This Thursday, July 30 at 6 p.m. Eastern, I will take part in a debate of the candidates running for president of the UAW. I am asking every one of you to watch and invite your coworkers to join you.
This is the one opportunity in the whole election when you can hear every candidate side by side and judge for yourself where each of us actually stands on the questions that will affect your lives and working conditions.
What I will say at the debate
The problem with the UAW is not just a few bad apples. It is the bureaucracy as a whole.
The UAW holds $1.25 billion in assets, hundreds of millions of it invested in stocks and bonds. It employs nearly 1,000 people, roughly 470 of them taking six-figure salaries paid for out of our dues. Shawn Fain is paid more than $270,000 a year.
That is where our dues money goes, and it has only brought worse conditions year after year. Forced overtime and speedup. Tiers that the apparatus swore it would abolish and did not. Contracts rammed through against our objections at Nexteer, at American Axle, and across the parts sector. Coworkers killed on the job—Ronald Adams Sr., Antonio Gaston, Gregory Knopf—with no answers for their families.
The apparatus cannot be reformed. It has to be abolished, and the $1.25 billion it sits on has to be put under the direct control of the rank and file. This will not be accomplished by electing a better set of officials. It can only be accomplished by workers ourselves, through a network of rank-and-file committees that we elect and control.
That is the program I am taking into the debate:
- Transferring decision-making power out of Solidarity House and into the hands of workers on the shop floor, through rank-and-file committees that are elected, answerable to the membership, subject to recall, and built to last, regardless of the outcome of this election
- Ending the regime of concessions: abolish the tiers, restore what was surrendered over 45 years, and put line speed, staffing and safety under workers’ control
- International solidarity against nationalism and trade war, and the defense of our immigrant brothers and sisters against ICE
Hear how the establishment candidates respond
Shawn Fain was on that stage with me in 2022. When I called for abolishing the bureaucracy, his answer was that he did not know how anyone could eliminate it. Of course he didn’t. He is a creature of the bureaucracy and always has been.
Ballots go out next month
In 2022, in the first direct election in this union’s history, fewer than 1 in 10 members cast a ballot. That suited the apparatus just fine. Most members never even heard there was an election; thousands never received a ballot at all.
There is nothing democratic about an election that members never hear about. Ballots go out in the mail next month. Watch on Thursday, weigh my platform against what the rest of them are offering, and mark your ballot knowing exactly what you are voting for.
How to watch
Livestream this Thursday, July 30 at 6 p.m. Eastern: youtube.com/watch?v=2wB2UEEboYI
What you can do
Many of our fellow UAW members still do not know there is an election, let alone that the candidates for president are debating this week. That is not an accident, and it is the first thing you can change.
Share this statement with your local and all your coworkers. Put a screen up in the break room, get people together after your shift, and invite your co-workers to watch with you.
Then do what will outlast any election. Start a rank-and-file committee where you work, and get in touch with my campaign so we can link you up with workers doing the same thing in other plants and other industries.
Nobody is going to hand us power. We have to take it ourselves, and that is what this campaign is about.
