UAW Reformers Close Caucus, Launch New Organization

Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), the reform caucus in the Auto Workers, voted to dissolve at its quarterly online membership meeting April 27.

“It was a heartbreaking decision to come to,” said UAWD founder and chair Scott Houldieson, a 36-year electrician at Ford. “UAWD had become a caucus that is ‘resolutionary,’ and focused more on caucus discipline than on actually organizing workers. Meetings had become dreadful. We can have differences as long as we make a decision and move on.”

A majority of the group’s steering committee had brought a resolution calling for the dissolution. It was hotly debated. About half of the caucus membership attended the meeting.

Two days later the steering committee majority announced plans to start a new network of reform activists, to be called UAW Member Action. “The energy of the membership has been unleashed in so many recent contract campaigns,” said Stephen Hinojosa, a 12-year Stellantis worker in Toledo, in a press release. “We want to bring these member leaders together to learn from each other for the fights to come.”

SHOULD WE STAY OR SHOULD WE GO?

The resolution to dissolve, which passed by a vote of 160 to 137, stated, “It is clear to us that the coalition of members that came together to achieve UAWD’s greatest successes can no longer work together toward common goals… There are two different visions for the kind of organization we need to build to advance a more militant union.”

Opponents said the majority group should work through the internal conflicts or leave, rather than close the caucus. “These have been tensions since the beginning, and we worked through them,” said Jeremy Bunyaner, a tenant attorney and longtime caucus activist. “Do you not believe we can work together? Then leave, don’t shut it down.”

Hinojosa had joined UAWD after attending the 2022 Labor Notes Conference. “I assumed UAWD was like Labor Notes—getting activists together,” he said, describing the competing visions. “They treated it more like a political party.”

EVOLVING GOALS

UAWD was formed by a few dozen members in 2019 with a singular purpose: to change the union’s constitution to give rank-and-file members, rather than convention delegates, the right to vote on top officers. Activists argued the reform was needed to end years of international officers ramming through concessionary contracts and divisive tiers.

Then the U.S. Justice Department dropped a bomb: it was investigating, and eventually indicting, top UAW officials for corruption, including colluding with employers. Thirteen went to jail.

To end corruption under the old guard, UAWD pushed for direct elections as a needed reform. The Department eventually mailed ballots to members to decide whether they wanted the right to vote.

UAWD attracted members energized by the democratic opening. Its volunteers made thousands of phone calls, convincing rank and filers to hand out flyers at plant gates and in the break rooms. They had a simple ask: vote yes.

Turnout was low (owing to cynicism, bad addresses, retirees a majority of the voting pool) but a 63.6 percent majority voted for the right to vote in fall 2021.

SEIZED THE MOMENT

Some predicted that once given the right to vote, members would simply mark ballots for incumbents. In the Laborers (LiUNA), where one-member-one-vote was imposed in 1996 by a government settlement, challengers have been few and the old guard has stayed in.

That’s not what happened in the UAW. Though still a small movement, UAWD managed to cobble together a partial slate for the International Executive Board, seven out of 14 slots (including regional directors). Again members and volunteers hit the ground running with calls, flyers, and road tours by candidates. In March 2023, after run-offs, again with low turnout, the UAWD-backed slate squeaked out a sweep, winning every position it ran for, including the presidency.

That victory suddenly changed the role of the caucus. Until then UAWD had been asking fellow members for one simple act: to mark their mail ballots. That didn’t require long-term base-building, running for local office, or confronting management.

Almost all auto locals were still run by officers who had come up in the era of boss-friendly politics and a view of the union as a patronage machine. Daily local union functioning—members’ involvement and interactions with management—could not be transformed top-down from the president’s office. UAWD would need to dig in to convince members their locals could be different, which would take new skills and staying power.

“The two campaigns we carried out, we were trying to build much broader than we actually were,” said retiree Dianne Feeley of Detroit, a UAWD member and a veteran of earlier UAW caucus-building. “We were forced to be far more national… That’s different from trying to build authority in the local, to lead the civil rights committee, to become a [steward].”

POST-STRIKE BLUES

UAWD pushed for the union to organize a contract campaign that summer, which it did, followed by the Stand-Up Strike against the Big 3 automakers, which won huge raises, especially for those in the lowest tiers. Members were enthusiastic about the strike, their new president Shawn Fain, and the chance to finally hold their heads high as auto workers and UAW members, after decades of shame and cynicism.

The ink was hardly dry on the three contracts, though, when the old skepticism came roaring back. Big raises for veteran workers weren’t as large as those for the so-called temps who had started at $15.78 an hour. Pensions for those hired after 2007 were not achieved. “Work-life balance” was not addressed; onerous overtime was as bad as before. At Stellantis, the new contract even went backward on the attendance policy; the vice president who had negotiated it was removed by Fain for dereliction of duty.

