As Auto Membership Fades, UAW Turns to an Unlikely Ally: Academia
United Auto Workers just won major pay gains after mounting strikes against Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. But the union is also having success with an entirely different set of employers: colleges and universities.
Academic workers now account for more than 25 percent of the UAW’s membership. One of the union’s nine regions is now led by a former grad student, and another is led by a former teaching assistant.
Over the past decade, the UAW has organized workers in the University of California school system, Harvard University, Columbia University and other major colleges across the country — even as union membership is at its lowest rate since the government started tracking the statistic in 1983.
Zoe Carey, the president of ACT-UAW 7902, the local that represents more than 4,000 adjuncts, student workers and student healthcare employees at New York University, said the union is increasingly integrating academia into operations.
The joining of forces “is an opportunity for members within local unions to meet and coordinate across the local but also across the region,” said Carey. She pointed to training efforts as another means of collaboration: “A focus on education and helping to teach members about the union and about how to get involved was really helpful.”
The UAW did not respond to requests for comment.
Academic workers’ influence is also growing thanks to changes in the union’s election process that give a greater voice to rank-and-file members.
The 2022 UAW convention was the first time the union implemented a direct voting system after the union signed a consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice. That followed a corruption scandal in which 12 senior officials were convicted.
Academic workers now make up almost 100,000 of the union’s 383,003 members, according to Brandon Mancilla, who directs union operations in New England and New York City.
“Part of what we are trying to do now is to ensure the organization responds a little to our needs,” said Cora Bergantinos-Crespo, the president of the UAW postdoctoral workers union at Columbia University. One such area is immigration law. “A lot of us have visas,” she said. Another is “intellectual property, which is an issue specific to academia.”
The move to recruit academics follows a long tradition in the UAW of organizing workers outside the automotive industry.
In 1953, the UAW established the Technical Office Professional Department for clerical workers, engineers, designers and technicians — that is, auto-industry employees who didn’t work in factories. The department was later extended to white-collar workers outside the auto industry, including health-care professionals like nurses.
In 1969, a group of workers left the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union because of dissatisfaction over the union’s opposition to the Vietnam War, according to NYU’s Tamiment Library. A decade later, the workers joined the UAW, where they remain today. The group was made up of retail and clerical workers, writers, lawyers and others.
Dr. Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at University of California, Santa Barbara, characterized most of the union’s organizing of non-auto workers in the 20th Century as “opportunistic.”
The UAW adopted a more tactical approach after the end of the Cold War and major changes in the auto industry.
In the 1970s, the auto-parts sector started moving their plants to the South, shedding union shops in the process, according to Lichtenstein.
In the 1980s, auto companies from Japan, Korea and Germany started building facilities in the U.S. after Congress passed laws imposing quotas and tariffs on foreign manufacturers. The UAW tried but failed to unionize facilities in states such as Tennessee and Ohio.
As the Cold War ended, and the demand for rockets slowed, aerospace plants that were represented by UAW started closing on the West Coast. Unionized auto plants were also driven out of the region around that time, as Japanese manufacturers opened competing facilities.
In 1995, after years of struggling with factory closures in the West, the UAW shut down its Region 6, which covered the West Coast. The landmark move reflected the union’s waning power amid shifts in sectors that had been strongholds for UAW.
Around the turn of the century, the UAW started making more concerted efforts to organize academic workers. The organization of the University of California system was a turning point, Lichtenstein said.
Academic workers in the U.C. system had been organizing as early as 1992, but Lichtenstein said the movement picked up its pace at the end of the 90s.
In December 1998, a group of teaching assistants at U.C. Santa Barbara went on strike for recognition of their union, which they organized with the UAW. By 2000, the student workers won a contract that waived fees for classes, provided health insurance, increased wages and capped workload at 40 hours per week.
More U.C. workers followed: 6,500 postdocs in 2010, 17,000 graduate student researchers in 2021, 3,000 teaching assistants in 2023. The UAW now represents more than 36,000 academic workers in the U.C. system, according to the union.
The UAW voted to reopen Region 6 in February 2022, with academic workers making up most of the membership.
Ray Curry, the UAW president at the time, cited the 2021 graduate students’ win in a press release announcing the reopening.
“Around 2000, the UAW became a little more systematic in organizing,” said Lichtenstein. “It’s strategic,” he said, noting that organizing auto workers had become “incredibly difficult.”
The gains in California caught the attention of academic workers nationwide.
Bergantinos-Crespo, who does genetics research at Columbia, said she gravitated toward the UAW while organizing postdocs thanks to the union’s 88 years of experience organizing the auto industry.
“We are starting to realize that we are more workers than anything else,” said Bergantinos-Crespo. “Sharing fights on very basic things like COLA [cost of living adjustments] or higher salaries with a more traditional sector is also helping us to hopefully shape academia into a more decent workplace.”
Lichtenstein likewise hasn’t seen a culture clash after academic workers linked up with auto workers.
“These grad students of course, they were completely culturally hip. I mean, you know, LGBTQ and, and you name it — they were everything. They were avant garde, in race, gender and ideas,” said Lichtenstein. “But the demand for COLA was like the most traditional UAW demand that Walter Reuther won in 1950.”
Reuther, who served as president of the union between 1946 and 1970, succeeded in pinning wages to inflation in a 1950 contract dubbed “Reuther’s Treaty of Detroit.”
Bergantinos-Crespo, who was elected the first president of her local in 2020, recently led a group of about 15 postdoc workers to picket alongside striking auto workers at the Chrysler Parts Depot in Tappan, N.Y.
“It was raining a lot. We were really, really wet. But it was good,” said Bergantinos-Crespo. “Some of the key things they are asking are very similar to us.” Among those: an end to tiered employment in which some staff are hired on second-rate contracts, plus COLA and higher wages. “It’s the feeling that we are working for institutions that make a lot of money, and we are struggling.”
Bergantinos-Crespo also got advice from the president of the local in charge of the Tappan parts depot on how to run a strike, which postdoc workers at Columbia had been planning to initiate if a contract was not reached, according to the union. The two discussed strategy “as simple as how they organize the different shifts for the picket… how he was making sure members’ morale was high.”
The postdocs won a contract a day before the strike would have started. They got a 17 percent wage increase scaling up to 24 percent by 2026, compensation for loss of benefits for those hired as contractors, childcare stipends and more.
With the success in the academic sector, the UAW is looking toward other industries.
Region 9A, which has limited auto-worker presence, has become a stronghold for workers at cultural institutions like museums and movie theaters.
Bridge Squitire, a server at the Alamo Drafthouse movie theater in Brooklyn who recently helped organize a successful drive, said the union’s resources and experience swayed organizers when choosing the UAW over Industrial Workers of the World.
The IWW “was more like “‘make a petition, present it to everybody.’ It was a lot more focused on mutual aid as well, which is virtuous,” said Squitire. “But I felt like UAW presented a lot more real-world, concrete, legally binding improvements to your job.”
The UAW’s demographic changes are starting to be reflected in its leadership.
Shawn Fain, a reform candidate with more radical politics than the old guard at the UAW, won by a narrow margin in the fall of 2022. Lichtenstein believes he was pushed over the edge by the academic workers, who brought “a certain youthful radicalism” to the vote.
Fain won the admiration of many UAW members for his confrontational style during the auto strike.
“Shawn Fain is a fucking mad man and I love him,” said Bridge Squitire, a server at the Alamo Drafthouse theater in Brooklyn. “He reminds me of my angrier uncles.”
