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Abe Walker, "Reassembling the UAW: Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American South" (Temple UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
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Dr. Abe Walker
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- [01:00]
Dr. Abe Walker
I get so many headaches every month, it could be chronic migraine 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting
- [01:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
four hours or more.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Abe Walker about his book titled Reassembling the UAW Insurgency, Contention and the Struggle for Unionism in the American south, published by Temple University Press in 2026. Now, this is a book where the title is very helpful because it tells us pretty much exactly what we're going to be talking about, which is, as the subtitle as well suggests, a number of things, intriguing things. We are talking about unions. We're talking about the politics between unions and other actors, the politics within unions, what is happening in many ways very much currently, as well as sort of recent history. This is not a book that is saying that the unions are only of interest if we look back a hundred years. But the unions are interesting now and in the last few decades too. So we have a lot to discuss. Abe, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [03:06]
Dr. Abe Walker
Thank you. I'm happy to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What sorts of interventions are you making?
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Dr. Abe Walker
Sure. So I'm an assistant professor of sociology at Fayville State University, which is an affiliate of the University of North Carolina system. And I think at a very basic level, I wrote this book to explain the United auto workers, or UAW's decade long battle to organize the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga. And it ended up taking three tries. So first they lost in 2014, then they lost again in 2019, and it wasn't until 2024 that they finally pulled off this landslide victory. So those are kind of the key dates that I'll be referring to throughout this interview. And listeners might want to make a mental Note that the 2014 and 2019 elections were defeats for the UAW, while 2024 was a success. Now, in terms of the way I go about telling this story, I think it would have been really easy to write this up as something like a fairy tale. Fiction writers sometimes talk about the rule of threes, like in Goldilocks. It's a very familiar trope. I even have an article out somewhere under the title third Time's the Charm. And in some ways, it might have been easier to write this book as like a linear narrative or as a straightforward progression from failure to success. And in fact, I remember a couple years ago there's this crop of articles by commentators and pundits proclaiming that the 2024 victory portended the revival, not just the UAW, but of the labor movement as a whole. Now obviously that's a very seductive story. And you know, to be honest, when you look at the market for books in the labor movement, I think readers tend to prefer these inspiring stories of struggle and triumph to more nuanced depictions of Trials and tribulations. But tempting though it was, I've actually tried my hardest to resist that triumphant narrative. Not because I don't like good storytelling or because I don't want to sell books because. But because that version just doesn't really align with the facts on the ground. And at the end of the day, I have a fundamental obligation to my readers to relate these events in a way that's honest and accurate, without pandering or sugarcoating. So even as I was getting ready to send my final version off to the printer in the fall of 2024, it was really apparent to me that this victory was unlikely to be the watershed moment for the labor movement that some had predicted. It was also pretty clear to me that the UAW's supposed comeback was very much tenuous and could easily backslide or disappear. So, unlike a fairy tale, but like good literary fiction, and, frankly, most of the best labor reporting, my book has something of an open ending. I leave the reader to decide for themselves how things might turn out. Now, in terms of the story behind the story, I really started doing research for this book around 2017, so a few years after that first defeat. Now, this wasn't originally conceived of as a longitudinal study. It was intended as a fairly narrow project, centered more or less on a single event, the 2014 election. But as I was writing up what would become my dissertation, the UAW called for a second election, in which, of course, they also lost. So I went back and I redid parts of my analysis to try and explain why. And then, once I got my book contract, and I was putting what I imagined to be the final touches on my manuscript, UAW actually called for a third election, where they finally won. So at that point, I suddenly realized I had a much bigger story in my hands. I not only added three more chapters, but I rewrote most of the rest of the book to better contextualize that ultimate victory. Sometimes we hear social scientists talking about an iterative approach to research, where we move back and forth between induction and deduction. And I think that term is sometimes thrown around a lot, somewhat disingenuously. But this project really was iterative in the fullest sense of the word. And I'm convinced that the final product is stronger for all the additions, deletions, and changes I made along the way. Now, at a very high level of abstraction, this is really a book about solidarity. At the end of the day, organizing a union is not about persuading workers to sign cards or cast their ballots the right way, but about bringing workers together to fight the boss and uniting them under a common purpose in a tetra, but in a way that doesn't collapse their differences or ignore the specificity of their circumstances. There are lots of forces out there they're going to try to impede, resist, or otherwise block the formation of those common bonds. So I think I have a chapter heading pretty late in the book that could really serve as something of a philosophical overlay for the whole thing, and that's Solidarity in Conflict. Basically, I'm asking how does solidarity emerge from the cauldron of conflict, and what does that tell us about both this particular case and about the prospects for labor organizing going forward?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's a really helpful introduction because it gives us a ton of things to talk about in more detail. But as you said, this isn't sort of the as much as the dates might seem like it's kind of a linear failure failure succeed. There is sort of a wider context to take into account. And kind of picking up your last point around sort of what it means for this union, but also sort of unions more broadly. Before we get into kind of what didn't work, can you just tell us a little bit about what did happen in 2024 and kind of why it was such a big deal for this union? But also more broadly?
