Harold Meyerson writes for the American Prospect:
Three incumbent regional directors have been ousted, one in the historic UAW bastion of Detroit, and another in New England (where the new regional director will be the former head of the UAW’s Harvard grad student local). At this stage in the vote-counting, incumbent UAW President Ray Curry is trailing insurgent candidate Shawn Fain by 2,500 votes, and the insurgent candidate for the union’s number two post, secretary-treasurer, has opened a 13,000-vote lead over the administration-backed candidate.
The insurgents ran on the slate of Members United, which encompasses the candidates of a caucus of UAW members entitled Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD). The caucus is somewhat analogous to Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which spent decades criticizing Teamster leadership until their endorsed candidates managed to win control of the Teamsters—in another court-ordered rank-and-file election—last year. UAWD is newer to the game than the TDU, and some of the UAW’s problems—like the difficulties in unionizing Southern factories—aren’t going away no matter who controls the union. But it’s been a very long time since the UAW had a significant cadre of the socialist and social democratic leaders it enjoyed, and flourished with, during the presidencies of Walter Reuther and Doug Fraser. How the UAWD will navigate the union remains to be seen, but they will gain simply by replacing the stale, frequently exhausted, and often corrupt leadership the union has endured in recent years. One thing that’s certain is that the union’s campus organizing will certainly increase.
To what extent the UAWD will actually control the union won’t be clear until the vote count is completed over the next several days. In some regions, the only candidates are administration incumbents, and the vote-counting for the two top offices is far from complete. That said, the union that, from the 1940s through the 1970s, was the only social democratic institution in U.S. history to wield real power and win real gains for workers, may well have a new birth of radicalism. We’ll see how that goes.