Melrod’s Fighting Times: Organizing on the Front Lines of the Class War (PM Press, September) tells the story of Melrod’s 13 years working at American Motors as a socialist agitator and a builder of working-class power. At that convention, according to Melrod’s telling, the Administration Caucus’s control of the gavel kept the issue from the convention floor, but Melrod’s legacy still lives on almost 40 years later - grounded in the daily battles Melrod and his comrades fought for democracy on the assembly lines of the auto industry.Īs their practice illustrates, union reform is only a tangible and living demand when it is coupled with the needs and interests of the rank and file - especially as they come into conflict with both the company and a do-nothing union bureaucracy. At the 1983 UAW convention, Jon Melrod and his fellow UAW delegates from Local 72, representing the American Motors Corporation plant in Kenosha, Wis., came to Detroit allied with other reformers to push for a national direct vote. The movement for “one member, one vote” won a membership referendum in 2021, and the constitutional convention in July saw a number of nominated challengers to the incumbent president.īut “one member, one vote” is not a new concept in the history of the UAW. But after the federal government brought suit against the union’s leaders for rampant corruption, the settlement reached in 2020 forced the union to give members a vote on whether to directly elect officers. The union, for decades, has been governed by the Administration Caucus, which perpetuated its rule by tightly managing the conventions to elect union officers (though the leadership of UAW has been resistant to charges that it is undemocratic). 5 million members in 1979, the union has been reduced to roughly 400, 000 active members (though it has nearly 600, 000 retirees) - and about a quarter of its members are graduate teaching assistants and other university workers in higher education. Once an industrial union power with almost 1. A national direct election will be held in the fall for the United Auto Workers (UAW), which held its 38 th constitutional convention the week of July 25 in Detroit.

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