Latest / The Real News Podcast / UAW Becomes First Major Union to Divest from Israel

Transcript

UAW Becomes First Major Union to Divest from Israel · The Real News Podcast

0:00
Speaker 1: Ah, I Got work.
0:05
Speaker 2: Oh.
0:07
Speaker 3: Welcome every one to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs,
0:11
Speaker 3: dreams and struggles of the working class today. Working People
0:15
Speaker 3: is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network
0:18
Speaker 3: and has brought to you in partnership within These Times
0:21
Speaker 3: magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced
0:24
Speaker 3: by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of
0:28
Speaker 3: listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez, and we've
0:31
Speaker 3: got a really incredible panel of folks today with the
0:34
Speaker 3: United Auto Workers, and we're going to get a worker's
0:37
Speaker 3: eye view of the huge changes that are happening and
0:40
Speaker 3: at been happening within the mighty UAW. And those changes
0:44
Speaker 3: were on display earlier this month at the UAW Constitutional
0:48
Speaker 3: Convention in Detroit, as Dan DiMaggio and Jane Slaughter report
0:52
Speaker 3: at Labor Notes, quote, delegates at the United Auto Workers
0:55
Speaker 3: Constitutional Convention affirmed the aggressive direction the union has taken
1:00
Speaker 3: under President Sean Fain, who took office in twenty twenty
1:03
Speaker 3: three and immediately set the four hundred thousand member union
1:07
Speaker 3: on a new path, illustrated in bold campaigns like the
1:10
Speaker 3: stand Up strike against the Big Three automakers. The thousand
1:14
Speaker 3: delegates who assembled in Detroit voted to increase the money
1:17
Speaker 3: designated for new organizing and to maintain dues at two
1:21
Speaker 3: point five hours per month in order to bulk up
1:24
Speaker 3: the strike fund. The union is looking ahead to a
1:27
Speaker 3: projected rematch with the Big Three on MAYDA twenty twenty eight,
1:31
Speaker 3: when contracts covering one hundred and fifty thousand auto workers expire.
1:35
Speaker 3: The UAW has called on other unions to align their
1:38
Speaker 3: fights then, too, to build more leverage on employers and
1:42
Speaker 3: politicians and win big demands end quote. Now this is all,
1:46
Speaker 3: of course, really important for UAW members and for the
1:50
Speaker 3: labor movement writ large, and we are going to talk
1:53
Speaker 3: about that with our guest today. But we're also going
1:55
Speaker 3: to focus on another really important development that came out
1:59
Speaker 3: of the uad w's thirty ninth constitutional convention. As Sharen
2:03
Speaker 3: akram Bachhar reports a truthout quote, the United Auto Workers,
2:07
Speaker 3: a union with some four hundred thousand active members across
2:11
Speaker 3: the US, has voted to divest its estimated four hundred
2:15
Speaker 3: thousand dollars from Israel bonds. The devestment vote makes the
2:19
Speaker 3: UAW the first major national union to vote to divest
2:22
Speaker 3: from Israel. The resolution states that the billionaire class that
2:26
Speaker 3: profits from war funnels public money into militarism instead of healthcare, housing,
2:32
Speaker 3: and education working people need. It cites the nearly three
2:36
Speaker 3: year long genocide in Gaza and the call by the
2:39
Speaker 3: Palestinian trade union movement for workers internationally to act in
2:43
Speaker 3: solidarity as among the reasons for its resolution to divest
2:47
Speaker 3: from Israel bonds, which are bonds issued directly by Israel
2:51
Speaker 3: and function as loans to the Israeli government. The vote
2:55
Speaker 3: was organized by Unite All Workers for Democracy or UAWD,
2:59
Speaker 3: a left wing caucus within the UAW and uaw Labor
3:03
Speaker 3: for Palestine, which is part of a broader Labor for
3:06
Speaker 3: Palestine coalition.
3:07
Speaker 4: End quote.
3:08
Speaker 3: To talk about this historic move by the uaw and
3:11
Speaker 3: what it means for uaw members, for the labor movement,
3:15
Speaker 3: and for the Palestine solidarity movement. I am really grateful
3:18
Speaker 3: to be joined on the show by four guests today.
3:21
Speaker 3: Andrew Bergman is a worker at General Motors in Detroit.
3:25
Speaker 3: He's a member of UAW Local twenty two and co
3:28
Speaker 3: chair of UAWD. Novruz Baum is a paralegal in New York,
3:32
Speaker 3: a member of uaw Local twenty three, twenty five and
3:35
Speaker 3: a member of the UAWD Steering Committee. Margie Thornton is
3:39
Speaker 3: an attorney in Colorado, a member of uaw Local twenty
3:43
Speaker 3: three twenty and a member of the UAWD Steering Committee.
3:46
Speaker 3: And Mike Davis is an auto parts worker in Ohio,
3:50
Speaker 3: a member of UAW Local twenty twenty one and a
3:53
Speaker 3: member of UAWD. Andrew Navrus, Margie, Mike, thank you all
3:59
Speaker 3: so much for joining me today. It's incredible that I
4:01
Speaker 3: have you all on this panel right now. I want
4:04
Speaker 3: to start our discussion with this historic vote by the
4:07
Speaker 3: uaw and its membership to divest from Israel. So I
4:11
Speaker 3: wanted to ask you guys, like as union members and
4:14
Speaker 3: as working people in America, why is this an important
4:17
Speaker 3: issue for you and what does the passing of this
4:20
Speaker 3: resolution mean to you?
4:22
Speaker 5: I would say a few things.
4:23
Speaker 6: First of all, there's currently an ongoing genocide in Palestine
4:26
Speaker 6: and workers every day are being killed and murdered by Israel.
4:31
Speaker 6: Israel is also wreaking havoc and destruction and entire region,
4:37
Speaker 6: bombing Lebanon, bombing Iran, bombing other countries and murdering civilians.
4:41
Speaker 6: And they're doing this with the active assistance of the
4:45
Speaker 6: US and financial assistance from up until very recently institutions
4:51
Speaker 6: like the UAW, And so just as people of conscience,
4:54
Speaker 6: it was really important for us to not be complicit
4:56
Speaker 6: in this ongoing genocide. Secondly, as members of the working
5:00
Speaker 6: class who want better living conditions, money, if it goes
5:05
Speaker 6: to Israel to bomb people, bomb children in other countries,
5:09
Speaker 6: is money that is not going to healthcare, to housing,
5:13
Speaker 6: to food to support us, And it's just totally unconscionable
5:17
Speaker 6: to us. The resources, the wealth that we produce every
5:22
Speaker 6: day as workers is being appropriated to fund misery and
5:26
Speaker 6: death instead of being used to improve our own living conditions.
5:30
Speaker 6: And lastly, I would just say that as members of
5:33
Speaker 6: the working class, as rank and file members of the UAW,
5:36
Speaker 6: it's really important that we have a say in how
5:38
Speaker 6: these resources are being used, and that when we're having
5:42
Speaker 6: that say, it's driven by our values and what actually
5:45
Speaker 6: benefits us. And so we're not content with just having
5:49
Speaker 6: some bureaucrats decide where all this money that we've paid
5:53
Speaker 6: in dues is invested, wherever they think is makes sense
5:58
Speaker 6: for their politics or the highest return. We believe that
6:01
Speaker 6: as workers, as members of the uhw, we deserve a
6:05
Speaker 6: say in where this money goes.
6:08
Speaker 4: It's important because we've just spent the three last three
6:11
Speaker 4: years watching a genocide be live stream and it's sickening.
6:15
Speaker 4: And as Navrus said, our dues hours are funding this
6:21
Speaker 4: and it shouldn't be happening at all. But as far
6:24
Speaker 4: as what does it mean going forward, it means we're
6:27
Speaker 4: on the right track, but we also have a lot
6:30
Speaker 4: more work to do. I don't know if you read
6:32
Speaker 4: our other resolution, but it had a lot more language
6:35
Speaker 4: in there that called for work stoppages, and it also
6:39
Speaker 4: called for us not to endorse politicians who take money
6:43
Speaker 4: from these type of people.
6:45
Speaker 7: So I would say that there's a mantra in the
6:48
Speaker 7: labor movement that the Jews are sacred, the members twos
6:51
Speaker 7: are sacred, And we've seen across the globe really the
6:55
Speaker 7: working class take to the streets and protest and scream
6:58
Speaker 7: at the top of our lungs basically about where our
7:01
Speaker 7: tax dollars are going.
7:02
Speaker 8: That doesn't seem to have any impact.
7:03
Speaker 7: But you know, those sacred dues, those dollars that we
7:07
Speaker 7: can decide. We can't have a voice if we organize,
7:10
Speaker 7: you know, the members we can't decide where those go.
7:13
Speaker 8: So being able to withhold those.
7:14
Speaker 7: Well, we can't withhold our tax dollars, is I mean,
7:18
Speaker 7: it's the least we can do in response to the
7:20
Speaker 7: call for solidarity.
7:21
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think of just all these conversations I've had
7:25
Speaker 9: over the last year. We were we were working all
7:27
Speaker 9: this mandatory overtime in twenty twenty four in my in
7:30
Speaker 9: my plant, and so there we were, and we were
7:32
Speaker 9: just in the plant together, twelve hour shifts, six days
7:34
Speaker 9: a week, so we spend a lot.
7:36
Speaker 2: Of time together.
7:37
Speaker 9: People who don't usually want to talk about politics. We're
7:39
Speaker 9: talking about politics. We were talking about everything with our
7:41
Speaker 9: coworkers out there, and Palestine came up a lot, and
7:45
Speaker 9: you know, I was kind of in my plan. You know,
7:47
Speaker 9: everyone know that that guy's the troublemaker. That guy wants
7:50
Speaker 9: to talk about politics. But people would come up to
7:52
Speaker 9: me and be like, what do you think about what's
7:54
Speaker 9: going on? This was a live question. This is a
7:56
Speaker 9: plan Detroit. It's a lot of folks, it's a majority, uh,
8:01
Speaker 9: you know, black folks who who have definitely I think
8:05
Speaker 9: in the working class in the United States.
8:08
Speaker 2: I'm not you know, it's not it's not just on
8:10
Speaker 2: the base of race.
8:11
Speaker 9: A lot of people have really been subject to oppression,
8:13
Speaker 9: and when they watched the news, they, I think and
8:18
Speaker 9: myself connect with the Palestinians who are being oppressed and
8:23
Speaker 9: are being seducated. And so it was a regular conversation,
8:27
Speaker 9: why is our country doing this?
8:29
Speaker 2: Why is our union actually supporting us?
8:31
Speaker 9: And it wasn't you know, we wouldn't get into the
8:33
Speaker 9: weeds on Israel bonds, right, It was more just like,
8:35
Speaker 9: why aren't we being clear? And a lot of people,
8:37
Speaker 9: I think, we're very excited when Sean van took a
8:40
Speaker 9: rhetorical position on this question, but then to sort of
8:43
Speaker 9: see that not followed up with any action, and that's
8:46
Speaker 9: something you AWD has talked about a lot that was
8:48
Speaker 9: that was disappointing. So I think a lot of folks
8:50
Speaker 9: are really excited about this, even tho who are not
8:52
Speaker 9: particularly political. And then the other thing that comes to
8:55
Speaker 9: mind is just after this happened, I was I was
8:57
Speaker 9: in Dearborn and we were near Local six hundred. There's
9:00
Speaker 9: a big mosque right down down the road and a
9:03
Speaker 9: lot of the folks in that mosque are uaw members, right,
9:05
Speaker 9: So we were talking at you because we're doing some
9:07
Speaker 9: interviews for our social media just to connect with folks
9:10
Speaker 9: in that community about what this done to them.
9:13
Speaker 2: And we have these really beautiful, you.
9:15
Speaker 9: Know, kind of passionate conversations with folks who are just
9:18
Speaker 9: like what does it mean to be here in this
9:20
Speaker 9: country and kind of be surrounded by people and then
9:23
Speaker 9: see your union, which you've kind of been unsure about
9:26
Speaker 9: or hasn't really taken the.
9:27
Speaker 2: Right position, but you knew what it used to.
9:29
Speaker 9: It stood up for Nelson Mandela, it stood up against
9:31
Speaker 9: apartheid to take that position.
9:33
Speaker 2: Now, I think it just has this.
9:34
Speaker 9: Like emotional moral character for myself and a lot of
9:37
Speaker 9: other people, separate from, you know, the important left politics.
9:41
Speaker 9: It's just a meaningful thing at an emotional level.
9:45
Speaker 6: Something we really hold secret in the labor movement is
9:47
Speaker 6: that we respect each other's picket lines and we don't
9:50
Speaker 6: undermine other workers. And there's been and this is a
9:53
Speaker 6: part of that, because there's been a call from the
9:55
Speaker 6: Palestinian trade union movement to respect bds, to not do
10:02
Speaker 6: financial investments or other business with Israel, and unfortunately the
10:06
Speaker 6: UAW has been crossing that picket line for decades and
10:10
Speaker 6: so with this vote, we're really proud to finally be
10:14
Speaker 6: respecting the BDS call, in that respect, respecting the call
10:17
Speaker 6: from the Palestinian trade union movement, so that we can
10:21
Speaker 6: stand in solidarity as American, Canadian and Puerto Rican workers
10:25
Speaker 6: here in the UAW with members of the working class
10:28
Speaker 6: and workers in unions in Palestine.
10:30
Speaker 2: You know, there's this very well known at least on
10:32
Speaker 2: the left, Wildcat strike that Forward workers, especially air of
10:36
Speaker 2: American Ford workers led in nineteen seventy three to push
10:40
Speaker 2: for divestment from the UAW and Israel bumps.
10:43
Speaker 9: That is over fifty years ago, right, And they succeeded
10:47
Speaker 9: in small part because they got Local six hundred. So
10:49
Speaker 9: when I was there in Dearborn, you know, just yesterday
10:53
Speaker 9: down down the road, you know, like a five minute
10:56
Speaker 9: walk from Local six hundred, and I was asking people
10:59
Speaker 9: what that resident was. I mean, it was it was
11:00
Speaker 9: beautiful because in my mind, people were very excited about it.
11:02
Speaker 9: But on the other hand, not very many people knew
11:04
Speaker 9: about that wildcat, right, And so I think it's a
11:07
Speaker 9: testament both to how important that thread can be through history,
11:12
Speaker 9: but then also how a little known it can become
11:14
Speaker 9: and how it you know, kind of they kept the
11:16
Speaker 9: light on and it got passed on, but through a
11:20
Speaker 9: small group of people who kept fighting. And the culmination
11:23
Speaker 9: that we had last week was not just you know,
11:26
Speaker 9: the four of Us, or even just UAWD or even
11:28
Speaker 9: just you w Labor for Palestine, which hopefully we'll talk about,
11:32
Speaker 9: but it was this movement of thousands and thousands of
11:34
Speaker 9: people across the decades.
11:35
Speaker 3: Well, let's talk about that right now, actually, because I
11:38
Speaker 3: really want to impress upon listeners that you know, this
11:44
Speaker 3: was such a hard won victory that has taken decades,
11:49
Speaker 3: you know, to accomplish, you know, right, Like I mean,
11:52
Speaker 3: because we're talking about from the public consciousness around Israel Palestine,
11:59
Speaker 3: which changange dramatically in this country over the past three
12:03
Speaker 3: and a half years. We're talking about the changes within
12:06
Speaker 3: the UAW itself. Right, this is a very different union
12:10
Speaker 3: than the uaw you know that I knew when I
12:13
Speaker 3: started this show eight years ago, right, And so this
12:16
Speaker 3: this and of course there's been you know, just a
12:19
Speaker 3: global movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people, a movement
12:25
Speaker 3: to stop the genocide, to stop you know, the occupation,
12:29
Speaker 3: and to stop US support of.
12:31
Speaker 2: All of it.
12:32
Speaker 3: So I wanted to kind of like ask y'all if
12:34
Speaker 3: you could talk more about that path that led to
12:39
Speaker 3: this moment, and you know the obstacles that were overcome,
12:43
Speaker 3: the growth that had to happen in us individuals and
12:47
Speaker 3: for your union.
12:48
Speaker 6: I can speak to my local twenty three twenty five,
12:52
Speaker 6: and I hope that others can also speak to their
12:54
Speaker 6: locals by in Local twenty.
12:56
Speaker 5: Three twenty five. We've definitely had.
12:59
Speaker 6: A content of members who've been fighting for a strong
13:04
Speaker 6: internationalist stance, for standing with members of the working class
13:07
Speaker 6: around the world for.
13:08
Speaker 5: Many, many decades.
13:09
Speaker 6: The strength and size of that contingent has luctuated over
13:12
Speaker 6: the years. I will say that I think post October seventh,
13:15
Speaker 6: twenty twenty three, when Israel really escalated its genocide, a
13:19
Speaker 6: new coalition and new majority around Palsenane solidarity was formed
13:23
Speaker 6: in my local, and at first it was really hard fought,
13:27
Speaker 6: and there was a lot of really incredible organizing that happened,
13:31
Speaker 6: telling people why, yes, it's difficult to take a stance
13:35
Speaker 6: on this issue.
13:36
Speaker 5: Yes you're going to get a lot of shit from it.
13:38
Speaker 6: A lot of people are going to yell at you,
13:40
Speaker 6: you might get doxed. Multiple people in my union have
13:43
Speaker 6: been the targets of online harassment campaign Multiple people have
13:47
Speaker 6: been fired by their employers in my local coming out
13:50
Speaker 6: of those online harassment campaigns, And yet why despite of
13:54
Speaker 6: all of that, it's important for us to take an
13:55
Speaker 6: issue on Palestine anyways. As of now, I think that
13:59
Speaker 6: we've a lot of organizing and we've gotten pretty used
14:02
Speaker 6: to taking pro Palestine positions in my local. So when
14:05
Speaker 6: it came time to endorse this amendment and send it
14:08
Speaker 6: to the International UAW Convention, there was a strong majority
14:12
Speaker 6: in my local for it. There was still some arguments
14:15
Speaker 6: about whether this is the right time, whether this is
14:19
Speaker 6: really the right issue to bring to the international convention,
14:23
Speaker 6: whether other locals are ready for it, And I hope
14:26
Speaker 6: that folks from other locals can speak to that, because
14:28
Speaker 6: obviously they were. But it's definitely been a long struggle
14:33
Speaker 6: in my local, and I think that it's been a
14:35
Speaker 6: microcosm of what's been happening in our country and in
14:38
Speaker 6: the world more broadly around Palestinian solidarity. And it's absolutely
14:42
Speaker 6: in the environment of pro Palestine organizing in New York
14:45
Speaker 6: City where my local is, where a lot of people
14:49
Speaker 6: are members of other Palestine solidarity organizations and have learned
14:53
Speaker 6: organizing and learned about the importance of solidarity with Palestinians
14:57
Speaker 6: through other organizations in the broader environment, and also brought
15:01
Speaker 6: those politics into our local And lastly, I would just
15:04
Speaker 6: say that watching the salitarity and actions of the global
15:09
Speaker 6: working class for Palestine, which honestly a lot of it
15:12
Speaker 6: has gone a lot further than just divesting from Israel bonds,
15:16
Speaker 6: has been an incredible and perpetual inspiration to us and
15:21
Speaker 6: also always driven home the urgency for us to also
15:24
Speaker 6: take the action that we can.
15:25
Speaker 5: With our union.
15:27
Speaker 6: And I do think that Mike actually brought an amendment
15:31
Speaker 6: that would have gone farther and done some more of
15:32
Speaker 6: the things that workers and other unions and other countries
15:35
Speaker 6: are doing. So I don't know, Mike, if you'd be
15:37
Speaker 6: downe and talk a little bit about that.
15:39
Speaker 4: Sure, my local actually did not pass this resolution. I
15:43
Speaker 4: wish they had. We passed the Ice resolution, but not
15:46
Speaker 4: this one. But the resolution that I read onto the
15:52
Speaker 4: floor did contain a lot heavier language, and I'm hoping
15:56
Speaker 4: that when we go back to the constitutional Convention of
15:58
Speaker 4: four years that we can try it again. I mean,
16:00
Speaker 4: the language in there about not endorsing politicians who support Israel.