- [08:34]
Dr. Abe Walker
Sure. So in 2024, the 3,600 workers at Volkswagen Chattanooga assembly plant voted overwhelmingly by a 73% margin to join the UAW. Now, your typical listener who perhaps doesn't really follow labor movement very closely will likely be familiar with this event because it received tremendous media attention and for good reason. Now, I should note that there's really only one or two chapters in my book that cover 2024, but I tease it from the very beginning because I'm well aware that it's going to be the primary draw for most general audience readers. And I apologize to anyone who might be annoyed by having to wade through six fairly dense chapters before getting to the part they really care about. But I promise it's worth it. So why does it matter? Well, Volkswagen's Chattanooga plan was the first foreign owned auto factory successfully organized by the uaw, and the contract that was just ratified a few weeks ago was the UAW's first freestanding collective bargaining agreement at a final assembly plant in the South. Now, when I say first, I should really say first and only. Some sticklers might want to add a few asterisks because American companies actually employ a decent number of auto workers in the south and therefore some were already covered under UAW contracts. But still the fact remains that the Volkswagen Chattanooga factory is the first and only foreign owned auto plant organized by the uaw. Now, people might be familiar with the old canard that southern workers just don't like unions. You know, it's against their culture or something. And for some, I think the UAW's weakness in the south seemed to justify the perception that that southern workers have some intrinsic aversion to organized labor, or that there's something special about southerners that predisposes them toward individualism. Now, to be clear, I completely reject that idea, Both because it's culturally determinist and ahistorical, and because it runs counter to all the empirical research we have on worker attitudes. But the political class could still point to the lack of union presence in the south as a way of backfilling the myth that southern workers are inherently anti union. And as it happens, spouting that lie served their purposes quite well through much of the late 20th century and into the 21st.
- [10:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so good then that we have some interventions to make sense of that and not just fall into those traps. But given the history that you're kind of hinting out there, that goes back much further than 2014, why do you start primarily in that year?
- [11:06]
Dr. Abe Walker
So reason I started 2014. Well, simple answer is that the 2014 union election provides something like a necessary baseline of institutional failure and structural dysfunction, against which the union's subsequent transformation and ultimate victory can be measured and understood. But if we think about the broader context, 2014 also represents something like a low point in the history of the UAW. During its mid century heyday, that is the middle of the last century, the UAW had derived immense power from geographic concentration. Up to 80% of production was historically clustered within 200 miles of Detroit. But look, dating back to at least the 70s and maybe even earlier, there's a debate among scholars. The American auto industry saw these structural transformations that fractured worker solidarity and severely weakened the UAW. People may know that the UAW's traditional stronghold in the Rust belt was hit hard by deindustrialization, outsourcing and capital flight. And by the time our story really starts in the 2010s, the union had seen its membership decline precipitously over the last 50 years, offset only slightly by new organizing in higher ed. So seeking to escape high union dense in the upper Midwest, these foreign owned transplants, operated by European and Asian automakers, develop massive facilities along the i75 corridor in the American south. And for the purpose of my book, when I say the south, it's basically a shorthand for the Southeast, really. The former states of the Confederacy, give or take a few. Now, these firms deliberately sought out ex urban locations and right to work states. And southern political elites aggressively courted foreign automakers by offering these massive financial incentives and the explicit promise of a union free environment. It was almost a match made in heaven. By 2010, foreign automakers employed over 100,000 workers in the South. Yet the UAW counted absolutely none of them as members. So why exactly was the south so hard to organize? If it wasn't culture, what was the real reason? Well, there's a few, but one that I want to highlight is that the UAW was selling a bad product. Throughout the 2000 and tens, the union's entrenched leadership had negotiated severely concessionary contracts with Detroit automakers, accepted multi tiered wage systems, expanded reliance on temporary workers and frozen benefits. In fact, during the economic crisis of 2007, UAW accepted two tier contracts that essentially forced new hires into second class pay that didn't just hurt their wallets. It also shattered industrial solidarity by turning workers against each other based on hire date and employment status, and created these, these artificial hierarchies on the shop floor. As a result, the union sales pitch was deeply unappealing to southern auto workers. There was really no compelling incentive to join an organization that was actively degrading the living standards of its core membership. So really, to set the stage, by the time our story gets going in 2014, UAW was facing off against an industry that had relocated to the anti union south, broken up production into fragmented supply chains and pitted workers against one another through unequal employment tiers. If the EU is going to make good in its promise to organize the transplants, it was going to be a heavy lift.
- [14:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that doesn't sound super promising. Right? So what if we're standing in that point of 2014, just how unlikely did victory at any point, right. Even 2024, obviously that's three elections later, but that's only 10 years. So how unlikely was that? And kind of are there any additional challenges to the ones you've already listed that organizers faced at this point?
- [14:53]
Dr. Abe Walker
Right. So from the vantage point of 2014, a victory really at any point, including in 2024, appeared highly improbable. Not only was the unit at that point structurally weakened and internally fractured, as I've already discussed, but it was also operating in an intensely hostile environment. My research identifies a series of overlapping challenges and obstacles that were deployed against the organizing drive in 2014. And I'm just going to mention some of the important ones quickly. People can read the book if they want some more detail. First was what I called the honeymoon effect. When the plant opened in 2011, Chattanooga had never seen foreign investment on that scale. And Volkswagen generated significant community goodwill by serving as a major job creator in an industry starved region. The company even provided above market wages for the region, which appealed heavily to a workforce with limited opportunities. Second, the company offered promises and improvements, or what we might colloquially call bribes. In the lead up to the election, Volkswagen management made minor improvements to working conditions to help ward off the threat of unionization and perhaps buy off certain impressionable workers. Third, while senior management remained outwardly neutral with regard to the union shop floor level, supervisors retaliated against pro union workers through overt intimidation, surveillance and disciplinary actions. This is all very well documented and these supervisors rarely faced consequences. Fourth, the company used delay tactics. Volkswagen initially maintained a neutral stance with respect to the union and even suggests they might voluntarily recognize the UAW through a card check process. Instead, management delayed the process for almost 18 months before eventually demanding a formal election, which generated a lot of uncertainty and sapped whatever momentum the campaign originally had. Fifth, we have political interference, and this is an important one. So amidst all this uncertainty, well funded national anti union lobbies stepped into the fray and mounted a massive public relations campaign against the UAW. These AstroTurf groups, coordinated by organizations like the center for Worker Freedom and funded by national anti union figures like Grover Norquist, saturated the local media market. They erected billboards that compared the UAW to an invading army. They ran editorials that compared it to a parasitic virus. And they warned that Chattanooga was going to turn into a post industrial wasteland if workers even dared to organize. And then finally there is this threat of disinvestment. So as politicians enter the mix, they threatened to withhold some $300 million in state subsidies if the plant unionized. So by the time workers finally went to vote in In February of 2014, nobody following that election was really sanguine about the UAW's prospects.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that really doesn't sound like an environment in which the union has much hope. How did the union try to overcome this after 2014?
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Dr. Abe Walker
So as incredible as it sounds, despite all the obstacles that I just laid out, the UAW initially hoped that Volkswagen would be an easy target and might even voluntarily recognize the union. So instead of gearing up for the kind of all out organizing drive you might expect from a union facing off against One of the world's largest and wealthiest firms, UAW actually ran a low key, low budget campaign and relied heavily on the company's good graces. For example, as part of a deal to secure a neutrality pledge from Volkswagen, UAW agreed to pare down its organizing activities and forgo house visits and even refrain from picketing, basically capping itself in the knees before it even started. Even more damningly, UAW agreed to a clause that required the union to maintain the cost advantages Volkswagen enjoyed over its unionized domestic competitors, more or less promising in advance not to fight for wage parity with Detroit. On top of that, organizers went out of their way to appear non confrontational and avoid antagonizing the company. Now there was another important aspect of this organizing strategy that bears mention here. And it gets a little bit complicated, but I'll try to break it down. The union together with the company floated the idea that that it might be possible to set up a German style works council in the United States. Now for anyone that knows anything about American labor law, it was always really unclear how this might happen. And it never really coalesced into a concrete plan. But nonetheless, the mere idea seemed to have some negative effects on the organizing drive. The irony perhaps is that in a German context, we works councils are actually designed to encourage collaboration between workers and managers. But in Chattanooga, where labor relations are quite different, all this talk of a works council sowed mistrust against Volkswagen workers who saw it as something like an intermediary that would get in the way of traditional independent collective bargaining. And in the end, the UAW took the fall because it positioned itself as as little more than a stepping stone toward the establishment of a works council, while downplaying its identity as a fighting union that would fight hard for pay equity. So the other part of the story I should mention here concerns some of the more basic strategic failures on the ground. With union officials prioritizing these high level deals with the works council organizers ended up neglecting the comparatively unglamorous task of of building meaningful relationships with workers and forging real connections on the shop floor. Instead, they ran a horribly mismanaged campaign that was almost completely detached from workers immediate material concerns. Basically, by prioritizing backroom deals with corporate executives, UAW alienated its own prospective members. For example, workers were kept in the dark for much of the campaign, creating a massive communication vacuum. Union staffers actively suppressed independent worker initiatives and stifled internal dissent. Campaign also struggled to bridge racial and skill divides, relying heavily on a predominantly white group of privileged skilled machinists while neglecting to build trust with regular production workers. And then finally, the UAW didn't build meaningful connections with local community groups, which made it easier for the opposition to paint the union as an alien outside force. And keep in mind, this was all happening while union staff were flying back and forth to Germany to meet with the company and works council leaders, which made rag file workers feel excluded and kind of suspicious of the collusion between the union and the firm. Put all this together and it's really easy to see why the UAW strategy backfired now. Believe it or not, the UAW turned around after 2014 and pretty much blamed everyone besides itself. So in public statements and internal assessments, it singled out politicians for spreading lies, pointed to the company for reneging on its promises, and also blamed the national anti union lobby for interfering. And as I've already noted, all these factors matter to be sure. But now here's the thing, and this is probably the most controversial part of my argument. I really think the UAW has to shoulder some of the blame because of its own tactical mistakes. When you put together the UAW's accommodationism, its misguided support for the works council, and the more fundamental breakdown of trust and communication that plagued the organizing drive, the combined impact was nothing short of disastrous. By substituting top down institutional alliances for business bottom up worker mobilization, I argue that the UAW set itself up for
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- [24:06]
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Why do we rack for the hottest? Still just so many good brands.
