Key Takeaways

The Union must centralize decision-making in the General Membership Meeting to ensure that all interested participants have the ability to contribute to Union decisions.
The Union must formally define the authority of standing committees to ensure that they do not act against the membership’s wishes.
The Union must better facilitate member participation in internal governance and administration.
The Union must improve members’ ability to provide feedback on Union matters.
The Union must become a mass participation organization with accountability for elected officials.

Executive Summary / Introduction

As it stands, UAW 4121 lacks the feedback structures needed to centralize decision-making within the General Membership Meeting. This is most apparent in the process used to make union-wide decisions. Despite the Local Charter stating that the General Membership Meeting is the highest authority in the Union, this meeting is not regularly used to make significant decisions. Instead, decisions are typically made either by the Executive Committee or other standing committees without referring to formal rules that govern the process or scope of these organizations’ decision-making powers. Decisions are made by these bodies as they see fit, with collective money being spent and public actions being taken without general membership approval or often even knowledge.

The executive actions taken by Union committees reflect the lack of established mechanisms for asking members about their views. Although polling citizens is a common and effective democratic method for establishing the public’s policy preferences, UAW 4121 maintains no such practice(s). The closest the Union ever comes to polling is its Initial Bargaining Demands survey, which is extremely infrequent and produces inconclusive results due to the ambiguity of the survey’s purpose.

Decision-makers’ apparent contentment with the undemocratic status quo seems to be justified by ideologies of trustee representation and service model unionism. Trustee representation conceptualizes elected union officials as empowered to act as they see fit without any need to consult members. This ideology implicitly argues that officials, by virtue of being elected, have been recognized as morally and/or intellectually “better” by their constituents. Officials thus no longer need to busy themselves with constituents’ worries as they carry out their duties. Service model unionism conceptualizes the union as a third-party service provider that works on behalf of members in exchange for a fee (i.e., dues). A union should be a vehicle for the democratic expression and exercise of worker power; however, these combined ideologies transform representatives, who should be volunteers working to implement democracy, into privileged stewards of a paternalistic workers-advocacy non-profit.

Decision-makers often justify their ideologies and the subsequent death of democratic processes by pointing to the Union’s low member participation. They then feel compelled to take on trustee roles and make decisions for everyone. This, however, fails to recognize the difficulties facing members who want to get involved with union decision-making and administration. Members looking to increase their union participation face a confusing landscape of committees without clear jurisdiction, meeting times that fall squarely within business hours (and are thus difficult to attend), and a lack of opportunities to meaningfully connect with other members or to find out more about Union operations. This is to say that, regardless of whether or not this outcome was intentional, those making decisions have constructed a walled garden protecting their authority at the expense of democracy.

A union is only as strong as its members make it, and members are only willing to cede individual power to the collective when they believe they have a meaningful place in the larger whole. If the Union wants to achieve its stated ends, it is imperative for UAW 4121 to democratize. This will necessarily involve moving decision-making to its rightful place in the General Membership Meeting; establishing clear procedures for policy formation and approval; setting up clear guidelines regarding which matters committees have the power to act upon autonomously and which matters they must bring to the larger Union; lowering the barriers facing members as they try to get involved with union governance and administration; and abandoning ideologies that valorize and justify the power of more involved members at the expense of those who, for whatever reason, lack the ability to contribute as actively. By taking these steps, the Union will become an organization that radically improves its members’ working conditions through solidarity and egalitarian collective action.

Extended Analysis

Lack of Formal Action and Decision-Making Procedures

Formal decision-making procedures are crucial for institutional efficiency, accountability, and maintenance. They allow decisions to be made in a timely, regular fashion, and the transparency of such processes ensures that decision-makers are held accountable for their actions. Moreover, formal decision-making procedures pave a clear path for broad participation for union members. They are vital for the maintenance of a vibrant democratic culture. Lacking such procedures guarantees unfair and unaccountable representation by elected officials who come to have sole authority as a result of a weakened forum for constituent advice and participation. This logic also extends to the importance of establishing procedures for undertaking actions.

UAW 4121 lacks sufficient institutional decision-making procedures. The local charter states that the General Membership Meeting is the highest decision-making body in the Union. However, it is unclear how this meeting is used to make meaningful decisions when members are often not given enough time to review and reflect on matters that have been brought to a vote. As a result, decisions are typically made by leadership, often in closed forums like Discord. It is unclear how or where records of these decisions could be obtained, if at all. Bargaining decisions in 2024 were similarly made in opaque venues without public participation, thus raising concerns about transparency.

Additionally, the Union consistently suffers from the practice of more involved members’ making binding decisions on an ad hoc basis that affect the entire union. For instance, in the run up to the most recent strike an ASE Head Steward created a direct-action committee with less than twenty-four hours’ notice to membership. Suggestions to provide even marginally greater lead up time or alert members of this committee’s existence were then refused and, the next day the committee planned a sit-in in the UW administration building. The lead time given was insufficient for members to meaningfully participate in the decision-making process, and resulted in a small group of Union members taking part in a significant (and illegal) action that spoke for the entire membership. Such decision-making procedures should not be allowed to stand in a democratic space.

The Union also sometimes makes decisions through its standing committees, whose scope of power and authority to speak on behalf of the union are not clearly defined. Furthermore, these committees also appear to lack formal decision-making guidelines, and instead often rely on “vibe checks.” On top of this, committees often make decisions that would appear to fall outside of their purview, even in the most generous interpretations in their scope. To wit, the strike mobilization committee in the most recent strike also engaged in planning a rally, persisting to do so even over the objections of members that this was not an appropriate venue for such planning.

The claim is frequently made that decisions need to be made exclusively by leadership, in committees overextending their mandate, or on an ad hoc basis because membership is not sufficiently engaged for structures of democratic participation to be successful. In this version of the story, the central thesis is that if only more members participated in union governance, then governance would be more democratic. Alternatively, it seems that a major reason membership is not engaged in governance activities is precisely because it does not have a legible way to engage the decision-making apparatus. If the means to do so were made available, membership participation in decision-making would increase. Moreover, clear, democratic decision-making processes are an inherent good, regardless of whether or not they are taken advantage of. Thus, even if decisions are ultimately made autocratically because members do not participate in decision making, decision-making processes should be clarified and democratized.

Several actions are needed to remedy this situation. Most importantly, decision-making needs to be moved primarily to the Monthly Membership meeting. This would guarantee the greatest possible membership participation, decision-making transparency, and decision-making accountability. Rules for making decisions such as quorums and procedures must also be established and communicated to all members. There should also be strict guidelines put in place that limit leadership’s ability to make decisions outside of this context. Similar guidelines should be established for committees in order to establish their scope, authority, and degree of autonomy. Ideally, all of these would be significantly curtailed in order to guarantee maximum accountability to the Union as a whole. Finally, ad hoc decision-making must be prohibited in all but the most extreme circumstances. Such decision-making undermines democracy and accountability, while the efficiency it generates is negligible.

Lack of Effective Public Opinion Solicitation Measures

Any organization that practices representative democracy, in which special powers are representatively delegated to a select group of people who are charged to act on behalf of the rest, must have effective measures for determining what the group wants. Without such techniques, it is impossible for delegates to accurately represent their constituents..
UAW 4121 regularly maintains only two formal public opinion solicitation measures: local elections and the bargaining survey. Local elections occur at least yearly to fill a rotating set of positions (depending on what terms have expired) ranging from Steward to Union President. Presumably, these the candidates that are selected for office are representative of members’ preferred policies. The bargaining survey is distributed once every three years to units that are entering their respective bargaining periods. It is a temperature scale survey where members are polled on how important various issues are to them ranging from “Not at all important” to “Very important.”

Unfortunately, union elections are not an effective tool for public opinion solicitation. For one, candidates for office are prohibited from using Union-maintained contact information lists to conduct outreach. Consequently, their range of outreach is a priori limited to those union members they are already in contact with; their ability to reach members who agree with but do not know them or members who could be persuaded to adopt their positions is close to non-existent. Resultantly, election results are more measures of which candidates have large social circles than of which have the most agreeable platforms. Additionally, the campaigning period allotted for election by the Union is extremely narrow. The most recent Union-wide elections for leadership positions, for example, allotted only ten days for campaign and voting combined. This puts further stress on candidates’ ability to campaign effectively, even if it is only to turn out the vote in their social circles. In terms of the most recent election, it did not help that the majority of the voting period concurred with Thanksgiving break, a time when many ASEs are not even in the state or country, let alone on campus or checking their emails.

