For Labor Notes, I reported on the once-in-a-generation breakthrough in the UAW, where members overwhelmingly won the right to elect top officers. This is the end of a decades-long road to win this right (which members have fought for since at least the early 80s), and the beginning of a new one, namely a UAW with meaningfully competitive elections for the top slots, which control all the meaningful national bargaining (namely the Big 3 automakers, whose contracts are all up in 2023, just six weeks after the massive UPS Teamsters contract). The question now is, how will these elections be conducted? Who’s going to run? Can change at the top turn around the union’s nosedive, and organize the 800,000 non-union auto workers and auto parts workers in this country?
Jonah Furman: The past two weeks in US unions, November 20-December 3, 2021
