UAWD Getting Back to the Future of Labor Organizing

On a Sunday in late March, more than four dozen United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers (UAW) union members joined a Zoom training put on by Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a UAW caucus. A year prior, in 2025, UAWD went through a divisive public split between reformers closely aligned with UAW President Shawn Fain and those who sought an independent caucus with a class-struggle focus. Coming out of that period, UAWD, in its current form, has set out to concretize and develop its organizational ideas.

The March training, called “Class Struggle Unionism 101 Training,” was part of those ongoing efforts. It aimed to provide new rank-and-file organizers with basic skills “to build strong teams, develop an escalation plan, and win fights against the boss,” according to the meeting’s billing.

For anyone who’s attended an introductory labor organizing course like those hosted by Labor Notes, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, or other left-leaning labor groups, large chunks of the presentation would be familiar. The training explained the historical role of unions in the U.S., showed the century-long downward trend of unions with a graph charting union density against broader income inequality, and spoke to the crisis faced by workers everywhere and the need for them to organize, now more than ever.

The second half of the presentation presented tried-and-true organizing strategies for the shop floor, beginning with coworker support mapping and tactical issue escalation schema. These modes of organizing are now common in any union organizing training aimed at empowering workers.

It was the first half of the UAWD presentation that one won’t find offered in the typical union organizing space today. It discussed the fundamentals of class struggle–a deliberate framing that placed workers at odds with the owners of the means of production. UAWD co-chair Nolan Tabb, a long-time member of Local 281 at John Deere in Davenport, Iowa, identified what class-struggle unionism boils down to in one word: power.

“Class-struggle unionism recognizes that, at the end of the day, it’s all about power: who has it, who doesn’t; how we build it, how we use it,” Tabb said during the Zoom training. The dynamic, he went on to explain, was a struggle between two competing classes, those that work and those that rule, with goals that work directly against each other.

“These opposing interests can’t be reconciled, and they can’t coexist. That means we have to fight,” said Tabb.

This rhetoric of boss antagonism and worker power fills speeches made by labor leaders and their supporters, all of whom are eager to capture the current moment of enthusiasm. For example, UAW President Shawn Fain has blasted “corporate greed,” “company unionism,” and pledged to fight for “the good of the entire working class.” The result is that hearing terms like “rank-and-file organizing” and “class warfare” now make it hard to pin-down a meaningful idea. This doesn’t appear accidental. The rhetoric of the labor bureaucracy and its backers gets defined on the shop floor and in meetings of the local. It’s made real in the power union members are invested with, in their day-to-day work space, in the say they have over working conditions, and in the role they have in building the union itself.

UAWD clearly sees a gap (or a chasm) between the words of union leaders and the deeds of the union as it operates in reality. Whereas generations of business-friendly unionism have reduced most labor battles to so-called “bread-and-butter issues” of wages and benefits, the focus on class-struggle unionism that UAWD advocates for harkens back to the heyday of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the early 20th century and the battles over virtually every aspect of working conditions. Not only are economic demands on the table, but the decisions about hours and shifts, safety and production output, and even what goods and services are actually produced.

The idea that owners had the “right” to run their companies however they like? Tabb called that idea “bullshit.”

Over the last year, UAWD has worked to mold itself into something that stands in contrast to much of today’s structured labor organizing efforts: avowedly militant, steeped in broad class solidarity, and focused first and foremost on workers themselves as the central figures–both to be organized and to be empowered, on the job and in the union. Those involved in these efforts are not shy about their struggles. Nor do they grandstand about outcomes; if anything, they’re hyperrealistic about the challenges ahead and the potential for failure.

A year after the split, despite the difficulties, today’s UAWD is providing both a new and revived historical model for organizing, one that has the potential to challenge the way business is done in the C-suite and the union hall alike.

Left evolution

The split that divided UAWD in 2025 was never inevitable. But in hindsight, a number of factors made it much more likely.

