The United Non-Auto Non-Workers

T he largest union filing of the year so far is to join the United Auto Workers union — by non-tenure-track faculty at Harvard.

According to the March 1 filing with the National Labor Relations Board, 3,100 full-time and part-time non-tenure-track employees at Harvard University would be covered by a collective-bargaining agreement to be negotiated by the Harvard Academic Workers-UAW union (HAW-UAW).

Harvard graduate students voted to unionize in 2018, and Harvard undergraduate non-academic student workers voted to unionize in 2023. Both of those votes were also to join the UAW. The graduate students’ union voted to affiliate with the undergraduate union, and when the undergraduate union is officially recognized, they will be UAW Local 5118.

Local 5118 has negotiated two contracts with Harvard, both coming after strikes. A one-year contract was ratified in 2020 after a 29-day strike. That contract was then extended for an additional two months before members struck again, for three days, before ratifying the second contract.

The UAW has a much harder time unionizing autoworkers, celebrating merely 30 percent of workers signing union cards at individual plants. UAW membership peaked at about 1.5 million members in the late 1970s.

Today the UAW has about 380,000 active members, and about 100,000 of them work in higher education. Non-tenure-track faculty have also unionized with the UAW at Columbia and the University of California. There are now four bargaining units represented by the UAW in the University of California system. Roughly the same number of UAW members work for the University of California system as work for General Motors, NPR reported last year.

The UAW has far more retired than active members, at almost 600,000, and like many unions, the multiemployer pension funds in which it participates are in financial trouble. The American Rescue Plan Act, supposedly for Covid relief, bailed out multiemployer pension funds with $86 billion in federal money in 2021. The National Integrated Group Pension Plan, which includes UAW retirees, got $887.1 million. One UAW local plan in New Jersey received $210.4 million, or about $56,000 per plan participant. The bailouts came with no requirements to reform the funds or put them on a path to solvency.

The UAW is so irresponsible with its members’ money that it was the target of a yearslong federal investigation that has resulted in more than a dozen union officials being convicted of fraud. Former president Gary Jones was sentenced to 28 months in prison in June 2021 for embezzlement. “Jones admitted that he and other senior UAW officials used the UAW money to pay for personal expenses, including golf clubs, private villas, cigars, golfing apparel, green fees at golf courses, and high-end liquor and meals costing over $750,000 in UAW funds,” according to the Department of Justice. The UAW has been operating under a court-appointed monitor since 2021.

Even after that appointment, more fraud has been uncovered. One UAW treasurer for a local union representing Stellantis autoworkers was convicted for embezzlement in July 2022 and sentenced to 57 months in prison. Over a span of ten years, he stole $2.1 million and “used portions of the proceeds of his embezzlement to gamble extensively, to purchase firearms, various high-end vehicles, and to purchase cocaine,” the Department of Justice found.

Given that track record, it makes sense that many career autoworkers would hesitate to join the UAW. And it makes sense that graduate students, who will be graduate students for only a few years and aren’t counting on receiving pensions decades in the future, would be wooed by the UAW’s progressive political activism.

The UAW has advocated social democracy for decades, most famously under the leadership of Walter Reuther. Reuther was an early enemy of Buckley and National Review, drawing strident condemnation for the UAW’s yearslong strike against Kohler, a bathtub and toilet manufacturer in Wisconsin. When Kohler hired nonunion workers, Reuther hired thugs to beat them.

Even though electric vehicles require fewer workers to manufacture and are unpopular with many car customers, the UAW continues to cheerlead for the “energy transition” that Democrats are pushing. The UAW called for a cease-fire in Gaza in December last year. It has given at least 98 percent of its campaign contributions to Democrats in each and every election cycle since 1990.

Several Republicans, including Donald Trump, have nonetheless tried to play nice with the UAW in recent months, likely under the theory that autoworkers are generally not as radical as their union. But that assumes that the UAW is primarily a group that represents autoworkers.

Unions are not what many believe them to be. Contrary to the image of “hard hats” from the Nixon days, half of U.S. union members today work for the government. Only 6 percent of private-sector workers, 7.9 percent of manufacturing workers, and 10.7 percent of construction workers were union members in 2023. Being “pro-worker” does not mean being “pro-union,” and despite media hype about a union “resurgence,” the union-membership rate last year was the lowest on record.

When anyone wonders why the UAW so often seems to act contrary to the interests of autoworkers, it helps to understand it doesn’t primarily exist to represent autoworkers. It knows that its growth prospects are much greater among progressives in higher education than among autoworkers. And it knows that when it needs a pension bailout for its hundreds of thousands of retirees, Democrats are waiting with taxpayer money to make ends meet.