot of other factors going into that.

It has to do with, you know, getting products from overseas and trade policies that affect that. It has to do with, with the compensation that goes to management, and also, more importantly, the compensation that goes to shareholders and out in profit. And I think it's important to, you know, to keep in mind that those all mean that we can actually, in many cases, it's beneficial for the broader economy to make sure that people have better wages. It stimulates consumption. And that there's certainly not a contradiction between improving conditions for workers and promoting a prosperous economy.

Zachary, you spent the summer in Germany, and of course, Germany's a country with very strong unions. Do you agree with Will that Germany's an example of economic growth and worker protections going hand-in-hand?

I think so, and I think one thing about this moment that maybe is a little optimistic is that I think the attention from both parties to the issue of economic equality, albeit from two different perspectives and one often much more about cultural resentment than actual economic policy, I think that should be a positive sign that most Americans or a large number of Americans recognize that the future of our economy is not going to be in the same places and organizations that we've relied on in the last decade or so that we have to look back to the past but also look forward to find new ways of thinking about wealth distribution and economic prosperity in our country.

And Zachary, for young observers like yourself, are unions part of that story? Do you feel that your generation is giving more attention to unions than maybe the generation just before yours?

I think so, and I think quite simply it's one of the places in American politics that is most exciting but also most accessible. I think it's a engaging, exciting, political movement as much as it is a very serious, critique of our economy.

So Will, that was the last question, the really last question I had for you, which was for our listeners, particularly our younger listeners, if they're interested in learning more about unions as scholars and perhaps as activists, what are the best ways to get involved and to become knowledgeable of this subject matter?

Yeah, well, I think you can, I'll do a plug for taking labor history classes. Sign up for my classes. Go to Minneapolis and sign up for Will's class. That's right. Well, you, you don't have to come here. You can in most universities there are classes, you know, related to labor history and labor studies more broadly.

I do think that, you know, Zachary's right in terms of the accessibility. I mean, in a lot of cases young people, you know, learn about unions 'cause they go to work in a place where there's a union drive. And, you know, I've been, there's a Starbucks down the street from my house, and I've had a great time talking to people who are trying to build a union there. And they're, you know, they're all in their 20s, and they have, you know, they haven't been involved in unions before, but they're learning a lot about unions, and they're really interested in it. So that's a way that I think, you know, whether you work in a place like that or you, you know, you go to a business like Starbucks, I think you can talk to the people who work there about their experiences. And, you know, I think depending on where you live, there are a lot of union members who, you know, they don't wear their UAW hat everywhere, but they're, you know, they're around and they have experience with unions. So those are other ways you can learn about unions.

 Its such a great point. Even in a state like Texas, which traditionally doesn't have the same strong unionization as other parts of the country, teachers are part of a union, right? That's right. What I know your next project is on, Will, public service workers, right? That's right.  My wife, who's a city council member, she's actually part of AFSCME, which is the public sector union. And so there are actually a lot of people around who work with or are involved with unions. And, as you say, Will, I think that talking to them and getting a sense, positive and negative, of what their experience is, is important in informing ourselves when we're discussing these issues politically.  Yeah. I mean, it's true that, you know, if you're in high school, the chances are your teacher is a union member.

Right. Right. Well, Will, thank you so much for sharing this excursion, a necessary excursion today into the history of unions and workers in American society. There's obviously much more you could say. You could fill, I think, 500 podcast episodes on this, but you've given us really a wonderful introduction to the topic, and I hope our listeners will dig in for more. So, thank you Professor Will Jones for joining us today. Thanks for having me on. It was great to talk to both of you. And thank you, Zachary, of course, for your, inspiring and really imaginative poem bringing us to the picket lines where we all could learn a lot. And thank you for doing that, Zachary. Thank you most of all to our loyal listeners for joining us for this episode of This Is Democracy.

This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts ITS Development Studio. And the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. The music in this episode was written and recorded by Haris Khodini. Stay tuned for a new episode every week. You can find This Is Democracy on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. See you next time.