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- [24:48]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And it doesn't sound like, at least in the initial aftermath, there was a lot of learning from those problems. Were there lessons taken from 2014 to 2019?
- [24:59]
Dr. Abe Walker
There were some. And I want to backtrack a little bit here to kind of outline one of the core theoretical frameworks I use in my book. So I rely pretty heavily on a framework that was first promoted by Marshall Gans under the name strategic capacity. So strategic capacity emphasizes the processual and agential dimensions of organizing. And basically there are three, sorry, four first order dimensions. And I'll just explain these briefly. So we have knowledge, motivation, learning, and innovation. Knowledge is more or less a question of what information did the union have at hand. Motivation refers to how committed they were, learning refers to their ability to adjust and change course, while innovation refers to their willingness to try radical new things. Now I should note here that I actually slightly modify Gans original framework by separating out learning and innovation. Without getting too far in the weeds, I'll just note here that the organizational change literature largely supports the idea that learning and innovation are related but distinct phenomena. So learning involves making incremental course corrections based on past mistakes, but innovation is more of a question of breaking free from from established patterns and creating radical new solutions. Now here's the kicker though. Innovation really becomes salient only during focal moments. So focal moments are these major disruptive crises that, according to Gans, are capable of shaking off organizational inertia and opening up the door for deep structural changes. I'm not going to dwell on this too much, because it's probably easier to understand with a visual aid like a chart or a path diagram, as opposed to a podcast. But it's important to note here, at least, that innovation is especially attuned to these focal moments. So just bring us back to where we were in 2019. As it happens. You know, I think to a large extent the the mistakes that the Union made in 2014 were in fact avoidable. The union committed a series of unforced errors that ultimately cost it the election. So referring to my strategic capacity framework, the dimension that I call knowledge depends in part on developing a rich institutional memory that can be accessed on demand. And as it turns out, by 2014, the UAW had quite a bit of experience to draw upon. In fact, by the time it set its sights on Chattanooga, it had run somewhere in the range of 10 different organizing drives at other foreign transplants over the course of 40 years. So as it turned out, of all the obstacles I mentioned a few minutes ago, basically all of them had already been tested and perfected elsewhere. In fact, the anti union tactics the UAW encountered in Chattanooga were almost literally a carbon copy of the union busting playbook it had encountered over the previous 30 years at other transplants from Toyota to Nissan to BMW. Nonetheless, organizers and staffers continued to operate on the mistaken assumption that Volkswagen was a different kind of company, imagining that somehow the company's social democratic values, which honestly were never that strong to begin with, were going to transfer seamlessly to the American South. Well, as it turned out, that was really a fatal error. And this is pretty much comparative industrial relations 101 in nearly every case we know about, European firms that do business in the United States are going to take advantage of our country's weak labor laws to the fullest extent possible. Foreign capital has absolutely no compunction about discarding home country labor standards to exploit deregulated environments abroad. In other words, when a company operates in a country where union busting is the norm, like the United States, that company will bust unions no matter how extensive its commitment to social responsibility or whatever might appear on paper. Now, if the UAW had learned the right lessons from its past failures and other foreign transplants, you know, Nissan, Honda, Mercedes, it might have actually been better prepared and less surprised when Volkswagen started trotting out the exact same tactics it had been facing down for years. What happened instead, unfortunately, was the union made the risky bet, which it turned out was wrong, that Volkswagen would play nice. Then by the time Volkswagen flipped, it was already too late. The union was shell shocked and unable to adapt. And here we get to this other dimension of strategic capacity, or what I call learning. So strategic capacity isn't just about having a good plan. It's also about being able to adapt on the fly as circumstances change. And when the when Volkswagen rather shifted away from its cooperation and shop floor supervisors became hostile, the UAW was driving with its eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. It couldn't steer away when the company suddenly flipped without a backup plan, it was completely defenseless when its institutional alliances fell through. Making matters worse, even after that situation had visibly deteriorated, the union continued trying to cooperate with the company instead of hardening its stance. When Volkswagen inevitably reneged on its promises, such as delaying the card check process or tacitly permitting its American managers to threaten and intimidate union supporters, UAW was left paralyzed and without recourse. So to sum up the events of 2014, no question the odds were stiff. But if the union had a longer institutional memory, or maybe a little more tactical agility, it might have actually broken through in 2014 instead of postponing its victory by yet another 10 years.
- [31:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And did they realize any of this or try to fix any of this going into 2019?