16:05
Speaker 4: That's a no brainer to me, and I really wish
16:08
Speaker 4: that we could have gotten that in there for sure,
16:10
Speaker 4: But that's definitely got to be brought back. The clauses
16:12
Speaker 4: in there about being able to strike over genocide, a
16:16
Speaker 4: lot of that was met with talk about legality this
16:20
Speaker 4: and legality that, and how we couldn't do it because
16:23
Speaker 4: it's not lawful. But as I made a point before,
16:25
Speaker 4: we're the international UAW. We're not the United States of
16:30
Speaker 4: America UAW. So when we're setting policy, we need to
16:34
Speaker 4: be worried about our own moral compass. We don't need
16:37
Speaker 4: to be worried about the moral compass of this country
16:40
Speaker 4: or that country. Because at the end of the day,
16:42
Speaker 4: we're operating in multiple countries. We're in Canada, we're in
16:45
Speaker 4: the US, and we're in Puerto Rico. So if let's
16:49
Speaker 4: say we organize people in Bosnia and all of a sudden,
16:54
Speaker 4: the Bosnian government decided they were just going to start
16:56
Speaker 4: nuking their neighbor, you know, and all the workers said, no,
17:00
Speaker 4: we're we're we're not going to support that. The UAW
17:03
Speaker 4: as a whole, because we don't feel that connected to Bosnia,
17:06
Speaker 4: we would say absolutely you guys strike them and we're
17:10
Speaker 4: going to send you money. Right. But when we when
17:12
Speaker 4: we sit here and we talk about it in our
17:14
Speaker 4: own country, all of a sudden, this fear comes in
17:17
Speaker 4: of you know, what's big Daddy Uncle Sam going to
17:19
Speaker 4: do to us? But and I think that that was
17:23
Speaker 4: a real hang up on this convention, was that you
17:26
Speaker 4: have people that are in a position of power within
17:29
Speaker 4: our union that really, really want badly to be taken
17:32
Speaker 4: seriously by the people in charge. And it started. This
17:37
Speaker 4: war didn't start with Trump. The start war started under
17:40
Speaker 4: Biden and Sean Fame. I really feel like part of
17:44
Speaker 4: the reason that he didn't kick back as hard as
17:46
Speaker 4: he should have on this was because he wanted to
17:48
Speaker 4: maintain that relationship with him.
17:51
Speaker 3: Mike, could you say just a little bit more about
17:53
Speaker 3: like that process of you know, raising these important issues,
17:58
Speaker 3: you know, from your local and raising them up to
18:01
Speaker 3: the rest of the union. Like what does that look
18:03
Speaker 3: like for listeners who maybe don't have any idea of
18:05
Speaker 3: how that works.
18:06
Speaker 4: Yeah. Sure, So after the locals submit all of the resolutions,
18:11
Speaker 4: and I do believe we submitted hundreds of resolutions in there,
18:15
Speaker 4: the committee, who is chosen by the International Staff they
18:19
Speaker 4: go through it and they decide which ones they're going
18:21
Speaker 4: to be presented to us, And unfortunately, at this year's convention,
18:25
Speaker 4: only five of them that were actually written by local
18:29
Speaker 4: unions were presented to us. So if out of the
18:32
Speaker 4: other the rest of them, if any of them wanted
18:34
Speaker 4: a chance to be heard, they had to be called
18:36
Speaker 4: out of committee. And calling stuff out of committee is hard.
18:39
Speaker 4: There's a thousand delegates. We had to get one hundred
18:41
Speaker 4: and forty four delegates to vote for it to come out.
18:44
Speaker 4: At the very beginning, we tried to have the rules
18:47
Speaker 4: change to lower that threshold, to bring it down from
18:50
Speaker 4: fifteen percent down to five percent, and we weren't able
18:54
Speaker 4: to accomplish that. So then going forward we had to
18:58
Speaker 4: get that one hundred and forty four votes. And with
19:01
Speaker 4: this one, we almost knew it wasn't going to happen,
19:04
Speaker 4: you know that, just the feeling in the room, the
19:07
Speaker 4: fact that no language, no language even made it in
19:10
Speaker 4: the book regarding Palestine at all, And that's actually helped
19:13
Speaker 4: us out because if they had even mentioned it once
19:16
Speaker 4: in there, we wouldn't have been able to bring our resolution.
19:19
Speaker 4: But because they were just dead silent on it, we
19:22
Speaker 4: were so thank you for ignoring us, I guess. But yeah,
19:27
Speaker 4: so once we once we called for it to come
19:29
Speaker 4: out of convention and we actually got to let people
19:33
Speaker 4: hear us. I think that if more of us would
19:36
Speaker 4: have gotten to talk, I think that we probably would
19:39
Speaker 4: have gotten a little closer to our goal. We only
19:42
Speaker 4: got sixty nine out of one hundred and forty four
19:44
Speaker 4: that we needed to get, but you know, at least
19:47
Speaker 4: people were listening to us. They really did everything they
19:50
Speaker 4: could to make sure that this wasn't going to be
19:54
Speaker 4: as democratic as we would like it to be. It
19:57
Speaker 4: really had the feeling like it was four years ago
20:00
Speaker 4: and we sat in there and we had like the
20:02
Speaker 4: entire Administrative Caucus working against us, like forty UAWD members,
20:08
Speaker 4: you know. And this time we went back in there
20:10
Speaker 4: and there was even fewer of us. I think there
20:12
Speaker 4: was like twenty five of US delegates that were in
20:14
Speaker 4: there UAWD. And then we had still the same amount
20:18
Speaker 4: of hatred coming to us, but it was from two
20:20
Speaker 4: different groups. We had the old Guard with their like
20:24
Speaker 4: three hundred or so voting block, and then we had
20:27
Speaker 4: Sean Fame's new Administrative Caucus with what four or five
20:30
Speaker 4: hundred people maybe, so you had two groups of people
20:34
Speaker 4: that were really shitting on us at this one instead
20:36
Speaker 4: of one. That was the big difference. But what really hurt,
20:39
Speaker 4: though was when they shut down being able to pull
20:42
Speaker 4: things out of committee. So rule number nine allows us
20:46
Speaker 4: that right to pull things out of committee. Halfway through
20:49
Speaker 4: the second day is when they all decided, the old
20:52
Speaker 4: Guard and the new Administrative Caucus decided to work together
20:56
Speaker 4: to shut down Descent, and we got more of our
21:00
Speaker 4: stuff pull they we did get to debate ours, So
21:04
Speaker 4: we're not I don't I'm not that upset that we
21:06
Speaker 4: didn't get our stuff out, but we had There was
21:08
Speaker 4: retiree language in there, and I think that really did
21:11
Speaker 4: upset me that we had retirees that had from from
21:15
Speaker 4: their locals. They sent stuff in International had taken all
21:19
Speaker 4: of their stuff and just watered it down to almost
21:23
Speaker 4: nothing and put it in there. And then they came
21:26
Speaker 4: up with this rule that or they the rule is,
21:31
Speaker 4: if it's in there, you can't debate on it until
21:33
Speaker 4: it's been brought by the committee, voted down by the committee.
21:37
Speaker 4: And then once we voted down by the committee, then
21:39
Speaker 4: we can bring the other stuff that the locals had presented,
21:43
Speaker 4: but by suspending Rule nine before they read the retiree language,
21:48
Speaker 4: and they shut down the retiree's voice altogether, and they
21:50
Speaker 4: weren't able to bring any of their stuff to the floor.
21:53
Speaker 4: But that's the kind of stuff that we dealt with
21:55
Speaker 4: four years ago. That's kind of stuff that we dealt
21:57
Speaker 4: with it this one. And that really was was, like
22:00
Speaker 4: I said, instead of one big group working against us,
22:03
Speaker 4: we had two large groups working against us, and the
22:06
Speaker 4: retirees apparently so.
22:08
Speaker 7: And Mike says, we were able to pull everything that
22:09
Speaker 7: we wanted to pull out. We had three priority amendments
22:12
Speaker 7: that we wanted to make sure that we at least
22:14
Speaker 7: got to speak about on the floor. We had an
22:17
Speaker 7: amendment that spoke about fighting layoffs using work sharing.
22:21
Speaker 8: That's the first one that we tried to pull out.
22:24
Speaker 7: We did not have enough delegates stand to pull out
22:26
Speaker 7: out of committee, but we did get to read it
22:27
Speaker 7: aloud and a lot of people were interested in the language.
22:32
Speaker 7: So that was, you know, kind of the first loss,
22:36
Speaker 7: but we learned from it right. And then Mike when
22:38
Speaker 7: he tried to pull out our broader pace, our devestment amendment,
22:42
Speaker 7: and we weren't able to pull that one out, and
22:44
Speaker 7: then we had Shelley from Local twenty three twenty five
22:49
Speaker 7: as well. She pulled out our fighting ice amendment, which
22:54
Speaker 7: we were able to pull out as well, and we
22:56
Speaker 7: did get to debate that one, and I think it
22:59
Speaker 7: was interesting seeing the reaction to that one because it
23:03
Speaker 7: was probably we thought more controversial, But when people were
23:09
Speaker 7: debating the amendment, there was not a single person that
23:13
Speaker 7: stood up and disagreed with the premise of you know,
23:16
Speaker 7: fighting ice or you know, I don't know if we
23:18
Speaker 7: can cuss on this show, but fuck ice. Basically we
23:21
Speaker 7: had people saying, you know, fuck ice, but is this legal?
23:25
Speaker 8: You know, it went back to.
23:26
Speaker 7: The legality and you know, I mean I made a
23:29
Speaker 7: point of information like who is deciding for the for
23:33
Speaker 7: this union our policies, It the lawyers or the membership.
23:35
Speaker 7: I was ruled out of order, but you know, people
23:38
Speaker 7: were people were able to hear.
23:39
Speaker 8: That I don't know.
23:40
Speaker 7: And then we were finally able to bring out the
23:43
Speaker 7: divestment amendment with the you know, more concise language where
23:47
Speaker 7: we were only divesting, and.
23:50
Speaker 8: Then we were able to pull that one out. So yes,
23:52
Speaker 8: as Michael was.
23:52
Speaker 7: Saying, it was like really a tragedy that democracy was
23:55
Speaker 7: basically democratically voted to be closed down during the convention,
24:01
Speaker 7: but we were able to pull out a lot of
24:02
Speaker 7: things from our class struggle program that we brought to
24:04
Speaker 7: the convention.
24:05
Speaker 8: The Ice amendment that we.
24:06
Speaker 7: Brought basically would ask that we not endorse politicians who
24:12
Speaker 7: were supporting ICE, and I believe this was also this
24:16
Speaker 7: was modeled on something that came from Local twenty three
24:18
Speaker 7: to twenty five. So basically it would allow a local
24:20
Speaker 7: to call an all membership meeting if there's ICE activity
24:23
Speaker 7: in the area, and then that would allow them to
24:26
Speaker 7: if the membership decided to go on strike, if they're
24:30
Speaker 7: you know, to combat Ice. Andrews, you can probably speak
24:33
Speaker 7: more to this than I can, because it was your
24:35
Speaker 7: local that passed that.
24:36
Speaker 5: Sure, in my local, we passed a.