The bargaining survey is a similarly flawed mechanism for soliciting public opinion. Information in the survey is presented in a way that leaves little room for nuanced preference expression, as nearly all of the topics asked about are of vital importance to members. As a result, many members may indicate that all topics are “very important,” without the ability to express circumstantial preferences. For instance, the most recent ASE bargaining survey asked how important members felt it was to “waive all campus tuition and fees,” as well as how important it members believed it was to “maintain $0 insurance premiums.” Either of these issues could gain or lose strength of preference depending on what happens with the other (e.g., if fees are waived, ASEs may feel more capable of paying a higher insurance premium). Although the survey does include a comment box in which to leave “any other comments/thoughts that aren’t covered above, including why these issues are important to you,” it is not feasible to systematically review tens of thousands of comments. In addition, as of May 27, 2024, the archived copy of the survey lacked a question about how important a wage increase was –likely the single most important topic in any collective bargaining agreement. Aside from the fact that it would be difficult, given the current format of the survey, for a respondent to communicate what degree of a wage increase they believed would be necessary, it is remarkable that this information apparently was not polled whatsoever. This underscores the fallibility of the bargaining survey.

It must also be noted that neither of the Union’s public opinion solicitation mechanisms leaves room for open, ongoing expression of members’ ideas. Elections are inherently limited to, at best, polls on the candidates’ positions, while the bargaining survey is restricted to a set of prearranged topics decided on by the survey’s authors. While Slack could theoretically be used to facilitate conversation about concerns beyond these pre-selected issues, it is a flawed communication tool and is not monitored systematically. Thus, it fails to provide ASEs a proper space for ongoing, freeform discussion of members’ preferences and concerns.
Monthly Membership Meetings, too, could serve as a space to engage in these ongoing discussions. In their current form, however, they do not serve this function because meeting agendas are most frequently set by leadership, which controls when conversations on each agenda item begin and end. As a result, members’ concerns have no space to be naturally brought to the table during these meetings. Additionally, little discussion happens in these meetings, as they typically consist of prewritten report backs and presentations from invited speakers (sometimes internal and sometimes external to the Union). On top of this, Monthly Membership Meetings are held at 5pm, which conflicts with graduate seminars in some departments. This prevents many members from attending, even if they wanted to. It is, therefore, impossible to accurately register member concerns, questions, or grievances in this space.

A space for ongoing, free form expression is a requisite component of democracy, especially due to the length of representatives’ terms and the dynamic nature of university working conditions. In any democracy, but especially in one where representatives’ terms are relatively long and conditions on the ground necessarily change quarterly, maintaining a space for ongoing discussion of new or persisting issues is imperative.

In light of the above, the authors recommend the following systematic changes be made to the Union’s structure:

It is necessary for the Union to implement new rules governing elections. These rules should, at a minimum, mandate a longer allotted time period for outreach efforts and proscribe elections from being held during periods of particularly low member engagement. Additionally, it would be favorable for the Union to facilitate opportunities for candidates to connect with ASEs outside their preexisting social circles. Based on best practice as exemplified by representative democratic countries around the world, this could be done through a series of town halls or debates. Members should be mobilized to attend these events to ensure that they can make informed voting decisions.
The bargaining survey must be greatly expanded to capture a wider range of data apart from the comments sections. Modern survey methods provide a great deal of mechanisms for accomplishing this task. Members could be asked, for example, to rank issues in order of importance, as well as to specify minimum and maximum acceptable thresholds for various survey questions (e.g., what is the greatest insurance premium you would be willing to accept).
Most importantly, the Union must create a structured space for ongoing, freeform expression of members’ preferences and criticisms. The Monthly Membership Meetings are ideally suited to become such a space, as they are for dealing with issues of union governance. That said, they are not the only options. For example, the union could institute frequent public opinion polling– a practice we see throughout liberal democratic governments. Likewise, leadership could have regularly scheduled town halls at which issues could be discussed and debated.

Difficulty Getting Involved

The strongest unions are those with the most active members. Unions with the highest levels of participation have the greatest ability to stop production and can do so to the greatest extent possible. Consequently, they have the most leverage over their employers when it comes to obtaining workers’ demands. Conversely, unions with lower levels of participation, though still potentially effective in getting their needs met, face stiffer challenges in exercising their power on the job. Lower participation unions are easily scabbed, have difficulty controlling production, and can even face formal or effective dissolution.

UAW 4121 has particularly low member participation rates. Only about half of potential members even pay dues and far fewer are involved in active union governance. Turnout for meetings and actions is challenging in part due to low membership and member engagement, though in larger part due to the structural factors previously discussed. The most recent strike mobilized just over half of eligible strikers, with many refusing to make long-term commitments to stay out of work.