- [31:10]
Dr. Abe Walker
Kind of. I mean, 2014 was a complete disaster. But. But in the aftermath, the UAW didn't just walk away once it was finished licking its wounds and, you know, playing Monday morning quarterback, there was this period of reflection during which the union more or less came to terms with its mistakes and resolved to do better as important. Feeling frustrated by the UAW's top down control, workers started to organize independently. They used an unmoderated Facebook group to to vent and debate amongst themselves. And for its part, the UAW even briefly played around with some alternative organizing forms like micro units and minority unions. But for reasons that aren't really worth getting into, not much came of it anyway. By the time the UAW filed for a second election in 2019, its playbook was almost completely different. So let's break down what changed. UAW seemed to acknowledge that Volkswagen wasn't going to play to play fair and would not be a reliable partner. So the union abandoned the Works Council scheme. It launched a more vigorous adversarial campaign. It also committed significantly more organizing staff and even allocated substantial financial resources to counter the opposition's media saturation. As important, it returned to organizing fundamentals, committing itself to house visits and direct worker to worker contact. So in all these respects, the union seemed to bounce back from 2014, having learned all the right lessons.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
But they lost in 2019. So how much did these lessons help?
- [32:55]
Dr. Abe Walker
They helped to some degree, but they didn't go far enough. So even though the union ran a better campaign at the end of the day, despite learning from many of its 2014 mistakes, it ended up losing that 2019 election by almost the exact same narrow margin. Now, to be fair, this wasn't entirely the UAW's fault. In some ways, the union faced a more difficult organizing climate in 2019. This time around, rather than putting on a false front, the company ran a much more traditional, which is to say harsher, anti union campaign, it dropped the pretense of neutrality entirely to actively campaign against the union. The company also used some legal maneuvers to delay the vote by six weeks, which gave these anti union forces like community groups and politicians even more time to mobilize. At one point, the Governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee, even held a captive audience meeting and workers were forced to attend, where he gave out free Chick Fil a sandwiches while warning workers that unionizing would hurt the state's economic interests. On top of that, the election also suffered from some awkward timing. In weeks before, the company had just announced an $800 million expansion package, which politicians quickly weaponized to imply that a pro union vote would probably jeopardize the plant's future. But once again, even in 2019, I somewhat controversially hold the union at least partially responsible for its own defeat. The UAW basically treated the 2019 campaign as a do over of 2014. Even with more resources committed, its organizational culture hadn't really changed. Staffers still ran a top down campaign. They still actively stifled independent rank and file organizing, and they still failed to build a deeply engaged Democratic workers committee. Making matters worse for the uaw, just as the campaign was peaking, federal investigators revealed that top UAW executives in Detroit had been embezzling funds to finance some some lavish vacations, basically stealing from the union. This decimated the union's moral authority and provided endless ammunition for the opposition. For workers who were already skeptical of the uaw, that scandal was like the ultimate nail in the coffin. Exposed the union's top level staff as little more than petty tyrants and grifters, barely distinguishable from the CEOs they confronted at the bargaining table. So in a nutshell, the odds were tough. Yes, but while the UAW might have learned enough to avoid a humiliating blowout, it still couldn't really innovate. And again, going back to my strategic capacity framework, innovation is the crucial component without which everything else kind of falls flat. The UAW's own decadent culture left it fundamentally outmatched by a heavily resourced and fully mobilized company. So learning can correct superficial tactical errors, but it's kind of like trying to fix a leaky faucet with a band aid. Without a radical disruption of its internal status quo, the UAW remained trapped in recursive loop of failure.
- [36:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That doesn't sound great. And yet something changed between 2019 and 2024. So let's look perhaps at 2023 as a key year.
- [36:33]
Dr. Abe Walker
Yeah, so this is interesting. Listeners should probably understand by now that my book centers mainly on the three elections, right? 2014, 2019 and 2024. And I did that partly because it seemed like a pretty simple and obvious way to tell the story. But of course, the organizing didn't completely stop in between, nor did conditions on the ground stagnate. In fact, in the years between 2019 and 2024, the environment shifted significantly. So in order to understand why 2024 broke so sharply from the failures of the previous decade, I'm actually going to take us back to 2023, which is really the pivot point in this story. And I actually need to give a little bit of background here. So, for after over 70 years, the UAW was run by this tight knit group called the Administration Caucus, or the AC for short. The AC prioritized industrial peace. It stifled internal dissent, and it concentrated power among top officials. It maintained a culture that actively discouraged genuine democracy and tended to see dissent as as a threat to its party line. It maintained something like a centralized, autocratic system of control and operated essentially as a one party state. And although it hasn't really come up yet, I think this organizational inertia really had a lot to do with the Union's failures in 2014 and 2019. Now, I should point out that over the years there were some notable efforts to challenge the AC's hegemony. In the 1960s, there was a group called the Revolutionary Union movement. In the 1980s, there was a rank and file caucus called New Directions. And all these groups made some inroads, but they actually failed to really dislodge the AC's grip on power. So by the time 2019 rolled around, AC was insulated from rank and file agitation and accountable to pretty much no one. From there, it was a short step from sweetheart deals to outright graft. But as I've already mentioned, in 2019 that breaking point finally came, and not a moment too soon. A federal corruption probe exposed widespread embezzlement and the training of contract concessions for corporate payoffs among the union's highest ranking