24:41
Speaker 6: Structure where we can take a vote as a membership
24:43
Speaker 6: if we want to strike against ICE, if ICE is
24:46
Speaker 6: attacking our community. We are really inspired by the events
24:49
Speaker 6: in Minneapolis, seeing workers there who were trying to organize
24:53
Speaker 6: for a general strike in their city in a response
24:55
Speaker 6: to the ICE attacks there, and we wanted to be
24:59
Speaker 6: ready in New York City if ICE did a similar
25:01
Speaker 6: escalation murdering people in the street wantonly like we saw Minneapolis,
25:07
Speaker 6: if that happened to us. And so we passed a
25:10
Speaker 6: resolution in my local where if there was an ICE escalation,
25:13
Speaker 6: we would immediately have a general membership meeting where we
25:16
Speaker 6: would decide what actions we want to take, for example,
25:19
Speaker 6: striking or joining a general strike movement. And as Margie
25:23
Speaker 6: and Mike said, we tried to bring this to the
25:26
Speaker 6: Constitutional Convention. In our broader resolution to fight ICE, which
25:31
Speaker 6: also included endorsement and criteria and some other good things,
25:35
Speaker 6: people were really supportive. A lot of people shared really
25:37
Speaker 6: moving stories about personal experiences with ICE, about their coworkers'
25:43
Speaker 6: personal experience with ICE, their family's experiences with ICE, which
25:46
Speaker 6: were all uniformly negative. Many, including us, made the argument
25:50
Speaker 6: that in the face of this crisis, we have to
25:53
Speaker 6: be using our labor power, and specifically our power to
25:55
Speaker 6: withholder labor, in order to put an end to these attacks,
26:00
Speaker 6: to defend ourselves, to defend the working class from these
26:02
Speaker 6: attacks from this federal agency. And it was really popular
26:06
Speaker 6: with a large segment of delegates. As Mike mentioned, there's
26:09
Speaker 6: this really procedural process where you have to get a
26:14
Speaker 6: bunch of delegates. The UAW leadership sets to the agenda. They
26:18
Speaker 6: excluded all of our amendments from the agenda. We had
26:21
Speaker 6: to organize to pull our amendments out of committee. We
26:25
Speaker 6: got enough delegates to stand up so that our ICE
26:28
Speaker 6: amendment was put onto the floor, which would have supported
26:32
Speaker 6: workers in democratic deciding if they want to strike against ice,
26:35
Speaker 6: even if that's illegal as per our contracts or per
26:42
Speaker 6: the US labor law. And so this would have been
26:44
Speaker 6: really momentous, I think, as a first as far as
26:46
Speaker 6: I know in the labor movement on.
26:49
Speaker 5: A national scale.
26:50
Speaker 6: And actually more delegates stood for the our Ice amendment
26:54
Speaker 6: that did for our divestment amendment, which just goes to
26:57
Speaker 6: show how popular it was. And we pulled them both
27:00
Speaker 6: out of committee on the second day. The debate on
27:02
Speaker 6: both were on the fourth day. And so what happened
27:05
Speaker 6: between the second day and the fourth day when divestment
27:08
Speaker 6: passed but Ice failed, is there was a lot of
27:10
Speaker 6: organizing against our Ice amendment. I think specifically people UAW
27:14
Speaker 6: leadership was very fearful of the legal repercussions, repercussions from
27:19
Speaker 6: the state, from the bosses if we took this sort
27:22
Speaker 6: of Milton stance against ICE, and so they had their
27:26
Speaker 6: caucus meeting before the convention, and they were organizing delegates
27:31
Speaker 6: hard against our ICE resolution. As Marchie said, everyone got
27:34
Speaker 6: up on the mic and said fuck Ice.
27:37
Speaker 5: Of course, but there's nothing we can do about it.
27:41
Speaker 6: And so that's why I think it was so popular
27:44
Speaker 6: on the first day, even more popular e than divestment.
27:47
Speaker 5: But then after they heard from.
27:49
Speaker 6: Their leaders and said no, no, no, you need to
27:51
Speaker 6: be responsible. We can't actually do any we shouldn't actually
27:55
Speaker 6: be taking a strong stance here.
27:57
Speaker 5: Then it was eventually voted down.
28:00
Speaker 6: While divestment, I think the leadership saw that as safer,
28:05
Speaker 6: as safer stamps than illegal strikes against ICE, and so
28:10
Speaker 6: different factions didn't organize against that, some faction still did,
28:13
Speaker 6: and that we were able to pass it.
28:15
Speaker 9: Just to quickly add on the ICE debate, I mean,
28:17
Speaker 9: for me it was actually I mean, divestment is an
28:19
Speaker 9: incredible win, but the debate around ICE was actually I
28:24
Speaker 9: think the highlight of the convention for me.
28:26
Speaker 2: It was not just speakers from UAWD and some of our.
28:29
Speaker 9: Allies on the left, but there was a particularly incredible
28:33
Speaker 9: speech from someone who I don't know personally but I
28:35
Speaker 9: know where he's from. He he's not from the sort
28:38
Speaker 9: of old administration caucus, but sort of a cousin movement
28:42
Speaker 9: that has a I think a very top down perspective.
28:44
Speaker 2: On how Union should run.
28:45
Speaker 9: But he gave this incredible speech about how if we're
28:48
Speaker 9: not ready to take illegal strikes in response to the
28:52
Speaker 9: repression of escalation advice, then when are we? And I
28:55
Speaker 9: think it just foke to the whole room to know
28:57
Speaker 9: that a guy like that, in addition to our force
29:00
Speaker 9: on the left, we're making this stand. And you could tell,
29:03
Speaker 9: like you could tell from the applause, you could tell
29:05
Speaker 9: from the reaction that.
29:06
Speaker 2: People really bought in.
29:07
Speaker 9: And then for that to then go to a vote
29:10
Speaker 9: that we estimate it was a voice vote, but probably
29:12
Speaker 9: twenty five four seventy five against. I think it's the
29:15
Speaker 9: kind of thing you know, you've heard from everyone else
29:18
Speaker 9: on the on the call today about these kind of
29:21
Speaker 9: bureaucratic machinations and these meetings and these kind of vote whipping.
29:25
Speaker 9: I think people were sitting in their seat going, shit,
29:28
Speaker 9: this is right, and I'm not allowed to vote yes
29:30
Speaker 9: for it. And I think when you have that experience
29:33
Speaker 9: and you move, I think what we did was we
29:34
Speaker 9: moved the politics and sort of the morality of the
29:37
Speaker 9: convention floor. Most people there, I mean Mike spoke to this.
29:40
Speaker 9: Most people there are local level bureaucrats. They want jobs
29:43
Speaker 9: on staff, right, most people that are not rank and
29:45
Speaker 9: file members. It's not like a meeting or a shop
29:48
Speaker 9: floor discussion with your coworkers. This is people who think
29:50
Speaker 9: that they're going to be on staff. So they're being
29:52
Speaker 9: told if you don't do this, then you don't have
29:54
Speaker 9: that shop But when you tell people that, and you
29:57
Speaker 9: tell people they can't vote their conscience, I think it
29:59
Speaker 9: changes their minds. So I actually think that that debate
30:02
Speaker 9: was just a few hours before the divestment debate. I
30:05
Speaker 9: don't think we win the divestment resolution by by less
30:08
Speaker 9: than forty votes. If we don't have that debate about ice,
30:12
Speaker 9: that shifts I think the whole sort of compass and
30:15
Speaker 9: political orientation of the convention. So I just want to
30:19
Speaker 9: really give you give you all a sense of like
30:22
Speaker 9: what our strategy was, because this actually wasn't an accident.
30:25
Speaker 2: I mean, we did not predict all of this.
30:26
Speaker 9: We thought we were going to do worse, right, we
30:28
Speaker 9: didn't know we were gonna get anything out of committee.
30:29
Speaker 9: So I want to be honest that we didn't think
30:31
Speaker 9: we were going to win divestment, but we did have
30:33
Speaker 9: a strategy going in, and I think everything we've been describing,
30:36
Speaker 9: I actually think shows that our strategy made sense, which
30:39
Speaker 9: was that we weren't going to come with very narrow reforms.
30:42
Speaker 9: That's something that UAWD tried four years ago, and that's
30:44
Speaker 9: something that another faction that might describe tried this time,
30:49
Speaker 9: kind of more procedural reforms. We said we were going
30:51
Speaker 9: to come with class strump of politics, and that comes out.
30:54
Speaker 2: Of a year ago.
30:55
Speaker 9: As many listeners may know, there was a split n UAWD.
30:58
Speaker 9: There was a group that was more aligned with FAME
31:01
Speaker 9: that tried to kill you AWD actually, which was which
31:04
Speaker 9: was a shame because it created a lot of you know, acrimony.
31:08
Speaker 9: Those of us, maybe be about seventy five percent of
31:11
Speaker 9: the active members of UWT said, you know what, that
31:13
Speaker 9: that wasn't legitimate. They didn't win the vote, they broke
31:16
Speaker 9: all of our own rules. We're going to keep moving forward.
31:18
Speaker 9: But what we recognized was that democracy wasn't enough. Our
31:22
Speaker 9: name is you not all workers for democracy. But we
31:24
Speaker 9: realized after we sort of saw our own elected leaders
31:27
Speaker 9: get pulled in by the old guard, not necessarily because
31:30
Speaker 9: they wanted to, but because they thought that was the
31:31
Speaker 9: only path. We realized that we have to stand for
31:34
Speaker 9: more the democracy. We have to actually stand for class struggle,
31:37
Speaker 9: and that a democratic union will be one where we
31:40
Speaker 9: have actual fight for worker control and we're militant, and
31:43
Speaker 9: then we can win democracy as a piece of that,
31:45
Speaker 9: and that can be a whole thing that you know,
31:47
Speaker 9: maybe Max, you'll you'll ask us about some point, but
31:49
Speaker 9: I don't want to go on to the weeds of that.
31:51
Speaker 9: I'm saying that because I don't want to say that.
31:52
Speaker 9: When we when we came time for us to plan
31:54
Speaker 9: our convention strategy, we.
31:56
Speaker 2: Said, well, what are we going to do.
31:57
Speaker 9: We're going to fight over like the definition of you know,
32:01
Speaker 9: a particular you know category, or how a particular vote is.
32:05
Speaker 9: We're not against a more democratic union.
32:07
Speaker 2: We're very much for it. But we thought that if
32:09
Speaker 2: we went narrow, people wouldn't understand where we were coming from.
32:13
Speaker 9: So we wanted to show not only that we were
32:14
Speaker 9: class struggle unionists, but that we were also.
32:17
Speaker 2: Good trade unionists.
32:18
Speaker 9: And so every one of the the resolutions that Margie mentioned,
32:23
Speaker 9: fighting layoffs, fighting ice and then fighting for Palestinian liberation.
