I am writing to you because when the UAW Constitutional Convention opens in Detroit on June 15, you will be asked to take part in the nominations for executive office. I am asking you to nominate me, Will Lehman, for UAW President, and to advance the program of rank-and-file power.
I work at Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania. My aim is not to win a comfortable position within the apparatus. The aim of this campaign is not to swap one official for another. It is to abolish the bureaucracy and place this union in the hands of the workers themselves.
One member, one vote only has any meaning if workers can vote for a candidate not chosen by the apparatus. As a delegate, you have the power to take a stand. I am asking you to use that power and give workers the democratic right to vote for a candidate who speaks for the rank-and-file.
We confront an entrenched apparatus
The members of the UAW confront an entrenched apparatus that works against our interests at every turn. Consider what is taking place as the Convention opens. On June 1, 1,000 workers at American Axle in Three Rivers, Michigan walked off the job. Starting wages are at poverty level and bills are climbing as the criminal war on Iran drives inflation higher. President Shawn Fain called that strike because the pressure from the rank and file had become impossible to contain.
But the real role of the apparatus is on display 200 miles north in Saginaw, where 1,700 workers at Nexteer have rejected three UAW-backed tentative agreements and voted by 86 percent to authorize a strike. The apparatus has ordered workers to remain on the line and has now presented a fourth TA, which it is seeking to ram through. At Dana, contracts for 4,000 workers across four states expired last Friday. The apparatus extended it, put off strike action and announced a deal that workers have not seen. At Harvard, the UAW shut down a 41-day strike of graduate students without a contract or any meaningful concession from Harvard’s administration.
The apparatus of the UAW is absolutely opposed to a struggle to win what workers need. Fain’s “stand-up strike” in 2023 was used to keep the majority of UAW members at the Big Three on the job while a handful of plants struck, producing agreements wiped out within months by inflation, layoffs, and broken promises.
The federal monitor’s reports under Fain have documented the same pattern of corruption, retaliation, and abuse of power that produced the criminal convictions of the last decade. The faces at the top have changed; the apparatus has not.
The UAW holds $1.1 billion in assets. Of the roughly 1,000 people the International employs, nearly 470 take home over $100,000 a year. Fain is paid $270,000. Secretary-Treasurer Margaret Mock makes $247,000. The three vice presidents average $235,000. The nine regional directors average $220,000. Below them sit 500 to 600 “International Representatives,” the enforcement arm of Solidarity House, paid $140,000 to $160,000 a year to function as industrial police, enforcing the decisions of the top leadership and suppressing rank-and-file dissent.
That is what the apparatus is defending: not our jobs, not our safety, not our wages, but its own income stream.
The situation we face
Look at the conditions our members face. Inflation is accelerating, driven now by the criminal war against Iran, which is part of an escalating global war, including the genocide in Gaza and the preparations for war against China. Workers across this union are locked into multi-year contracts that erode their living standards and strip them of rights.
At the parts plants that feed the Big Three assembly lines, younger workers are starting at wages that put them at or below the poverty line for a family. Tiers have been renamed, restructured, and disguised.
Health care workers are being driven out of the profession by chronic understaffing, mandatory overtime, and wages that have not kept pace with the cost of housing. Academic workers are paid stipends that do not cover rent in their own university towns. Educators face overcrowded classrooms, eroded benefits, and contracts that the International signed off on without a fight.
And the retirees have been sold out again and again. The defined-benefit pensions that should have been their security have been frozen, hollowed out by inflation, and denied to a generation of newer workers entirely.
More than a year has passed since brother Ronald Adams Sr. was crushed to death at the Stellantis Dundee Engine Plant because management cut corners on safety to rush the reopening of the plant. The conditions that killed him have not been fixed, and no one has been held accountable.
What the apparatus wants from this convention
The apparatus wants this convention to consecrate a slate it has already chosen. It wants nominations made with no real accounting for the last four years and no opening for a candidate who actually represents the rank and file.
The 2022 election—the first direct election in our union’s history, forced on the bureaucracy by a federal corruption probe and a membership referendum—was held behind the backs of the membership. Turnout was 9 percent, the lowest of any national union election in this country. The apparatus worked to limit turnout, with most members not even knowing that an election was being held.
The nearly 5,000 votes my campaign received under these conditions expressed a growing demand for the transfer of power to the rank and file. Changes in the rules for this election are designed specifically to make it more difficult for rank-and-file workers such as myself to run for office.
The program
I am running on the following program:
Abolish the bureaucracy. Place the union’s $1.1 billion in assets under the democratic control of the rank and file, organized through committees on the shop floor and in the workplaces. This money must be used to organize a real struggle of the entire membership to win what we need.
End corporate collaboration. Replace 45 years of concessions with a strategy of class struggle. Restore wages, pensions, and retiree health care. Adopt a zero-layoff policy. Reassert the demand for a 30-hour week with no loss of pay. Establish rank-and-file control over line speed, staffing, and safety.
Build international solidarity. Reject the chauvinism and trade-war politics of the bureaucracy. Unite American, Canadian, and Mexican autoworkers against the transnational corporations. Defend immigrant workers—our class brothers and sisters—against ICE.
Defend democratic rights. Mobilize the industrial power of this union against the police-state attacks on workers and against the drive toward war.
This program will not be carried out by any single individual sitting in Solidarity House. It can only be developed through a powerful movement of the rank-and-file to take control and restore power where it belongs, on the shop floor. This is what my campaign is about.
A call to you
I am asking you to nominate me on the floor of the convention. I am asking you to talk with the other delegates in your local and your region about supporting that nomination. And I am asking you to contact me directly so that we can talk about the situation in your local, the conditions in your workplace, and how delegates committed to the rank and file can act together in Detroit between June 15 and June 19.
You can reach the campaign at willforuawpresident.org or by email at willforuawpresident@gmail.com. I will speak with any delegate who wants to talk.