officials. By the time the dust settled, two former presidents had been sent to federal prison and a monitor was appointed to oversee the union's operations under a consent decree. This legitimacy crisis shattered the old guard's aura of invincibility and created an opening for change. So from within that wreckage emerged a dissident rank and file caucus calling itself Unite All Workers for Democracy, or uawd. And I'm going to try not to drop too many acronyms here because I know it's not great for your listeners, but just Remember, uawd, despite its similarity to uaw, refers to the rank and file caucus, not the union itself. It forced a vote. The uawd, that is, forced a vote that dismantled the union's easily influenced delegate system in favor of one member, one vote, direct elections. Sensing an opening, it then mounted a hostile takeover of the union's international executive board that culminated in the election of a figure that people might know about, Shawn Fain, who was a former electrician, a reform candidate who repudiated the business unionism that had defined the ac. Now, I might want to hedge in this point a bit here, especially given how things have developed recently. I'll touch on in a minute, but I argue in the book that the faint administration fostered a more democratic culture that encouraged open debate and tolerated dissent, at least within limits. So where does this all take us? Well, the UAW's institutional rebirth really culminated in the autumn of 2023 with the major standup strike against Detroit's automakers. And this was termed a standup strike because rather than employing traditional pattern bargaining, the new UAW leadership announced unpredictable and unannounced walkouts to maximize economic disruption across geographic boundaries while also preserving its limited strike fund. The union kept management on its toes by calling unannounced strikes with only minutes notice, preventing the companies from stockpiling parts. On top of that, in a major tactical shift, The UAW struck 27 aftermarket parts distribution centers, hitting a highly profitable strategic choke point for the automakers. So that strike, when it was ultimately settled, yielded historic contracts that eliminated wage tiers, secured massive pay increases, provided pathways for temporary workers to become permanent, and won the right to strike over plant closures. More importantly, the strike served as a masterclass in structural power. It fundamentally altered the national discourse surrounding organized labor, demonstrating to non union auto workers across the country that the UAW was no longer a corrupt, stagnant bureaucracy, but a militant force capable of extracting real wealth from multinational corporations.
- [41:59]
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- [42:43]
Dr. Abe Walker
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- [42:43]
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- [43:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a pretty big change. What then did that do in 2024? Was that what made the difference? Or was it a case of learning the lessons from 2014 and 2019? What made the difference a year after what you've just described?
- [43:29]
Dr. Abe Walker
So I think it was mostly the former. And here we we again turn to that theoretical framework strategic capacity that I laid out earlier. So as we saw in 2019, learning alone or incremental adjustments were not really sufficient to save the union. If learning alone was the fix, we might have expected better results in 2019 when I assessed learning as being high. But as I've already stated, learning only goes so far. You might think of an organization that gets stuck in a recursive feedback loop, continually making incremental improvements, but unable to really achieve that escape velocity that might allow it to trigger truly break free. So I determined here that the UAW needed to destroy its old habits to forge a new path forward. It needed what I've referred to earlier as a focal moment. And of course, that came in 2023 the rise of UAWD, the candidacy of Sean Fain, and the standup strike together. That was the UAW's focal moment. The union democracy movement and the strike allowed the UAW to dismantle what I've referred to as deep structures, those ingrained, unquestioned assumptions that had guided its strategy for decades. So by that time the UAW returned to Chattanooga in 2024. Its campaign was almost unrecognizable from the failed strategies of 2014 and 2019. So let's take a look at some of those differences in a little more detail. Probably the biggest difference was that the UAW explicitly connected the Chattanooga drive to the success of its 2023 standup strikes. Domestic automakers had already blazed the path forward, and Volkswagen workers were really eager to follow in their tracks. So rather than foreign automakers setting the floor for Detroit and undercutting Detroit's gains as it had been in the past, Detroit was now setting A new higher aspirational ceiling for foreign automakers. This matters because research shows that workers draw implicit comparisons to concretize what might be achieved with union representation. Sorry, in 2014, the bar was set by German works councils. On the other hand, by 2024, workers no longer had to look across the Atlantic for inspiration, but could point instead to the unionized General Motors plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, just an hour or two up the road from Chattanooga. There was also, I think, a more general shift in the way the union approached these transplants. So rather than slowly and methodically organizing plants one at a time, it announced that it was going to launch these rapid fire organizing drives targeting all 13 non automakers all across the country. In fact, breaking with the conventional wisdom of running covert, under the radar campaigns, UAW maximized momentum from the standup strike and went public immediately. Trading secrecy for speed. Worker engagement was another key change. The union built a massive bottom up volunteer organizing committee of 300 workers, or roughly one for every 14 employees. Volunteer organizing committee included rank and file workers that took real ownership of the drive. Needless to say, this highly public member centered campaign was a marked shift from the backroom deals and works council schemes that had caused so many problems 10 years earlier. Now I should point out here that the union can't take credit for everything. The 2024 victory was also aided by shifts in in the material and demographic conditions within the plant. For example, the workforce had doubled since 2019, bringing in younger workers and more racial diversity. And even some former union members who had been members of unions elsewhere who tended to be much more receptive to organizing. The elimination of the two tier wage system in the national contracts also resonated powerfully