32:28
Speaker 9: They all mentioned strikes and it's not an accident. They
32:32
Speaker 9: all talk about how we build capacity. They also don't
32:34
Speaker 9: say go on strike, because that's silly. We know that
32:37
Speaker 9: many of our coworkers are not necessarily like ready to strike,
32:41
Speaker 9: But our orientation in UAWD is that our coworkers are
32:44
Speaker 9: also not apathetic.
32:45
Speaker 2: They give a shit.
32:46
Speaker 9: It's just that you don't necessarily feel the protection or
32:49
Speaker 9: the sort of capacity, or how you don't feel your
32:52
Speaker 9: union has your back. But my experience on the shop
32:55
Speaker 9: floor when we're working mandatory overtime or when we're going
32:57
Speaker 9: to last lots of people were pissed off and ready
32:59
Speaker 9: to fight. They just didn't have the organization or language
33:03
Speaker 9: to be ready to do it. And I think that
33:04
Speaker 9: differentiates us from maybe other folks in the uaw even
33:09
Speaker 9: that we have agreement with, like Fain and his allies,
33:12
Speaker 9: who want to build a fighting union, But I think
33:14
Speaker 9: think it has to come from the top down because
33:16
Speaker 9: they don't see the level of possibility within the sort
33:20
Speaker 9: of membership and we do. We still think we have
33:22
Speaker 9: to build it. We only it's happening next year. We
33:25
Speaker 9: know it's not necessarily soon. But we think that if
33:27
Speaker 9: we give people tools and capacity, our rank and file
33:31
Speaker 9: coworkers actually will build it.
33:32
Speaker 2: And so we said, let's go with.
33:36
Speaker 9: Real provisions, not just words, not just symbols, but actions
33:39
Speaker 9: that would either create new meetings or give resources.
33:43
Speaker 2: Our bigger resolution that Mike mentioned about.
33:47
Speaker 9: Palestine would have given weapons manufacturing workers the ability to strike,
33:53
Speaker 9: or they would be given them protection, financial backing.
33:56
Speaker 2: If they took a strike to not send weapons to Israel.
33:59
Speaker 2: That would that would either be illegal or certainly an
34:01
Speaker 2: unprotected strike.
34:02
Speaker 9: We knew that, we own that. We're not trying to say, oh, no,
34:04
Speaker 9: it's legal, let's play a game. No, we know that
34:06
Speaker 9: the only way that kind of militant action happens is
34:09
Speaker 9: if people feel ready, they feel backed, they feel that
34:12
Speaker 9: if they're retaliated against, they'll have their salary paid until
34:15
Speaker 9: they get a new job.
34:16
Speaker 2: That's a huge financial commitment.
34:18
Speaker 9: But if we put that finances behind our politics, we
34:22
Speaker 9: think that builds capacity. And so that was the same
34:24
Speaker 9: with the ICE resolution that it would have enabled these
34:26
Speaker 9: meetings that Niver's talked about, which everyone said, oh, there's
34:29
Speaker 9: illegal to have those meetings. We said no, and the
34:31
Speaker 9: same with our fighting layoffs resolution. You can't just go
34:34
Speaker 9: on a strike and response to a layoff, But if
34:37
Speaker 9: you want to actually win things like work sharing provisions,
34:40
Speaker 9: that's where you can come up with these mid contracts,
34:43
Speaker 9: strike paradigms over things like health and safety, which are protected,
34:46
Speaker 9: but you have to be strategic about orienting people to
34:49
Speaker 9: take that kind of action. So this was kind of
34:52
Speaker 9: our orientation that class struggle could actually bring not just
34:57
Speaker 9: like you know, a vibe or not just like a
34:59
Speaker 9: left flank that everyone would like to give the finger
35:01
Speaker 9: and vote down, but actually move the conscience even of
35:05
Speaker 9: these bureaucrats in the orientation of building and fighting. And
35:08
Speaker 9: we actually suspected that we wouldn't win anything, but we said,
35:12
Speaker 9: if we can go in there with our small delegation
35:14
Speaker 9: and even get fifty seventy five people to start thinking
35:18
Speaker 9: the same way as us, but then more importantly, not
35:21
Speaker 9: worry about the convention, focus on building at shop floors,
35:25
Speaker 9: because that's our real orientation, that we want to build
35:27
Speaker 9: shop floor movements at locals.
35:29
Speaker 2: Then this can be an anchor for that.
35:31
Speaker 9: And you know, I'm curious if whatever help thinks, but
35:33
Speaker 9: I think I think that actually even though we didn't
35:36
Speaker 9: set out to the wind investment if we had not
35:38
Speaker 9: had that political orientation, the smaller but still very important
35:42
Speaker 9: symbolic when that wouldn't.
35:44
Speaker 2: Have been possible without that more political orientation.
35:47
Speaker 3: Well, I could talk to you guys for hours, but
35:49
Speaker 3: I know I don't have too much longer with you,
35:52
Speaker 3: and I want to make use of the time that
35:54
Speaker 3: we've got, So before we wrap up, I wanted to
35:58
Speaker 3: just sort of zoom out a bit and talk about out,
36:00
Speaker 3: you know, within the context of everything that y'all just
36:03
Speaker 3: said and the U a w D sort of vision
36:07
Speaker 3: of class struggle unionism, where is your sense of where
36:13
Speaker 3: the U a W is as a union coming out
36:16
Speaker 3: of this convention, and where is U a w D
36:21
Speaker 3: within that we just read.
36:23
Speaker 9: This analysis of the same administration. And I think for
36:27
Speaker 9: many of us, you know, Fame did represent a move
36:30
Speaker 9: towards class struggle, especially around his in his in his term,
36:34
Speaker 9: and is really one of the more militant figures in
36:36
Speaker 9: the U a W. So it's not like we see
36:38
Speaker 9: him as you know, our core enemy or something like that.
36:41
Speaker 9: But I think we have some really really significant critiques
36:44
Speaker 9: and it comes up in many of the things that
36:46
Speaker 9: we've heard from the Fan administration actually the good, the
36:49
Speaker 9: good rhetoric, but unfortunately what we see is not really
36:53
Speaker 9: having been invested in it. We also don't think it
36:56
Speaker 9: was some sort of accident. We think that you know,
36:59
Speaker 9: this old guard that that everyone else here I think
37:01
Speaker 9: spoke about at one moment, really went ahead and reeled
37:04
Speaker 9: in after after Fan was elected. You know, it's dangerous
37:08
Speaker 9: if you want to sit there in Solidarity House, that
37:10
Speaker 9: the AW headquarters and just kind of kick your feet
37:13
Speaker 9: up and you want to make sure your job continues.
37:16
Speaker 9: A militant union is actually kind of risky. That's when maybe,
37:19
Speaker 9: like like Mike was saying, the federal government gets involved.
37:21
Speaker 2: Right, there are these risks that come up from that.
37:24
Speaker 9: So you know what we see as a tendency for
37:26
Speaker 9: these kind of bureaucratic forces to rein in anyone who's
37:29
Speaker 9: more militant. And we think Fan kind of had an
37:32
Speaker 9: opportunity to decide, am I gonna am I gonna go
37:35
Speaker 9: around them? But then they might go to war with him,
37:37
Speaker 9: And we sort of laid out. They started fighting, they
37:39
Speaker 9: started jabbing, they started taking out as.
37:41
Speaker 2: People undermining his campaigns.
37:43
Speaker 9: So it's like, are you gonna go to war with
37:45
Speaker 9: the bureaucracy or are you going to make peace with them?
37:47
Speaker 9: But going to war it wouldn't meant that he and
37:50
Speaker 9: the sort of leaders could have invested in a new
37:53
Speaker 9: layer of rank and file leaders. So just to be quick,
37:56
Speaker 9: a couple of those places are some of the things
37:57
Speaker 9: we've forgot organizing the South. There's a sad reality right now.
38:01
Speaker 9: They've pulled out of most of the Southern organizing and
38:04
Speaker 9: we have UAWD members who are in plants in Alabama
38:08
Speaker 9: who's seen it. They can't get their staff person, you know,
38:11
Speaker 9: on the phone really anymore, even though the folks that
38:13
Speaker 9: they liked's not of the staff were bad, but they've
38:16
Speaker 9: been redeployed elsewhere.
38:18
Speaker 2: So what does this tell us, Well, there.
38:20
Speaker 9: Was this notion that, you know, you send some staff
38:22
Speaker 9: down and quickly kind of use momentum organizing to win
38:24
Speaker 9: some drives. There was one win at Volkswagen, but then
38:28
Speaker 9: there's another loss in Mercedes. Our review is this is
38:30
Speaker 9: gonna take years, probably, And I'd be curious what mike'
38:33
Speaker 9: think because it's a similar thing in independent parts like
38:37
Speaker 9: these are hard drives sometimes, especially when they're in the South.
38:40
Speaker 9: Years and years of building up leaders that takes money,
38:43
Speaker 9: that takes time, that takes creating things like educational programs.
38:47
Speaker 9: You know, going to like a night school for months.
38:48
Speaker 9: It's not like a quick week long training or like
38:50
Speaker 9: a two hour thing. Right, Like, we're talking about serious
38:53
Speaker 9: leadership development. But when you invest in that, then your
38:56
Speaker 9: buddies in the bureaucracy probably say no, no, no, that money's
38:59
Speaker 9: not going there.
38:59
Speaker 2: It's supposed to.
39:00
Speaker 7: Go to me.
39:01
Speaker 9: So these are the kinds of thing. The other one
39:02
Speaker 9: I think that people are familiar with is that the
39:04
Speaker 9: twenty twenty eight general strike.
39:06
Speaker 2: Which was supposed to be this big thing.
39:08
Speaker 9: Now they don't even say the word general strike anymore.
39:11
Speaker 9: But uawd's orientation is, well, you're never going to put
39:14
Speaker 9: a date on a calendar for a general strike anyway.
39:16
Speaker 9: General strikes happen when the working class is pissed and
39:21
Speaker 9: feels like they need to shut things down and that's
39:23
Speaker 9: their only choice. But you can build capacity for it.
39:26
Speaker 2: So how do you do that?
39:26
Speaker 9: Well, you show up to locals, you deliver toolkits, You
39:29
Speaker 9: tell rank and foul members, don't worry about what your
39:31
Speaker 9: local leader says.
39:32
Speaker 2: I'm gonna support you if you want to go.
39:34
Speaker 9: On a strike to end mandatory over time or to
39:37
Speaker 9: take action at your workplace.
39:39
Speaker 2: But again that's someone like Fame risking his neck.
39:42
Speaker 9: So our orientation is actually right now, the UAW bureaucracy
39:47
Speaker 9: is not really our focus. This constitutional Convention was actually
39:49
Speaker 9: kind of the most we've done. Most of our work
39:52
Speaker 9: has gone into building local chapters, like Navruz talked about,
39:55
Speaker 9: that are actually fighting on the shop floor over workplace issues,
40:00
Speaker 9: over overtime, even over Palestine. Palestine is a workplace that
40:02
Speaker 9: she had been censored there at many of the legal
40:05
Speaker 9: services workplaces. But it's not that we're uninterested in the bureaucracy.
40:09
Speaker 9: We think it's important. We just see it as so
40:11
Speaker 9: captured right now that what we need is big, sort
40:15
Speaker 9: of established local movements, and then our new problem of
40:19
Speaker 9: leaders that can actually transform the UAW into a class
40:21
Speaker 9: struggle union can come from that.
40:23
Speaker 7: And I'll just say, like I do think there is
40:25
Speaker 7: a parallel between what happened at the convention and what
40:28
Speaker 7: is maybe happening in the rank and file, because at
40:31
Speaker 7: the beginning of the convention, you could tell everybody was
40:33
Speaker 7: looking to the front of the room to see what
40:35
Speaker 7: they should.
40:36
Speaker 8: Be doing and how they should vote. But by the
40:38
Speaker 8: end of the convention, people were doing what we had
40:40
Speaker 8: been doing the.
40:41
Speaker 7: Whole time, and I was looking at each other and seeing,
40:44
Speaker 7: like you know, we were looking at the rank and
40:46
Speaker 7: file and seeing what people were thinking, how people were moving.
40:49
Speaker 7: And I think people stopped by the end of the convention,
40:51
Speaker 7: not everybody, but enough people, you know, if they were
40:55
Speaker 7: voting their conscious they were looking at the rank and
40:56
Speaker 7: file and stop looking at leadership, you know.
40:59
Speaker 8: To to basically make the decisions for them.
41:02
Speaker 7: And so hopefully that ripples out word if we can
41:05
Speaker 7: continue organizing with the rank and file.
41:08
Speaker 4: I feel like it was very telling and showing of
41:11
Speaker 4: what we're going to be continuing to deal with is
41:13
Speaker 4: what we have been dealing with. Like I said, they
41:16
Speaker 4: they had their admin Caucus meeting, they decided they were
41:20
Speaker 4: interested in our class struggles, and they decided they were
41:23
Speaker 4: going to vote against it. They may not be throwing
41:27
Speaker 4: their members out of the caucus when they vote against them,
41:30
Speaker 4: So their caucus may be a little more democratic than
41:34
Speaker 4: the original administrative caucus, but they're still clicked up and
41:38
Speaker 4: they're still battling to keep power. You've got the old
41:43
Speaker 4: guard fight in the new guard. The elections and the
41:45
Speaker 4: slates they've chosen show that Sean Fain's got the most
41:49
Speaker 4: interesting slate I've ever seen. When you're you're the reformist,
41:54
Speaker 4: you're the militant one, but you're running on a ticket
41:57
Speaker 4: with Brandon Campbell, Laura Dickerson and they, grain doesn't make
42:01
Speaker 4: much sense to me. So I think UAWD right now
42:04
Speaker 4: we're in a really good place. I think that we were.
42:07
Speaker 4: We only have twenty five Dell gets there this time,
42:09
Speaker 4: but you know, if we can move it up to
42:11
Speaker 4: one hundred next time and eventually one day, maybe we'll
42:14
Speaker 4: get on the same level as the Old Guard and
42:16
Speaker 4: the new Administrative Caucus. As far as like the way
42:20
Speaker 4: that the uaw is going to go going forward, I
42:22
Speaker 4: think it's going to be a lot of the same old,
42:26
Speaker 4: same old, you know. I think Sean Fain really wants
42:29
Speaker 4: to impress the establishment. He really wants to be a
42:34
Speaker 4: part of the neoliberal front. I don't think that he
42:40
Speaker 4: really is as militant as what he says he is.
42:43
Speaker 4: If he was, then we would have had general strike language,
42:47
Speaker 4: actual general strike language put in there. When he's talking
42:50
Speaker 4: about taking out the Big Three. On May Day of
42:53
Speaker 4: twenty eight. I don't think he's really realizing how devastating
42:57
Speaker 4: that's going to be for little guys like me. And
43:00
Speaker 4: I plant my contracts up in June of twenty eight,
43:04
Speaker 4: and I supply all these big three shops. So when
43:07
Speaker 4: they go out a month before my contracts up, what
43:10
Speaker 4: kind of bargaining power does that leave me with?
43:13
Speaker 2: You know?
43:13
Speaker 4: But we're kind of used to that in the IPS world,
43:19
Speaker 4: we do. We feel like the Mastard children of the UAW.
43:23
Speaker 4: Sometimes there's one hundred thousand of us. We're one of
43:26
Speaker 4: the biggest blocks of people in it, but we are
43:30
Speaker 4: the most underrepresented group that there is. And right now
43:36
Speaker 4: with one hundred thousand of US, and in the United States,
43:38
Speaker 4: there's nine hundred thousand unorganized IPS workers and you don't
43:43
Speaker 4: see any movement on that front at all. I think
43:46
Speaker 4: that's a lot of the disappointment that I've had in
43:47
Speaker 4: my region is that we had a reformist candidate, Dave Green,
43:52
Speaker 4: who came on ran as an independent, and he boasted
43:55
Speaker 4: about how he had a master's in organizing. So you'd
43:58
Speaker 4: think Region two B would just be booming right now
44:01
Speaker 4: with organizing and we're really not. You know, my local
44:04
Speaker 4: we've had a couple of organizing drives ourselves, and we've
44:08
Speaker 4: reached out and gotten some help from the region, but
44:10
Speaker 4: not a lot. And the drives fall apart so quickly.
44:14
Speaker 4: As soon as the employee gets found out that he's organizing,
44:17
Speaker 4: they get fired, whether it's for the organizing or something
44:20
Speaker 4: else they found. We're in Ohio. It's an at will state.
44:23
Speaker 4: You just got to sneeze funny and they can shit
44:25
Speaker 4: cany so we really do that. Fostery, Ohio is where
44:29
Speaker 4: I'm from. At one point we had over five thousand
44:32
Speaker 4: UAW jobs, not just union jobs, but UAW jobs. We
44:38
Speaker 4: were booming economy in the eighties, and then all that
44:42
Speaker 4: went away, and today Fostery has zero UAW jobs. We've
44:48
Speaker 4: got some steel workers and we've got some farm workers,
44:51
Speaker 4: but as far as the UAW, we only have retire
44:54
Speaker 4: rev shops. So all those facilities, though, didn't go away,
44:58
Speaker 4: they're all sitting here. They've been bought by other employers.
45:01
Speaker 4: They're creating parts in them, and for some reason, we're
45:06
Speaker 4: not going after them. And they talk a good game
45:09
Speaker 4: about building union density, but when you've got small communities
45:13
Speaker 4: like this that are right for the picking, they don't
45:15
Speaker 4: They don't go anywhere near. So I'd really like to
45:18
Speaker 4: see that change. We my local voted against the expansion
45:22
Speaker 4: of the strike fund because we even know we're never
45:26
Speaker 4: going to see it. We're we're not going to get
45:28
Speaker 4: strike pay, We're going to be laid off. And so
45:32
Speaker 4: to go back to my membership and tell them, yeah, guys,
45:35
Speaker 4: I voted up the misery strike pay. You know they
45:38
Speaker 4: would be livid with me. So I didn't do that.
45:41
Speaker 4: But I really do hope that now that they do
45:43
Speaker 4: have this powerful war chest, that they go after some
45:47
Speaker 4: of these ips places that are some of the like
45:50
Speaker 4: they're the worst offenders when it comes to the employers
45:54
Speaker 4: they hire people, they pay them the worst wages, they
45:58
Speaker 4: give them no benefits, there's zero safety in their facilities,
46:02
Speaker 4: and then when they get hurt, they get called on
46:04
Speaker 4: the cell phone on the way to the hospital and shit,
46:06
Speaker 4: can't you know. So those are the places we really
46:10
Speaker 4: need to be going after. These these large tribes at
46:13
Speaker 4: Volkswagen and all that. They're necessary, yes, but they cost
46:17
Speaker 4: millions and millions of dollars and a lot of times
46:21
Speaker 4: they're not successful. But we really need to come up
46:23
Speaker 4: with a game plan to target the small shops and
46:26
Speaker 4: help guys out in IPS because they try to say
46:29
Speaker 4: they can't. At the uaw's IPS conference last year, the
46:36
Speaker 4: theme was you can't roll without us, but I'm sorry.
46:40
Speaker 4: When you've got nine hundred thousand unorganized IPS workers in
46:44
Speaker 4: the sector, they absolutely can roll without us. They don't
46:47
Speaker 4: need us for anything, and we get treated like that.
46:51
Speaker 4: That's why we're the low was paid. That's why we're
46:54
Speaker 4: lowest benefits. That's why we don't get pensions, because they
46:58
Speaker 4: can push us around and if they decide we've gotten
47:00
Speaker 4: too much in one facility or another, they just shut
47:03
Speaker 4: it down and move the jobs one city over.
47:06
Speaker 2: You know.
47:06
Speaker 9: So what Mike is saying, I think summarizes our view
47:10
Speaker 9: that fame, I think is sort of the progressive face
47:14
Speaker 9: of the administration Caucus, the old administration caucus. It is
47:18
Speaker 9: not that he hasn't pushed for more militancy. It's not
47:20
Speaker 9: that his rhetoric hasn't been better. There has been more organizing,
47:23
Speaker 9: but it's been the same approach, just kind of like
47:27
Speaker 9: with a bit more of a fighting spirit as opposed
47:29
Speaker 9: to this kind of long term investment in the rank
47:32
Speaker 9: and file.
47:33
Speaker 2: It this willingness to invest.
47:35
Speaker 9: In the rank and file and maybe lose your reelection
47:37
Speaker 9: by the way, because the old bureaucrats fight.
47:39
Speaker 2: You so bad.
47:40
Speaker 9: But how are you going to get you know, thousands
47:42
Speaker 9: of IPS workers or workers in the South ready to
47:45
Speaker 9: build long, hard campaigns. It's probably not just through the
47:49
Speaker 9: same union car drives that have failed for decades. Right,
47:51
Speaker 9: It's probably not just by adding some more money. You're
47:53
Speaker 9: probably going to have to commit to training. You're probably
47:56
Speaker 9: going to have to give them more of the reins
48:00
Speaker 9: of those campaigns, and they're probably gonna have to be
48:03
Speaker 9: not just permitted, but actually encouraged to engage in more
48:05
Speaker 9: militant action while they're fighting.
