Our Program

We have an ambitious goal of recruiting 1,000 new members to UAWD. We’ll expand our base in manufacturing, organize new frontiers in under-prioritized parts suppliers (IPS) locals, and capitalize on the growing Southern manufacturing sector where our slate member Ben Smith is a key leader. We’ll focus on locals with a small group of members who we can support to build their base, and on locals with contract campaigns, elections, or other struggles in which we can intervene. We’ll support these locals with training on building shop floor militancy and UAWD speakers from high-profile campaigns like Daimler and Deere. We’ll also ask our UAWD IEB members to speak openly about UAWD, to get the word out, and set up a structure of regional and local organizers responsible for organizing their turf. Our bold goal of 1,000 new members is a commitment to develop these and other tactics required to fulfill it. This project will also build on the work Nolan has done as Chair of the UAWD Organizing Committee.

A key part of building a rank-and-file movement is that workers understand its history, organizing vision, and the resources and benefits on offer. We will launch a UAWD Onboarding Committee, which will both create new onboarding materials, and welcome new members into the organization. This project will be especially important to integrate and activate new members as we expand our recruitment efforts.

We’ll organize local UAWD chapters across our union to kick out concessionary leaders, support contract campaigns, and organize around shop-floor issues. In particular, we’ll support manufacturing chapters by giving them each a $500 budget, to empower rank-and-file members to develop their own campaigns and set their own collective strategy. These chapters will play a key role in building rank-and-file power and making good on the promise of participatory democracy in UAWD. With this structure, more decisions about caucus strategy can be made closer to where workers are, local rank-and-file organizers will be empowered to lead campaigns. This project will build on our slate-members’ work developing 10 model UAWD locals and the unanimously adopted UAWD Organizing Vision.

We’ll create a digital newspaper to highlight stories of UAW members fighting bosses and concessionary union leaders. Too often, UAW members are forced to turn to the boss’s papers, facebook rumor-mills, or local leaders with their own agenda for news about our union. UAWD is uniquely positioned to fill this void with worker-controlled, well-sourced, and independent reporting. In addition to relying on UAWD members’ networks, we’ll review and analyze IEB minutes to help UAW members stay informed and hold our elected officials accountable.

A successful general strike has to be organized deeply among our union’s membership, with rank-and-file organizers in UAWD playing a key role. Strikes called for by top leadership without rank-and-file buy-in flounder. But democratic strikes, where the membership has real control over the goals and the strategy, can grow in power to truly challenge the bosses. We have a proposal for how to work with and support President Fain's vision for a 2028 General Strike by helping build a democratic process to create demands for 2028 that will include town halls and education campaigns across the country. We’ll also put forward a set of radical demands on beating back the ruling class’s control over our lives, realizing work-life balance, implementing universal health care, strengthening labor law, and giving workers power over capital investment decisions.

Our members have so much to learn from one another and that we all benefit enormously when we can share information and resources. Our Organizing Committee enables our active rank-and-file organizers to share organizing tools and tactics for developing campaigns. We’ll re-invigorate UAWD’s Education Committee to also enable our membership to share knowledge and best practices for filing grievances, ULPs, and bargaining tactics. We’ll also support the development of a contract bank, so that our members can compare examples and learn about how to strengthen technical contract provisions, like COLA or the right to strike over plant closures.

Despite significant gains in the last contract, labor is still struggling to catch up with the corporate EV strategy, which will result in crises for workers and communities: fires in battery plants, large layoffs, factory shutdowns, and potentially industry-wide economic downturns. Following the Electric Vehicle Committee’s research and analysis, UAWD must develop and popularize a worker-led EV transition program in response. Our organizing approach must match the right scale: militant health and safety organizing in battery plants, being ready to strike over workplace closures and changes in production, a shorter workweek to buffer shift reductions and production uncertainty, and even organizing for worker control or nationalization of factories when they are shut down. Ultimately, if UAW workers are to thrive in the coming century, they must expand their focus to also work on clean and safe public transportation, which phases out fossil fuels, and be ready to stand and strike in solidarity with workers across the entire supply chain, both in the US and internationally. As a first step, we will develop and work to share this program with workers at UAW locals and regions, and with community organizers.

International solidarity is core to class struggle, no exceptions. We’ll continue UAWD’s work of educating and organizing our caucus and the UAW to live up to the commitments we’ve made to stand with workers around the world, working with organizations within the UAW, like UAW Labor for Palestine, and outside, like SINTTIA (Independent National Auto Workers Union of Mexico), to realize our vision of social justice and international solidarity. Instead of seeing bread and butter demands and social justice issues as in opposition to one another, we commit to building UAWD and our union through the fight for social justice, and we'll work to show how we can win social justice demands within our union and through our contract struggles. We understand that alongside wages and benefits, issues like housing, reproductive justice, climate change, and international solidarity, like the call for Palestinian liberation, are also starting points that will energize our caucus, bring in new organizers, and help us achieve our broad based demands.