with those younger newer hires at Volkswagen who seemed to recognize that the union now possessed the leverage to permanently alter their career trajectory. Seizing the moment, production workers really took the lead, shifting power away from that elite vanguard of skilled machinists who had dominated the 2014 drive. As a result of those demographic shifts and changing cultural norms within the uaw, staff organizers kind of stepped back and allowed rank and file members to dictate strategy. As it turned out, ceding control of the campaign to workers actually changed the campaign's message. For example, because Volkswagen already paid wages above the regional medium, money was not the primary issue for the campaign. Instead, workers rally around quality of life issues, making paid time off policies and sick days and arbitrary management decisions their their flagship demands. As important. Those newly empowered workers didn't easily fall prey to the kinds of company tactics that had succeeded in the past. For example, when Volkswagen attempted to pacify the workforce with a 11% pay raise immediately following the the UAW's contracts in Detroit workers the workers were fooled. They weren't afraid to look the gift for they weren't afraid to look the gift horse squarely in the mouth as the expression goes, understanding that that pay raise was little more than hush money. Now, to be fair, the opposition forces in 2024 were not quite as intense as they had been during the previous two election cycles. Overt union suppression for management and interference from local politicians was noticeably weaker and less effective than in previous cycles. On top of that, the honeymoon effect had by this point thoroughly faded. Volkswagen had now cycled through multiple executives workforce was increasingly disillusioned by the company's broken promises. There was high turnover, and the fallout from the 2015 global diesel emissions scandal still lingered. On top of that, the threat of capital flight and disinvestment, which you might remember had been the opposition's most potent weapon in 2014 and 2019, was almost entirely neutralized by the transition to electric vehicles. Between 2019 and 2024, Volkswagen had actually sunk billions of dollars into retrofitting that Chattanooga plant to produce the new ID4 electric SUV. So by this point, Volkswagen was really tied down by massive fixed capital investments and you can think of it as being anchored to Tennessee. So when state politicians attempted to recycle their threats of plant closure, their warnings really collapsed under basic economic scrutiny. The notion that unionizing was going to cause the plant to close was just no longer credible. So to take us back one final time to our strategic capacity framework, summarize here. The UAW won by abandoning the cautious incremental learning strategies of the past and fully embracing high risk, high return experimental strategies. To put it differently, iterative learning just wasn't enough. UAW could not fix its deep structural decay through learning alone. The union didn't just need to learn, it needed real innovation to win in 2024. Ultimately, the 2024 campaign succeeded because the UAW stopped reliving the trauma of 2014 and 2019, instead offered an aggressive worker led vision for the future. So to sum up here, if you're wondering how this union, which almost looked like a dinosaur as late as 2022, turned around a couple years later and became the poster child for union renewal. My answer is actually a bit unexpected. It might be tempting here to credit Shawn Fain with having the brilliant foresight to lead his organization to victory, but you know, the fact is Fain is actually a complicated figure. And frankly, I don't put a whole lot of stock in his personal qualities or talents. Ultimately, if we were to break down the sequence of events that really allowed the UAW to win in 2024, it started with, with UAWD, with, with that rank and file reform caucus, which set in motion the organization's cultural shift, which led to fame, then led to the standup strike, and eventually led to victory in Chattanooga. So I would insist on crediting that union democracy movement with setting in motion the chain of events that led to the first contract at a foreign automaker in the South.
- [52:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is very helpful to getting us to 2024, which is in many ways where we started the conversation. But of course, the book has been published in 2026, and. And that's when we're having our conversation now. So what might listeners who want to learn all of that history, but also think about the present and future consider or pay attention to regarding the UAW going forward, given what you've told us?
- [52:54]
Dr. Abe Walker
Right. So as I'm sure your listeners are going to realize, one of the challenges with academic books about current events is that they tend to be outdated almost before they go to press, let alone when they're finally released a year later. And in the case of the auto industry, which has seen enormous changes in the last year, that's especially true. So despite all that, I actually think my book holds up remarkably well, with maybe one important exception that I'll get to in a minute. So to sort of put us back in the timeline right after that big win at Volkswagen in The spring of 2024, if Sean Fain's boldest prognoses were to be believed, the UAW was on the verge of parlaying its victory at Volkswagen into a whole wave of union wins across the South. After coming after Volkswagen, UAW was going to target BMW and Toyota and Nissan and Kia. And then after that, it was going to turn to American EV makers like Rivian and Tesla. The goal was to take wages out of competition by negotiating a master contract for the entire automotive sector. Well, suffice to say, that didn't really happen. Barely a month after that victory in Chattanooga, UAW suffered a defeat at the Mercedes Benz plant in Vance, Alabama. Now, this was a tougher fight than Volkswagen. Mercedes ran a far more aggressive and legally dubious union suppression campaign, and had an enormous political machine on its side to boot. But since then, things have only gotten worse. Not only has the UAW failed to organize any more transplants, but it's even had trouble enforcing some of the key contract provisions at big Detroit automakers. And then we get to the question of electric vehicles. As you might recall, I argued a few minutes ago that the Biden administration's support for electric vehicles really improved Volkswagen workers bargaining position by neutralizing the company's relocation threat. I noted that this was important but also highly contingent as it depended entirely on the whim of the incumbent administration. I also caution in my book that even at the height of support for the electric vehicle transition, its impact on worker power was ambiguous. In fact, as early as 