After the heady days of September-October 2023, when the whole world was watching and public support for the Stand-Up Strike was 78 percent, rolling layoffs and temporary shutdowns at Big 3 auto plants pushed many members back into pessimism about their union. Victory in the organizing drive at Volkswagen in Tennessee, in April 2024, lifted spirits among activists, but could only go so far for members at older plants worried about a pink slip.

TWO COMPETING VISIONS

The headwinds from the union’s largest employers came just as UAWD faced tougher choices about how to focus the reform project for the long haul. At the caucus’s convention last September in Detroit, two different visions were tested in a vote for leadership, which the UAWD Strong slate won with two-thirds of the vote.

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The majority emphasized “getting our co-workers organized and fighting together on the shop floor,” seeking common ground within the caucus, building rank-and-file connections for international solidarity, and winning power in the locals.

The minority platform laid out its own plans for local organizing and alleged that the caucus was becoming “staff-led.” It called for a more critical stance versus elected union officials, both through “unendorsement” and through plans to “put forward a set of radical demands” for a May Day 2028 strike.

Tensions in the caucus did not abate. Recruitment slowed to a trickle. Quarterly online membership meetings were highly contentious.

“We accomplished a lot until everything became a political litmus test,” said General Motors worker Sean Crawford. “Instead of focusing on areas of mutual agreement, it seems the focus always goes towards differences… because of a jillion resolutions.”

Finally, on March 28 the steering committee majority put forward its own resolution: to dissolve the group. “Members have disengaged from the caucus and terminated their membership, citing a toxic culture and lack of focus on the issues they care about most,” they wrote. “We have seen disproportionate levels of disengagement from members in manufacturing, despite our strategic focus in this sector.”

In its response statement, the minority group described itself as the “class struggle wing” of the caucus and argued that after the initial UAW election wins, “reform is not enough.” It called for the caucus to become a pole pushing for more aggressive demands, including worker control of production and international wage floors. (Labor Notes asked five opponents of dissolution for interviews; four declined.)

RECRUITMENT PLUMMETED

The 2026 UAW international officer elections loomed as another point of tension. Fain is expected to stand for re-election, but other candidates and slates have not announced. While the caucus had yet to take up an endorsement, leaders from the minority group warned that Fain might run on a slate with past adversaries from the old guard, and accused the majority of supporting “a new left labor bureaucracy.”

Aims for the caucus often overlapped with sectoral differences. The UAW is 75-80 percent manufacturing workers. About 12 percent are in higher education, legal services, and nonprofit work. Academic workers are often short-term members; they provided just above 2 percent of the votes in the election that brought Fain to office.

But about half of UAWD’s members came from outside manufacturing. The majority leaders drew their strongest support from the plants, and the minority from legal aid and higher ed workers in the Northeast, though both camps included members across sectors. Of those who signed a petition against dissolution, 70 percent were from Region 9A in the Northeast and 80 percent were from academic or legal services locals.

The majority argued that fights over resolutions, in heated chats and quarterly meetings sometimes three hours long, had stifled action, discouraged manufacturing workers from participating, and led recruitment to “plummet” since the convention last fall. “Both UAWD meetings and the listserve have become toxic, with various people accused of being ‘reformists,’” Feeley wrote in a message to the caucus. “Without building activist and militant locals, we cannot develop the democracy the union needs. ”

“After they lost at the UAWD convention, everything in that chat got toxic,” Hinojosa said. “People started leaving the chat en masse. Most of their political stances I agree with them on. But they were not about building bridges, they were about taking a hard stance and dying on every hill.”

DIVIDING

Dissolution, the Steering Committee majority proposed, would allow each group to organize for its own caucus vision, instead of staying stuck in infighting. The proposal allowed leaders from all camps to use UAWD member contact lists going forward, and donated remaining caucus funds to caucuses in other unions, immigrant aid, and peace nonprofits.

The minority leaders and some supporters termed the dissolution a “coup.”

On April 29, majority leaders launched the UAW Member Action group, aimed at “helping members stand up to bosses and win strong contracts… including by running for office.” Meanwhile, the minority group encouraged supporters to “reach out to us so we can plan this future together.”

At the big Jeep plant in Toledo, supporters of UAWD and now Member Action have been brewing reform on the ground—putting on a recent workshop on what to do when you’re harassed by management, and another on fighting back on job overload. They’re running for shop committee, the UAW version of full-time stewards.

“UAWD was a ground-up organization,” Hinojosa said. “That’s what we’re trying to get back to and focus on—bring in new leaders, help educate a worker-driven workforce and union. I’m looking forward to the new organization.”