The following resolution passed at the UAWD Special Membership Meeting held on May 7, 2023.
Whereas:
1. At our September 2022 UAWD Annual Meeting, the UAWD membership unanimously adopted an amendment to our Bylaws setting out a process for the creation of Local and Regional UAWD Chapters.
2. Since our organization’s founding, UAWD has had a Bylaws provision stating that a “goal of UAWD is to establish Local and or Regional UAWD Chapters as soon as practical.”
3. To tap into and bank the historic success of our IEB Campaign, we can invite excited members to maintain that energy and keep achieving our collective goals within Local and Regional UAWD Chapters.
4. UAWD members, especially in manufacturing-based Locals with hostile Administration Caucus leadership, can benefit from having spaces to strategize, develop plans for organizing around Local-specific issues, and create progressive goals for UAWD as a whole. Local Chapters can play an especially important role as our members build Big 3 contract campaigns under hostile Local leadership.
5. The creation of a Local or Regional UAWD Chapters, in contexts where a group of UAWD members feel prepared, can enable current UAWD members to more easily recruit new members and normalize UAWD as an open, democratic caucus, grounded in shop floor issues that are important to rank-and-file members.
6. Encouraging the creation of Local Chapters does not mean mandating it, and UAWD leadership and staff should always respect and consider Local organizers’ knowledge.
Be it resolved:
1. UAWD, our Steering Committee (SC), and our Organizing Committee (OC) will encourage UAWD members to create Local or Regional UAWD Chapters in the following ways:
a. Through regularly publicizing the ability for members to create Local and Regional Chapters, at appropriate meetings and within our OC, the process for doing so, and the ability to receive funding for meetings, in the provision below.
b. By allocating UAWD staff time to support active UAWD members who are seeking to recruit the ten required UAWD members to create a Chapter at manufacturing-based Locals, especially when that organizing also supports the Big 3 contract campaign
2. UAWD will fund any reasonable meeting expenses for meetings of any new Local or Regional UAWD Chapters at manufacturing-based Locals. The UAWD SC will approve any expenses beforehand to ensure they are reasonable.
3. The UAWD SC and OC will discuss the pros and cons of creating Local or Regional UAWD Chapters with UAWD organizers in manufacturing-based Locals, and engage more deeply with the short-term challenges for active UAWD members to do so. These discussions should be compiled into a plan for building more Local Chapters by the end of 2023 that provides suggestions for how to overcome these challenges.