Faced with an ongoing corruption scandal that might lead to a government takeover, United Auto Workers President Rory Gamble has presented himself as representing a clean break from the union’s crooked inner circle, someone who can unite a fractured union and restore members’ trust after the UAW’s top leaders spent years stealing from the union and taking millions in employer payouts in exchange for concessions.
But transcripts of the November 2, 2019 meeting of the UAW International Executive Board, the union’s top decision-making body outside the constitutional convention, reveal that disgraced former president Gary Jones cast a deciding vote for a combined motion that provided himself with a paid administrative leave and named Rory Gamble as the interim president. The transcript of the vote raises serious questions about both the vote’s legality and Gamble’s relationship to Jones and the Administration Caucus, the powerful and secretive ruling party that has run the UAW for the past 70 years.
(These transcripts were made available to me as a member in good standing of UAW Local 1981, the National Writers Union, per my request, which is a right afforded to all members under the UAW constitution.)
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About Brother Brooks — Chris Brooks is an organizer from Tennessee and a graduate of the labor studies program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He currently works as a staff writer at Labor Notes. He is a member in good standing at UAW Local 1981.