>But I think that the argument that the UAW is losing members because it
doesn't organize autoworkers is a mistaken criticism.
[ . . . ]
> The fact is that the auto industry in the US is basically organized.
Justin
thinks that I too quickly pass over the fact that the auto parts sector of
the industry is more unorganized. But it is a very decentralized part of the
industry, organized into small units. Organizing it is like organizing a
fast
food chain, outlet by outlet. You have to expect that progress will not be
fast or dramatic. There are some Japanese based automobile factories which
are not organized, but we are not talking about a major part of the industry
here.
> The problem is that the automobile industry is being economically
reorganized
and restructured. Parts of the work is being shifted to factories in the
global South, and parts of the work are being transformed, with the
introduction of more and more capital intensive and high technology methods.
That is why the UAW has lost members, and will continue to lose members, in
the auto industry.
Doug once posted employment figures in the auto industry:
U.S. employment in motor vehicles & equipment, thousands and percent of total employment:
1960 721 1.33% 1970 799 1.13% 1980 789 0.87% 1990 812 0.74% 2000 1,011 0.77%
Moreover, even the UAW (well, at least their organizers) doesn't believe that they've lost membership due to globalization and capital intensive production . As the head of the organizing department pointed out to me when I worked on a UAW organizing blitz of independent parts suppliers a couple of years ago, there are at least as many autoworkers currently in the US as there were in the early 1970s, at the height of UAW membership (and perhaps industry density too?). It's true that all of the Big 3 "domestic" assembly plants are organized, but much of the work that used to be preformed in house by GM, Ford and Chrysler has been farmed out to domestic, independent and non-union sources. Thomas Sugrue's history of Detroit _Origins of the Urban Crisis_ is excellent on this conscious effort by management, which began as early as the 1950s, to deindustrialize urban centers of UAW strength and move production to rural and suburban America.
You're also right that the UAW has had little recent success in organizing
the parts industry.Yet the UAW could be doing more to facilitate organizing
these workers. While parts production might be spread out between hundreds
of different suppliers and located in hundreds of different locales, final
assembly is certainly centralized, and unionized to boot. It doesn't take
much to imagine acts of solidarity that could potentially put great pressure
on management to stop fighting an organizing drive. One such tactic involves
workers at a Big 3 assembly plant red tagging -- that is, marking as
defective -- every lot of parts that comes from a certain parts factory.
>From what I gather such efforts are sadly few and far between.
mark