Trina picks the labor story of 2022.
Labor story of 2022
Are you ready to presoak? Reminder, if you're eating black-eyed peas on Sunday for New Years and using dried black-eyed peas, you're going to need to start soaking them tonight.
Okay, the labor story of the year? How UAW conspired to rig the election for UAW president and to shut out candidate Will Lehman.
On December 19, UAW presidential candidate Will Lehman filed a formal protest to the results of the 2022 officer elections “in their entirety.”
Lehman’s written protest to the court-appointed monitor overseeing the ballot is an encyclopedic historical record of the election, comprehensively detailing every facet of the antidemocratic conspiracy by the entrenched bureaucracy to cling to power by suppressing the vote.
The 50-page protest and dozens of pages of attachments, compiling information gathered through the growing networks of rank-and-file members that were established in the course of Lehman’s campaign, demonstrate that the bureaucracy repeatedly violated American labor law and that the election was illegal.
Lehman, the only socialist candidate in the election, won nearly 5,000 votes among rank-and-file auto and academic workers from across the country. But unless his protest is upheld, his name will be excluded from the runoff election next month, which will be limited to the leading candidates of the union’s bureaucratic apparatus, Ray Curry and Shawn Fain, each of whom earned less than 4 percent of the total eligible votes amid massive voter suppression.
One million out of 1.1 million eligible members did not vote in the election because the UAW leadership deliberately kept them in the dark. This is not a matter of opinion but of provable fact. Lehman’s protest describes, for example, how the UAW national “Member News” web page, which is incorporated into many local union web sites, made no reference to the election whatsoever between July 29 and November 29.
While it maintained a conspiracy of silence around the union’s internal elections, the bureaucracy devoted vast resources to campaigning for the Democratic Party in the national midterm elections. In those elections, which took place at the very same time as the union election, the bureaucracy utilized advanced techniques, organized public events, and bombarded union members with advertising in an effort to increase turnout by reminding workers of voting deadlines.
There is no innocent explanation for this contrast. If the union had spent the same resources on its own election as it did supporting Democrats in the midterms, the turnout would have indisputably been far higher.
His campaign issued the following statement:
On December 5, the UAW Monitor announced unofficial results from the UAW’s first-ever direct elections of its national leadership, which were held as the result of a years-long corruption scandal which sent more than a dozen top UAW officials to prison. The Monitor’s vote tally showed that only 103,495 ballots were counted, out of a total eligible voting membership of 1.1 million active and retired workers—a turnout of less than 10 percent, the lowest turnout by far for any direct union election.
Lehman’s protest submitted to the Monitor extensively documents, including numerous statements submitted by workers and data from other direct union elections, how the UAW apparatus systematically failed to inform workers of the fact that union elections were taking place, or took only the most minimal measures to do so. At the same time, the UAW went to great lengths to “get out the vote” for the Democratic Party in the run-up to the US mid-term elections, demonstrating that UAW had the means to inform workers of the union elections, but deliberately did not do so.
In November, Lehman had earlier filed a lawsuit in US District Court requesting that voting deadlines in the UAW elections be extended by 30 days and that serious measures be taken to ensure all workers were informed of the elections. The judge in the case, while acknowledging serious problems with the election procedure, dismissed the suit on narrow technical grounds.
To remedy the violation of workers’ democratic right to participate in a meaningful election, “ballots should be re-issued and a new election should be held,” Lehman states. “In the alternative, the names of all candidates should be added to the ‘runoff.’ In either case, this time adequate measures must be taken to prevent the union leadership from suppressing the vote and ensure that the entire membership is aware of the election and able to vote.”
“I urge workers in the UAW to read the full protest and to share it as widely as possible,” Lehman added. “Contact my campaign and send us a statement supporting my challenge opposing the UAW bureaucracy’s attempt to once again trample the rights of the rank and file. Let me know if you were unable to secure a ballot, or if you have other relevant information about efforts to suppress the vote.”
The UAW repeatedly sold out autoworkers in 2022 so it shouldn't be a big surprise that they also worked to rig the union's presidential election.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for Friday:
