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Unions have not gained many decisive victories in recent decades, so this week’s agreement between the United Auto Workers and General Motors makes a change. The provisional deal ends a six-week campaign of strikes that will bring workers at the three largest US carmakers a 25 per cent rise in hourly pay rates over four years.
It follows the progress made by Hollywood writers in September after a five-month strike, and other successes. After the unions’ long, melancholy withdrawing roar since the 1970s, the UAW savoured its achievement. “We truly believe we got every penny possible out of the company,” the union’s president Shawn Fain said last week after it settled with the carmaker Stellantis.
But they do not call it the workers’ struggle for nothing. Strikes are gruelling and the UAW’s campaign was groundbreaking not only in the result but the precision of its strategy. Rather than the union’s traditional approach of calling out all its workers at one of the big carmakers, it used clever tactics to bring individual plants to a halt in an unpredictable fashion.
It is a salutary contrast to strikes that fail because unions inflict more pain on members than on employers. There is a miserable example in British universities, where lecturers have been staging on-off industrial action for five years over pay and conditions, losing money for members and depriving students of some teaching on degree courses, all without making universities back down.
The University and College Union imposed a boycott on exam marking and assessment this summer, which made final-year students wait for their degrees and led to lecturers having their pay cut. The union abandoned the boycott for lack of support last month but has been balloting members again for further industrial action, with results due on Monday. Even some of its senior figures despair.
“We’ve got no strategy apart from more of the same, and we have lost. For a union of scholars, we’ve been remarkably unscholarly in our approach,” one disenchanted member of the UCU’s national executive committee told me. The committee has 63 members and almost as many opinions, but a five-year campaign takes a toll on morale.
The UCU did manage to push universities into restoring pension benefits (helped by a rise in bond yields carrying the defined benefit scheme back into surplus). It also has a fair argument that universities have become two-tier workplaces, with younger academics having to move from one fixed-term contract to another.
But that is not the point: many unions have a decent case that their members should be paid more, or employed more securely. The question is whether they can do something about it by exerting sufficient leverage to get their way. Launching an ambitious campaign without a clear-eyed calculation of the chances of success risks making things worse for everyone.
This is the significance of the UAW’s “stand-up” strike (evoking the sit-down strikes of the 1930s in Detroit). “The strike threat is back as a bargaining tool, but we’re seeing action limited by size and length, rather than the all-or-nothing strike,” says Thomas Kochan, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and veteran observer of the auto industry.
Fain was elected as UAW president this year, promising to confront employers, and is not short of inflammatory rhetoric. “Billionaires, in my opinion, don’t have a right to exist,” he said last month. But the union was careful in its actions: it targeted limited strikes at plants making profitable SUVs.
Perhaps the UCU did not know what it was starting when it broadened its pensions dispute into a larger, vaguer campaign in 2018. But this summer, it ended up expressing outrage that universities had docked pay from lecturers who boycotted marking. Strikes involve losses, and a union that fails to anticipate it misleads members.
There is a wider moral for unions. A successful strike is a recruiting tool: Fain has promised to renew the UAW’s efforts to organise in non-union carmakers including Tesla. Conversely, a botched one is not only a bad advertisement but encourages existing members to drift away.
It is easier for some unions to put pressure on employers than others. The UCU’s weakness was that its strikes did not hit university revenues because students kept on enrolling. Transport unions such as the RMT in the UK, which has called a series of rail strikes this year, have more clout.
But every union should heed the UAW example. The strike was a textbook case of a union knowing its strengths and its weaknesses, and responding smartly. UK union membership is now higher among graduates than non-graduates, so it is time for lecturers to start learning from the assembly line.