Members of our slate have been key to advocating for solidarity with Mexican auto and other industrial workers and pushing the UAW International Affairs department to go further in hiring organizers to make this happen. Continuing and expanding upon these efforts to forge solidarity with our Mexican siblings is essential to building a labor movement capable of fundamentally challenging capital and stopping the never-ending push by the bosses to pit us against one another across the border. Mexican industrial workers perform the same work that we do in our plants in the United States. They deserve to be paid the same wages. We must actively support the organizing efforts of the independent labor movement in Mexico — and forge real connections between rank-and-file U.S. workers and Mexican workers in struggle. Ultimately, our aim should be to act in direct solidarity with Mexican workers: when our Mexican siblings go on strike, we should be prepared to strike with them — and vice versa.

UAWD was also a key force in the UAW’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza, and we continue to uphold UAWD’s commitments to Palestinian liberation. We’ll push for our elected IEB members to divest the UAW from Israeli bonds, to hold accountable politicians who legislate against our union’s positions by supporting genocide, to provide resources for education at the local level that enables workers to understand their connection to the struggle in Palestine, and to organize rank-and-file members in weapons manufacturing to end the flow of weapons to Israel, while ensuring that their jobs are secure, making good on the promise of the IEB’s Just Transition Working Group. Our slate members have also been active participants in and supporters of the work of UAWD's Palestine Solidarity and Peace Economy Committee.

Currently, most caucus decisions are made in closed-door Steering Committee meetings with motions that never see the light of day. We want to de-emphasize the role of the Steering Committee and our Chair, and empower our membership. We’ll publish minutes for all Steering Committee meetings, and share details we learn about what’s going on in Solidarity House so members can make informed decisions. We’ll also shorten the agendas and prioritize member-submitted proposals at our quarterly UAWD membership meetings so more people can attend and participate. We’ll also uphold the commitment to UAWD members to facilitate monthly IEB Strategy Meetings, which have gone largely unscheduled, and any other spaces our members call for.

We’ll organize to clean our house by un-endorsing Secretary Treasurer Margaret Mock and Vice President Rich Boyer. Margaret Mock denied routine purchases for the Stand Up Strike and attempted to exchange expenditure approvals for votes on the IEB. Rich Boyer made deals behind the backs of the Stellantis committee during bargaining and let the company go back on its promises to Stellantis members. Both voted against the reinstatement of the servicing credit for Local 2320, upholding a retaliatory policy implemented by the Ray Curry-led IEB to punish the Local for supporting UAWD’s Members United slate. UAW members across the country hold our caucus accountable for getting these two elected. If we want UAW members to believe us when we say we stand for democracy, accountability, and class struggle, we need to practice what we preach.

There has been an unspoken debate within UAWD about whether to chart an organizational course toward 1) a top-down, largely staff-led organization or 2) a democratic, member-led organization. We believe our goals of empowering the UAWD membership, developing collective strategy, and training the next generation of rank-and-file leaders can only be realized if UAWD commits to the second option, with member-leaders on the Steering Committee and an informed, engaged UAWD membership that independently and democratically determines our path. We believe the role of UAWD staff is to use their knowledge and abilities to facilitate that path, directed by our member-leaders.

We support pushing for -- and organizing for -- the replacement of Neil Barofsky as the federal monitor as a result of his illegal, outrageous efforts to intervene in our union's affairs in order to alter the righteous position adopted by the IEB calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Now he’s attempting to discredit Shawn Fain and other reform leaders with endless investigations. UAWD must go on record in support of these calls for Barofsky’s replacement.

To stay true to the organizing horizon of class struggle, UAWD must commit to principles of independence, which protect against forces of the ruling class undermining the working class. This opposition comes first from corporations seeking profit, but extends to the Democratic and Republican Parties, the Administration Caucus, parts of the UAW bureaucracy in staff and elected positions, and more. Unlike our allies in Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), we must be ready to criticize the actions of leadership, including those who we endorse. At the same time, we can choose to support and celebrate actions that we believe will advance our vision.

Democratic organizations should welcome disagreement, and union leaders who abuse their positions to bully members for defying the status quo should never be tolerated. Neither should union leaders who use union resources to win elections or block member access to meeting minutes and budget information. We’ll fight these practices and vocally call them out when we see them. We also won’t build alliances with any UAW leaders engaging in repression or undermining union democracy, even if it’s convenient.

A democratic union, which is led by and fights for rank-and-file members, hires staff from within its own ranks, and we’ll advocate for a change in UAW hiring practices to reflect that. Whether for jobs as servicing representatives or in the education, organizing, communication, or CAP departments, the best people to advocate for and empower rank-and-file members are people who have worked in the same sectors and have the same lived experiences and challenges of working on the shop floor. Of course, there are times when it's important to bring on someone with exceptional knowledge or experience, but we need to prioritize building up capacity within the UAW membership.