Who Does UAW Speak for?
The United Auto Workers union bosses find themselves unable to control the rank and file members for many reasons, one of which is Michigan’s Right to Work Law. With workers having a choice about union membership, many are choosing to refrain, and the UAW is having difficulties meeting its annual budget. Joann Muller has the story in Forbes.
Ford isn’t the only place the UAW has run into trouble getting rank-and-file members to ratify the contract their leaders negotiated.
All this is coming against the backdrop of the new right-to-work law in Michigan, home to about half the industry’s unionized workers. The law makes it illegal for employers to require employees to pay union dues. Some who are dissatisfied with the contract might use the occasion to drop out. The stakes are high for the UAW, which depends on annual dues – about $550 per employee – to help fund its $214 million annual budget.
None of this should come as a surprise, really, considering that the UAW reluctantly abandoned one of the most basic principles of union membership – equal pay for equal work – when it agreed in 2007 to the introduction of a lower pay scale for new hires.