48:08
Speaker 2: That isn't just like sign a union car drive.
48:10
Speaker 9: Actually, a lot of folks that are UWT members we're
48:13
Speaker 9: hearing want to fight against mandatory overtime in the South
48:16
Speaker 9: or an IPS and that's their gateway into winning a union.
48:20
Speaker 9: And I'm going to see them prus because I know
48:22
Speaker 9: you've been working with a lot of these folks that
48:23
Speaker 9: are organizing committee.
48:24
Speaker 2: If you wanted to comment more on any of.
48:25
Speaker 6: That, Yeah, we're here talking tonight talking a lot about
48:29
Speaker 6: the Constitutional Convention. But the vast majority of UAWG members
48:33
Speaker 6: weren't even there at the convention, and so what we
48:38
Speaker 6: actually spend most of our time in UAWD doing is
48:43
Speaker 6: organizing in our locals and organizing on the shop floor.
48:46
Speaker 6: And we've been organizing chapters in locals across the country,
48:53
Speaker 6: in Detroit, on the West coast, on the East coast,
48:55
Speaker 6: in the South of workers who want to fight on
49:00
Speaker 6: the shop floor, fight their bosses in their shops, and
49:05
Speaker 6: fight the ruling class on these larger issues.
49:07
Speaker 5: They impact the entire working class.
49:09
Speaker 6: And there's a lot of reasons that we've talked about
49:11
Speaker 6: why some people are a lot of people in uaw leadership.
49:15
Speaker 6: Maybe they want to fight, but they don't want to
49:17
Speaker 6: fight too hard. They don't want to fight to the
49:19
Speaker 6: extent that it starts bringing in some mascular consequences. Maybe
49:25
Speaker 6: some I mean, if we do illegal strikes right, the
49:28
Speaker 6: federal government will try to put top union members in jail,
49:31
Speaker 6: they will try to find the union, they will try
49:32
Speaker 6: to bankrup the union, and so there's real risks and
49:35
Speaker 6: there's a lot of people that myself included, that think
49:38
Speaker 6: that we need to be taking these more Milton tactics.
49:41
Speaker 6: That we're facing a lot of emergencies we're facing an
49:44
Speaker 6: emergency in terms of thousands of UAW members being laid
49:47
Speaker 6: off and that destroying people's livelihoods and communities. We're facing
49:51
Speaker 6: emergencies in terms of the working class workers being deported,
49:55
Speaker 6: We're facing the genocide emergency of the genocide and Palestine.
49:58
Speaker 6: And then these emergencies require us taking bigger risks and
50:02
Speaker 6: using more Milton tactics like shutting down production or Shop four.
50:08
Speaker 6: But we're not able to organize for that at somewhere
50:12
Speaker 6: like the in Solidarity House in the top u a
50:15
Speaker 6: W leadership, and we're able to take our argument to
50:20
Speaker 6: the Constitutional Convention and get a lot of UH sympathetic
50:23
Speaker 6: allies there, but not a majority, because at the end
50:26
Speaker 6: of the day, the Constitutional Convention is also very much
50:29
Speaker 6: under the control of UAW leadership and the a W biocracy,
50:33
Speaker 6: and they use their tactics. They deployed their tactics to
50:36
Speaker 6: organize the more Miltant aspects of our program, and so
50:40
Speaker 6: that's why we're very focused on organizing these local chapters
50:43
Speaker 6: on Shop four across the country and have been seeing
50:46
Speaker 6: a lot of success where workers are interested in banning together,
50:52
Speaker 6: banning together in my local Banning together and other people's locals,
50:55
Speaker 6: uh to take more fighting class regal stance.
50:58
Speaker 3: Well, and let's let's finish on that point, right, because
51:02
Speaker 3: I know that this question can lead to, you know,
51:06
Speaker 3: another hour of podcasting, which I won't ask y'all to do.
51:11
Speaker 3: But this is obviously like the biggest question in labor
51:16
Speaker 3: and about labor right now in the year twenty twenty six,
51:21
Speaker 3: with fascism rising, climate change spiraling out of control, war
51:27
Speaker 3: and genocide you know, funded largely by our tax dollars
51:31
Speaker 3: and supported by our military, like is spiraling out of
51:35
Speaker 3: control across the world, like the we have our first
51:38
Speaker 3: goddamn trillionaire in history. Now, the richer getting richer, poor
51:43
Speaker 3: and working people are getting squashed. The cost of everything
51:46
Speaker 3: is going up. They're data centers plopping into our damn
51:50
Speaker 3: you know, neighborhoods. We're all getting poisoned and by all
51:53
Speaker 3: this industrial runoff and.
51:55
Speaker 5: YadA, YadA YadA.
51:57
Speaker 3: Shit is bad to quote, you know, Malcolm Harris. Shit
52:00
Speaker 3: is fucked up in bullshit, right, And so amidst all
52:04
Speaker 3: of this, people have been asking, like our union is
52:07
Speaker 3: going to be able to like rise up as this
52:09
Speaker 3: working class force to help save society from apocalypse, right,
52:16
Speaker 3: And you know it's a naive question, but I think
52:18
Speaker 3: it comes from a hopeful place. And you guys are
52:22
Speaker 3: we've been talking for the last hour about the nitty
52:24
Speaker 3: gritty debates that happen within a union as large as
52:27
Speaker 3: the UAW when you're talking about this, and so I
52:31
Speaker 3: guess I wanted to just end on the blunt question
52:34
Speaker 3: and any thoughts y'all wanted to share and lead listeners with.
52:38
Speaker 3: You know, can labor unions be more than just labor
52:42
Speaker 3: unions and should they be?
52:45
Speaker 5: I don't know if they can be, but they have
52:46
Speaker 5: to be.
52:47
Speaker 6: We have a lot of interests, We have a lot
52:49
Speaker 6: of needs as workers, and certainly higher wages is one
52:52
Speaker 6: of them. More vacation days is good for me, but
52:57
Speaker 6: so as not being the port by ice is not
53:00
Speaker 6: having my money funded genocide on the other side of
53:03
Speaker 6: the world. And the bosses have a lot of organizations, right,
53:08
Speaker 6: They have the Chamber of Commerce, they have their trade associations,
53:11
Speaker 6: they have the Republican and Democratic parties, And there's not
53:15
Speaker 6: a lot of organizations in our column, in the column
53:18
Speaker 6: of the working class, and unions I think are some
53:22
Speaker 6: of the organizations that have the best shot of actually
53:27
Speaker 6: being vehicles for the working class, for us to fight
53:29
Speaker 6: for our class and our interests.
53:31
Speaker 5: There's some headwinds.
53:33
Speaker 6: There's a lot of labor law and other incentives for
53:36
Speaker 6: labor leaders that are designed to turn our unions against us,
53:39
Speaker 6: to contain us instead of being vehicles for our fights.
53:42
Speaker 6: There's also things that are special about unions. There are
53:44
Speaker 6: some of the most democratic organizations in our society. There's
53:48
Speaker 6: some of the only organizations where I can actually get
53:50
Speaker 6: together with my coworkers and directly decide and debate and
53:55
Speaker 6: vote on how we want to use our dues dollars
53:59
Speaker 6: that we are full the organization ourselves. It's not funded
54:02
Speaker 6: by some billionaire foundations. And because of that, I think
54:05
Speaker 6: that we have to fight for our unions to actually
54:08
Speaker 6: represent us, to actually represent the interests of the working class.
54:11
Speaker 9: Yeah, I would say, I mean, as nevrus put it
54:14
Speaker 9: very eloquently, my summary, the answer to your question is
54:18
Speaker 9: is yes, unequivocally, we need to be more than just
54:22
Speaker 9: focus on, you know, some narrow notion of workplaces. And
54:25
Speaker 9: for you at WD, you know, we talked a little
54:29
Speaker 9: bit about the split our orientation since then with class
54:32
Speaker 9: struggle unionism for a reason, we actually don't even think
54:35
Speaker 9: we're going to be the best labor unions.
54:38
Speaker 2: We don't even think we're going to be successful.
54:39
Speaker 9: Labor unions unless we become class struggle unions because as
54:43
Speaker 9: all these crises you're talking about occur, and as Nevrus said,
54:47
Speaker 9: nobody just cares narrowly about like one, what it's like, Oh,
54:50
Speaker 9: I got paid more, but I don't have the house
54:52
Speaker 9: because it got it got destroyed in the flood.
54:54
Speaker 2: It's okay, Then what do you know that this isn't
54:57
Speaker 2: nobody thinks this way.
54:58
Speaker 9: We don't categorize our lives up the little buckets and
55:01
Speaker 9: then say well, it's great that my union were here,
55:03
Speaker 9: but I literally don't have a place to live. So
55:06
Speaker 9: we understand that fighting, you know, for the working class
55:11
Speaker 9: and as a class means that our institutions need to
55:15
Speaker 9: understand the class struggle as the path as well. And
55:18
Speaker 9: so you know our orientation when we adopted this idea
55:22
Speaker 9: of class drug unions and we have five principles militancy, democracy, independence,
55:27
Speaker 9: working class solarty and solidarity.
55:29
Speaker 2: And worker control. And the last one sounds.
55:32
Speaker 9: You know for some folks on the left and like, oh,
55:34
Speaker 9: you can't talk about worker control.
55:36
Speaker 2: That's that's scary.
55:37
Speaker 9: You know, that sounds ideological, but it's totally not my experience.
55:41
Speaker 9: When Mike, when we were in mandatory overtime, folks were
55:44
Speaker 9: pissed that we didn't have control over the clock when
55:47
Speaker 9: we were you know, they could move the leave time
55:50
Speaker 9: on the board. You could be there and it could
55:52
Speaker 9: say we were going to be there for a nine,
55:54
Speaker 9: and then it would get raised to a ten or twelve.
55:56
Speaker 9: We didn't have any control over that. That is, you know,
56:00
Speaker 9: enraging in the same way that it's enraging that you
56:03
Speaker 9: don't have control over where your dues go. You also
56:05
Speaker 9: don't have control over if you can have a data
56:07
Speaker 9: center down the street. That you don't have control over
56:11
Speaker 9: how to clean your water or how you get electricity.
