At the heart of the corruption scandal is the union’s Administration Caucus. Founded by Walter Reuther seventy years ago, every union president and almost every International Executive Board representative since then has been a member. The Administration Caucus operates as an authoritarian “one-party state,” showering those who are loyal to the caucus with patronage positions and perks, and demonizing and using dirty tricks to drive out any who oppose.
And for the past forty years, the Administration Caucus has devolved more and more into an arm of the employers. Beginning in the early 1980s, the UAW leadership abandoned the traditional trade-union understanding that capital and labor have inherently adversarial interests for a new religion: labor-management partnership, or “jointness” in Administration Caucus parlance.
Hoping to turn the tide against corruption and concessions and build on the energy of the recent forty-day strike by forty-six thousand GM workers, a national network of autoworkers are organizing to take back their union and reignite the UAW’s fighting spirit. Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) is a new rank-and-file caucus being organized to challenge the Administration Caucus and bring democracy to the UAW.
To learn more about the caucus, the corruption scandal rocking the union, and the recent strike against General Motors, Labor Notes staff writer Chris Brooks spoke with Justin Mayhugh, an activist in UAW Local 31 at GM’s Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas City and a founding member of UAWD.