2021American auto companies were trying to use the electric vehicle transition to create a second class of workers employed by pseudo subsidiary joint ventures. Well, we're now recording this in February 2026 and frankly things aren't looking great for electric vehicles today. Changing electric vehicle mandates and clean car rules have have dramatically reduced the leverage that workers once had. The position they occupied at the cutting edge of the electric vehicle transition no longer as powerful as it once was. UAW's efforts to organize to include these subsidiary battery plants under its master agreements briefly look kind of promising in 2023, but have since mostly sputtered out. Even back in Chattanooga things have been pretty rough. Volkswagen wouldn't agree to a contract for almost two years and the final agreement, which was just cut a few weeks ago, fell short of expectations. It didn't achieve full parity with Detroit competitors, which of course was the promise that Sean Fain was holding out. Now none of this takes away from the fact that that the 2024 election victory in Chattanooga was legitimately a big deal for those who follow the labor movement closely. There's no question that that 2024 election is going to be remembered as the major win that it was. But when I was sending my book off to press at the end of 2024, I was already cautioning against reading too much into that moment, or for that matter, imagining that it represented anything like a turning point. Well, I can now say that history has unfortunately proven me correct. And I think there's one final point here that maybe merits discussion. Unite All Workers for Democracy uawd, that organization that I identify as the secret sauce behind the union's transformation, it's now effectively dissolved. I say effectively here because the organization actually splintered and there's a minority faction that still lays claim to the name uawd. But it's now a shadow of its former self and the organization, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists in its original form. So while I stand by all the factual content in my book on certain questions of interpretation. I might pull back a little bit if I had the opportunity to, let's say, I don't know, write a second edition with the benefit of 2020 hindsight. In retrospect, I think it's obvious that I was a little bit too optimistic about UAWD's durability. Now, I can say unequivocally here that the disintegration of UAWD is bad news for the UAW's future. It's probably no accident that the fracture of that independent reform movement occurred precisely at the same time as the faint administration began exhibiting some of the very same bureaucratic behaviors it was elected to dismantle. Without internal pressure for accountability, Sean Fain and his acolytes have now moved to consolidate his hold on power. In fact, just over the last few months, he's been accused of purging dissident board members, suppressing internal records. And this is obviously hugely disappointing, but I might actually disagree a bit with those who accuse Sean Fane and company of betrayal. In my view, union democracy can never rely on the benevolent intentions of elected leaders. It depends instead on continued pressure from an independent rank and file force that compels the bureaucracy to perform. So anyway, people might wonder, why exactly did UAWD fall apart? Well, there were a number of reasons, but I think the core problem here was that the Reform Caucus was not able to maintain its independence once its candidate took power. It couldn't really figure out how to balance its anti establishment ethos with the solemn responsibility of governance. That problem, of course, is not unique to uawd. In fact, it's an enduring problem for advocates of union democracy. And the historical record shows that very few rank and file caucuses survive the transition from the streets to the boardroom. But for those that are trying to read the tea leaves and predict the UAW's future, I would tend to pay less attention to what Sean Fain is saying at any given time and focus a little more closely on whether the remnants of of UAWD can reconstitute themselves as an internal force that might ultimately prove capable once again of holding Shawn Fain and company accountable.
- [60:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, we shall certainly have to pay attention to whether that develops or how that develops. What will you be working on in the meantime? Whether or not it's related to what we've been talking about. Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [60:18]
Dr. Abe Walker
Yeah. So I have a few different projects, but what I'll mention here builds directly off a point that I mentioned in passing, but probably could have developed much further in my book, namely the question of supply chains. So, although my book is. Although my book is focused almost entirely on an assembly plant, final assembly is of course, just the last stage in a vast interconnected network of suppliers, all of which rely on a system called Just in Time Production to pull components toward the end stages in the production process. Supply chains like this are really efficient, but they're also taught and brittle, which creates certain vulnerabilities. So as part of my research on supply chains, I've gotten really interested in battery plants, which are key nodes on which the entire automotive sector depends. They can easily become a bottleneck or a choke point that triggers cascading effects across the entire production network. And consequently, workers at these battery plants occupy choke points and hold disproportionate structural power, which presents a massive organizing opportunity for the uaw. Now, to its credit, the UAW has been organizing some of these plants, but it's been an uphill battle, and frankly, I'm not always sure it's been a real strategic priority. Now, as it seems to as seems to be a recurring pattern here. Things have gotten a little more complicated since I started this new project, sometimes something like a year ago. We've seen that battery plants are highly susceptible to trade war escalations, to say nothing of geopolitical unpredictability, not to mention immigration enforcement against foreign workers. But anyway, your listeners can expect something in print on battery plants and supply chains in the not too distant future.
- [62:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly does sound like a crucial piece of the economy, so best of luck with that project. And of course, while you're working on it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Reassembling the UAW Insurgency, Contention, and the Struggle for Unionism in the American south, published by Temple University Press in 2026. Abe, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [62:21]
Dr. Abe Walker
It's been great. Thank.
- [62:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
You.