56:13
Speaker 9: I don't think that it makes any sense to think
56:16
Speaker 9: of these things as separate. So we use worker control
56:20
Speaker 9: store as a little bit of a lightning rod. But
56:22
Speaker 9: also because I think it actually speaks to most people,
56:24
Speaker 9: and I you know, in my experiences, it speaks to
56:27
Speaker 9: my co workers, not just co workers on the left,
56:30
Speaker 9: to our you know, revolutionarized socialists like me, like co
56:33
Speaker 9: workers who just are pissed off. But want to fight,
56:36
Speaker 9: and so yeah, I think if we our sort of
56:39
Speaker 9: model is you know, it's us first them, and if
56:42
Speaker 9: our unions don't start operating that way, I actually think
56:45
Speaker 9: and this will be sad, but I think it's happened
56:46
Speaker 9: throughout history that that workers and members in the world
56:49
Speaker 9: class will actually toss you canto the side right and
56:52
Speaker 9: build new institutions that I can accomplish this task because.
56:55
Speaker 2: People will need to.
56:56
Speaker 9: But I think our hope in UAWD is that instead
57:00
Speaker 9: of that, we transform the uaw so it can be
57:03
Speaker 9: the fighting working class institution that it's capable of being,
57:06
Speaker 9: and then we won't have to do this sort of
57:09
Speaker 9: awful rejiggering and refiguring out. We'll actually just have our
57:13
Speaker 9: union be our fighting for us, and it'll be us,
57:16
Speaker 9: not just staff or not just folks sitting at a headquarters.
57:19
Speaker 4: Yeah. I want to agree with Andrews point here that
57:23
Speaker 4: a lot of people in our union have they forgot
57:27
Speaker 4: why we have the union. A lot of people in
57:28
Speaker 4: this country have forgot why we have a union, where
57:31
Speaker 4: it all started, and what kind of stuff we were
57:33
Speaker 4: doing before we had a union, you know, when we
57:36
Speaker 4: had a disagreement with the boss we'd show up at
57:38
Speaker 4: their house and kick the shit out guy, and if
57:42
Speaker 4: he had a problem with us taking over his facility,
57:43
Speaker 4: he would send a gun, you know, our men, and
57:46
Speaker 4: to shoot us and to get us off of his property.
57:48
Speaker 4: So we came up with this whole deal to do it.
57:52
Speaker 4: But the corporations are just taking advantage of it. They
57:56
Speaker 4: bought off our politicians, they bought off our Supreme Corps.
58:00
Speaker 4: They're doing everything they can to fuck with the unions
58:04
Speaker 4: and to keep them as powerless as possible. And meanwhile,
58:09
Speaker 4: we have our unions in this country are giving us
58:13
Speaker 4: the whole Oh, there's nothing we can do about it.
58:15
Speaker 4: It's illegal. Everything they're doing is illegal, you know, like
58:19
Speaker 4: back to Palestine, the Leagy Act. They're not allowed to
58:22
Speaker 4: be selling these arms there. You know, the President may
58:25
Speaker 4: have the discretion to look over and see what, you know,
58:28
Speaker 4: if they're doing this wrong or doing that wrong. But
58:31
Speaker 4: Congress could have called them out. And the only reason
58:33
Speaker 4: our Congress and our Senate hasn't called them out on
58:35
Speaker 4: it is because they're taking money from Israel too. They're
58:38
Speaker 4: either blackmailed by them, their bride by them, or they're
58:43
Speaker 4: terrified that they're going to put millions of dollars up
58:45
Speaker 4: against them in a race. So we just we really
58:48
Speaker 4: need fighting institutions. We need our unions to wake the
58:51
Speaker 4: hell up, because, as Andrews said, if we get to
58:54
Speaker 4: a point where the unions have to go away and
58:56
Speaker 4: something else has to be created to fight for us,
59:00
Speaker 4: it's it's going to go back to what it was before.
59:03
Speaker 4: It's not going to be even more parliamentary procedure. You
59:07
Speaker 4: know that this really is like our our John Brown moment.
59:11
Speaker 4: The Union needs to beating John Brown to prevent the
59:13
Speaker 4: next the Civil War from happening. But as long as
59:17
Speaker 4: they just keep on going down the road that it should,
59:20
Speaker 4: everything's going to keep blowing up, and it is it's
59:22
Speaker 4: going to end up a catastrophe. Corporate America has absolutely
59:26
Speaker 4: just run them up, and they're completely out of control.
59:29
Speaker 4: And until we get a hook on them, until they
59:33
Speaker 4: they're a either not people that can donate unlimited amounts
59:37
Speaker 4: of money to our politicians, or or be at least
59:41
Speaker 4: put a cap on it, so we keep it down
59:43
Speaker 4: to a couple grand per corporation. If you're a corporation, great,
59:47
Speaker 4: you get to donate, but we all get to donate
59:49
Speaker 4: the same and it's got to be something that I
59:52
Speaker 4: can afford, that you can afford that you know, not
59:55
Speaker 4: just them, not just Elon Musk and all of his front.
59:59
Speaker 4: For Elon Musk to be able to put two hundred
1:00:01
Speaker 4: and fifty million dollars into an election, that's criminal. That's
1:00:04
Speaker 4: criminal right there. He's paying off these politicians so you
1:00:09
Speaker 4: can get all these subsidies back and he is. He's
1:00:13
Speaker 4: not paying any taxes. We're paying him to sit here
1:00:16
Speaker 4: rip us off. And that's their whole game that they're playing.
1:00:19
Speaker 4: It's the entire establishments game. I want to go more
1:00:22
Speaker 4: into this, but I want to talk about oil. Like oil,
1:00:26
Speaker 4: we pay for oil to leave our country. We say, oh,
1:00:32
Speaker 4: we're making money off of taxes from the oil leaving.
1:00:34
Speaker 4: We're making like, let's say we make twenty billion off taxes,
1:00:37
Speaker 4: but then we give them a fifty billion dollar subsidy.
1:00:40
Speaker 4: So we just paid them thirty billion to take our
1:00:43
Speaker 4: oil off of our laps. And then but it's still
1:00:45
Speaker 4: okay because the government's making money off of it in
1:00:48
Speaker 4: the form of the taxes at the pump. So we're
1:00:52
Speaker 4: paying somebody to take our oil from us, and then
1:00:55
Speaker 4: we've got to pay for it. To come back in
1:00:57
Speaker 4: the form of gasoline. But it's all okay because the
1:01:00
Speaker 4: government makes a couple hours off of a bit. You know,
1:01:03
Speaker 4: those what kind of resources should belong to us. They
1:01:05
Speaker 4: shouldn't just belong to whatever billionaire corporation comes along grabs
1:01:09
Speaker 4: them and does what they want. But Sor, I know
1:01:11
Speaker 4: it's way off topic.
1:01:12
Speaker 9: I just had to say, Hey, worker control goes way
1:01:15
Speaker 9: beyond the simple little things that happen on the shop floor.
1:01:18
Speaker 9: Worker control is means something global and international.
1:01:22
Speaker 2: Good example.
1:01:23
Speaker 7: I think the divestment vote is kind of encapsulates labor
1:01:27
Speaker 7: movement right now because.
1:01:28
Speaker 8: Our leadership is afraid. Our leadership is comfortable with the
1:01:31
Speaker 8: status quo.
1:01:32
Speaker 7: And I watched grown men stand up next to other
1:01:36
Speaker 7: men trying to pull them down to sit.
1:01:38
Speaker 8: Back down during the divestment vote. So there's a lot
1:01:41
Speaker 8: of fight in the rank and file.
1:01:42
Speaker 7: Our leadership maybe not, but the rank and file, the membership,
1:01:46
Speaker 7: they're ready to fight.
1:01:47
Speaker 8: So I think there is hope.
1:01:48
Speaker 7: I think the unions can be what they're supposed to
1:01:50
Speaker 7: be for the working class.
1:01:55
Speaker 3: Oh right, dang, that's going to wrap things up for
1:01:58
Speaker 3: us today. I want to thank our guest Andrew Bergman
1:02:01
Speaker 3: a worker at General Motors in Detroit, a member of
1:02:04
Speaker 3: uaw Local twenty two and a co chair of UAWD.
1:02:08
Speaker 3: Navruz Baum, a paralegal in New York, a member of
1:02:12
Speaker 3: uaw Local twenty three twenty five and a member of
1:02:15
Speaker 3: the UAWD Steering Committee. Margie Thornton, an attorney in Colorado,
1:02:20
Speaker 3: a member of uaw Local twenty three twenty and a
1:02:23
Speaker 3: member of the UAWD Steering Committee. And Mike Davis, an
1:02:27
Speaker 3: auto parts worker in Ohio, a member of uaw Local
1:02:31
Speaker 3: twenty twenty one and a member of UAWD. And of course,
1:02:35
Speaker 3: I want to thank you all for listening, and I
1:02:37
Speaker 3: want to thank you for caring. We'll see y'all back
1:02:40
Speaker 3: here next time for another episode of Working People. And
1:02:43
Speaker 3: in the meantime, please go explore all the great work
1:02:47
Speaker 3: that we're doing at the Real News Network, where we
1:02:49
Speaker 3: do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories
1:02:53
Speaker 3: from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across
1:02:56
Speaker 3: our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, are website in our
1:03:00
Speaker 3: different social media pages, and help us do more work
1:03:04
Speaker 3: like this by going to the realnews dot com, forward slash,
1:03:07
Speaker 3: donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys,
1:03:11
Speaker 3: it really makes a difference. I'm Maximilian Alvarez. Take care
1:03:15
Speaker 3: of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
1:03:24
Speaker 1: When my face you no longer see. I live on, Yes,
1:03:28
Speaker 1: I live on. Wherever we go we are going to
1:03:33
Speaker 1: roll the Union on a song, I live on. Yes,
1:03:36
Speaker 1: I live on wherever hunger are we just ass Honger
1:03:42
Speaker 1: can be this song? I live on.
1:03:46
Speaker 7: Yes, I live on.
1:03:48
Speaker 1: Well, mean things are happening in this Land's read a song.
1:03:52
Speaker 4: I live on.
1:03:53
Speaker 7: Yes.
1:03:53
Speaker 1: I live on wherever the book mean thing happening in
1:03:58
Speaker 1: this land.
1:03:58
Speaker 9: Is read live.
1:04:00
Speaker 1: Yes, I live on wherever the video okay or media
1:04:05
Speaker 1: shown me.
1:04:06
Speaker 4: I live on.
1:04:07
Speaker 9: Yes.
1:04:08
Speaker 2: I live won.
1:04:09
Speaker 1: If I have help make this a better world to
1:04:12
Speaker 1: be here, I'll live on.
1:04:15
Speaker 7: Yes.
1:04:15
Speaker 1: I'll live on when my body was solid and in
1:04:19
Speaker 1: some loans and grave, I'll live on.
1:04:23
Speaker 7: Yes.
1:04:23
Speaker 1: I live on When my songs and poems are read,
1:04:29
Speaker 1: I live on. Yes, I live on