How the UAW abandoned auto-workers to back radicals
... The UAW is no longer all about building cars. The union, desperate to build its shrinking ranks, has been adding members in all kinds of professions and trades, including signing up some 100,000 people who work in higher education. That group, which includes post-doctoral researchers and adjunct faculty members, now constitutes more than 25 percent of UAW membership, according to the Detroit Press, and has led, not surprisingly, to a significantly more progressive and activist union profile.
This is why the union’s 2022 changes to its election process, intended to “give a greater voice to rank-and-file members,” has instead empowered an ever-more radical constituency of university teaching assistants. UAW’s resulting leftward lurch made headlines recently in New York’s Democratic primary contests, where democratic socialist Claire Valdez won her race to represent New York’s District 7 in Congress. Valdez had previously worked at Columbia University as a program assistant in the visual arts department, where she joined the UAW. The union boasted, “UAW Region 9A mobilized thousands of members across NY-07 to help deliver a victory for New York’s working class.”
Here is what we know about Valdez: she went to the exclusive School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where tuition runs about $60,000 per year. Also, she hates cars. Her campaign embraced the normal lefty litany: abolishing ICE, Medicare for all, universal rent control and so forth. But one distinctive item was her promise to “fight to redirect federal dollars toward public transportation, walking, and biking” and “reverse the proliferation of surface highways.”
Do UAW workers on Detroit’s assembly lines know that their union’s favored candidate hates automobiles and wants to shut down federal highway spending? Is that in their best interests? ...