A large part of the reason for low member participation rates, however, is that it is incredibly difficult for members to get involved. We have already discussed some reasons this is the case, but these are not exhaustive, and at least three other structural factors are at play.
First, the Union’s large number of committees without clear jurisdictions makes it confusing for members to determine who to contact to get involved, where to go to participate, or what they would even be doing if they did join a committee. Indeed, one of the authors has met with multiple members of union leadership to inquire about these things and still does not have a clear picture of any of the answers to these questions. When members cannot figure these things out, their interest in participating can easily wane.

Second, meetings are almost always held at times convenient for the preexisting members of the Union governance institution in question. Typically, this means weekdays in the mornings or afternoons. Of course, regardless of how convenient this is for already active members, it severely restricts the ability of potential recruits to get involved. A union which is premised on gathering the workers at a workplace into one institution, it is generally impossible for potential members to involve themselves in union governance activities before 5:30pm; they are at work.
Third, the Union has almost no social events. This is to say that, currently, all Union activities have some connection to organizing, be they governing the day-to-day, planning actions, enforcing the contract, or trainings for how to do the former. Social activities have historically been and remain a mainstay of effective solidarity building. Teamsters Local 117, for example, lists a “Young Teamsters Hang,” a 5k/10k run/walk, a womxn’s conference, and a soccer game & barbecue on its calendar all coming up in the next four months (as of the time of writing). Such events allow members to build relationships that extend beyond the mere coincidence of being coworkers. They also allow for the communication of labor theory in a more relaxed environment than formal trainings. All this, in turn, generates militancy and a willingness to fight for and trust in one another.

To increase member involvement, it is imperative that the Union establish clear jurisdictional boundaries for constitutive organs of the larger body, guarantee that such organs are easy to enter and exit, and make sure these organs do not carry out the majority of their activities during the workday. Furthermore, it ought to facilitate ways for members to socialize, especially across departments and units, as a way for them to get involved in lower stakes activities on the way to active participation in labor militancy.

Over Reliance on Leadership / Key People

Strong organizations rely on a diverse contribution of skills from its members to successfully make and execute plans. These skills exceed the scope of any one individual or small group of individuals, and their effective utilization requires more time and energy than any one individual can contribute. This makes it necessary to spread the workload amongst numerous contributors. Proper division of labor helps prevent fatigue and burnout, and keeps more contributors engaged for longer periods of time. This creates a virtuous cycle of accomplishing tasks and avoiding unwanted consequences.

Presently, UAW 4121 is extremely top heavy in its labor distribution. Leadership, alongside a small number of other members, completes every task. Consequently, leadership and a handful of others report constant feelings of displeasure at the amount of work on their plates, and ultimately not all the necessary work is accomplished. Grievances, for example, must be chosen selectively instead of taken up wholesale. Actions are necessarily sparse because there is no one to plan more. Ideas that should be generated and new structures that should be established are put on the backburner because there is no one to pursue these tasks. While this top-heavy structure and its attendant problems are in part a consequence of the aforementioned structural factors that produce low levels of member engagement, they also constitute a structural problem in and of themselves.

Moving forward, the Union must come up with ways to more evenly distribute the workload, thereby creating a solid base to support those higher up the organizational hierarchy. This can be accomplished in part by making the changes that have already been discussed in this document. Establishing more effective modes of communication, more efficient mobilizing networks, more opportunities for members to deepen their connections with one another, and instituting more union democracy will inevitably increase member contribution to union governance. That said, it is also necessary to establish proper systems for delegating tasks. No more can delegation devolve to whoever is on hand at the moment. Instead, the Union must devise ways to systematically assign tasks to union members. Only by creating such structures can the problems of top-heaviness be avoided indefinitely.

Trustee Model of Representation

Economics and Political Science distinguish between delegates and trustees in models of representation. In any representation scenario, in which one person or group of people act/s on behalf of another, the “agent/s,” or the person or people that assign tasks, choose (a) representative/s to carry out their will. These representatives then have a choice of how to accomplish this task. Delegate representatives will carry out their assignments according to the concrete instructions of their agents. For instance, an employee will do their job according to the training their employer has given them, the rules in the employee handbook, and their manager’s explicit instructions. A trustee, on the other hand, will more generally represent the interests of their agent according to what they believe these interests are. For example, the CEO of a company will not ask shareholders what to do in each situation, but rather do what they determine best for the shareholders.

In elected representative situations, delegate situations are inherently more democratic than trustee situations. Delegates receive instructions from their constituents and their goal is to carry out these instructions as meticulously as possible. Delegates are little more than volunteers doing the tasks that no one else can or wants to do because they recognize that these tasks are important. Trustees, conversely, lack the direct will of their constituents as a constraint on their behavior. They act how they see fit to represent those who elected them, regardless of whether the electors think the trustee is taking the best course of action.
Elected representatives are not necessarily elected as either delegates or trustees. Typically, they are simply elected and then choose how to go about their representation once in office. Hence, representatives may lean more towards acting as delegates through frequent consultations with their base, referendums among the electors, and so on. On the flip side, they may act more as trustees, making decisions without prior consultation. Ultimately, the power of elected office gives representatives the power to determine their preferred mode of representation through the length of their term.

As it stands, UAW 4121’s leadership and many of its more active members view themselves as trustees. They see themselves as the only people making decisions for whatever reason – other members are not sufficiently involved, the representatives are the only ones who are willing/able to do this work, etc. – and thus act with little consultation with membership. As discussed above, there is not much of a mechanism for obtaining this consultation if desired. The result is that the Union tends towards autocracy. Collective decisions are made by a small group of people and then imposed on the wider membership without the ability for membership to express their desires in a meaningful way. There is no recognition that members may want their voices heard and have no way to express them.

The fact that Union leaders and more active members generally make collective decisions without consultation is connected to apparent feelings of smugness and self-satisfaction that arise in these members. From their actions and words, it comes across that these members feel they are better than other members because they are the ones making decisions. This, however, is opposed to long-established ideals about how representatives should act, regardless of whether they are delegates or trustees. Historically, representatives are presumed to humbly serve their agents, recognizing that the power they wield as representatives is merely an extension of the agents’ powers. The inversion of this attitude eventually breeds an authoritarian attitude and approach in which the agent is the rightful wielder of power.

To truly promote union democracy, Union leaders and active members must abandon the notion that they are trustees. Moreover, they must give up any illusion that their representative status makes them in any way better, or even different, than the rank-and-file membership. Democracy requires leaders, elected or otherwise, to serve the wishes of their constituents as expressed by those constituents, and to constantly both provide the constituents with the knowledge they need to give informed instructions, and to continuously check in with the constituents to ensure their effectiveness as representatives.

Service Model Self-Conception

Broadly, unions’ self-conceptions can be divided into two camps, here referred to as the “class warfare” and the “service model” conceptions. The class warfare conception sees the union as an institutional representation of the workers’ interests, which are permanently and structurally antagonistic to that of the boss. The service model conception views the union as effectively a third-party provider of technical negotiating and contract enforcement expertise. These two conceptions are incompatible with one another, although a union’s service model self-conception can sometimes be obscured by rhetoric borrowed from class warfare ideologies.

The vast majority of UAW 4121’s members hold a service model conception of the Union. Among the more active members, this takes the form of viewing themselves as the “adults in the room” who know how the bureaucracy operates, and thus best know how to meet members’ needs if they should even attempt to do so. Among the less active members, this takes the form of relying on more active members to operate the bureaucracy. This self-conception from both groups was on display in the most recent bargaining period when leadership would make plans without attempting to secure wide-scale member participation in planning. As a result, the general membership would uncritically accept these plans on the grounds that leadership knew best.

Viewing the Union as a service providing organization and mediation, rather than as a vehicle for class struggle, is ideologically and practically untenable. American labor history bears out this claim. Union activity in the US was at its highest and unions were at their strongest from the 1920s to 1940s, when open communist participation in unions championed and institutional unions organized themselves around a class warfare ideology. In the mid-20th century, however, George Meany, long-time leader of the AFL-CIO, championed a shift to a service model conception of unions. This ideological shift occurred and unions changed their operations to conform with their new way of viewing their roles. Since then, the United States has seen a precipitous decline in union density and power.

To operate as an effective fighting force, the Union must adopt a class warfare ideology and run itself in line with the principles contained therein. Doing so will encourage member participation, the democratization of union structures, and aggressive contract negotiations that fully utilize the Union’s structural advantages. Continuing with the service model conception, however, will guarantee that the Union continues to wallow in powerlessness, providing minimal services and securing bad contracts.

Democratization