Since the late 1940s, the UAW existed under the one-party rule of the Administrative Caucus, which began with Walter Reuther. It ended when federal prosecutors put away a baker’s dozen UAW leaders, including the president of the international, on corruption charges in 2020. This opened a window of opportunity that reformers, led by UAWD, quickly took advantage of in 2021 by winning a union-wide referendum to change the voting process for union leadership to a one-member-one-vote system. The success of that campaign led the fledgling UAWDto assemble and lead the campaign for a new leadership slate that saw Shawn Fain and a number of others elected as reformers.

Yet the questions of UAWD’s politics–what the caucus, only a few years old, would stand for following its successful campaigns–began to crystallize during the first major test of Fain’s leadership. In Summer 2023, Fain took the union into conflict with the “Big 3” automakers during a series of simultaneous contract negotiations–a bold first. Ultimately, the union would secure tentative agreements from all three companies. What role, then, would UAWD play, if any, to help the union’s leadership secure support for the proposed contracts?

Two competing views began to develop, although not yet with clearly defined groupings or fully-formed strategies, setting the stage for the tension within the caucus. One tendency adopted a loyalist reform stance that sought to keep itself and the caucus close to Fain and the rest of the new leadership, while prioritizing union reform. In contrast, another tendency sought to maintain UAWD as independent of leadership and, instead, beholden only to members. They would come to identify themselves almost a year later as the class-struggle wing.

At the end of August 2023–weeks before the Big 3 strikes began–a resolution was put forward within UAWD that called for weekly membership meetings as long as a strike continued, as well as members’ meetings to discuss and debate any tentative agreement. Ultimately, the resolution passed, but the internal debate foreshadowed the groupings that would come to define the split, with those eager to show independence strongly supporting the measure, hoping to empower rank-and-file workers to make their own call on any agreement, and those opposed more concerned about the impact on Fain and the rest of UAW leadership.

By early 2025, the year-plus of internal conflict within UAWD was reaching a crisis point. A few months earlier, at the annual UAWD convention, a slate close to the union’s leadership won a majority of the caucus’s steering committee. Fain himself made an appearance. Members of the class-struggle wing claimed the win was bolstered by paper members and support from more progressive members of the Administrative Caucus, the long-time leadership caucus UAWD worked to defeat in the 2022 election, who had come to align with Fain in the years since.

Disagreements about the future of UAWD persisted. The class-struggle wing continued organizing around its priorities and winning when it did so. This was made possible by the fact that it aligned with the vast majority of the caucus’s active members in manufacturing and other sectors. The pro-Fain reform wing would later point to debates during this period as being highly politicized and designed as “a political litmus test,” with the debate over support for Palestine, in their words, an example of high-minded union activists who had lost sight of the shop floor.

Yet the class-struggle group took on a full array of issues, including support for Palestine, that were important to workers, and won. They took on the Federal monitor over his improper interference in UAW’s internal policy decision making, calling his actions “an example of the government and the billionaire class working to undermine our union’s political independence”. They spearheaded resolutions that rescinded endorsements for two UAW leaders, Margaret Mock and Rich Boyer, over failures in office. They anchored UAWD’s Electric Vehicle committee, which raised awareness about mass layoffs. They argued against Fain’s support of Trump’s tariffs in trainings, voted down a resolution to disenfranchise non-manufacturing workers, and launched a campaign to organize for a bottom-up general strike in 2028.

On March 26, 2025, a majority of the UAWD steering committee, all Fain-backing reformers, released a statement. Members of the caucus could “no longer work together toward common goals,” they said. While they believed in the need for a caucus like UAWD, the current group had become “one that is constantly engaged in insular debate that distracts from the work of building the union.” The class-struggle wing issued a rebuttal to the claims of the steering committee majority and reaffirmed the principles of class-struggle unionism.

At the UAWD membership meeting the following month, the steering committee majority pushed through its resolution to dissolve the caucus. Members of the class-struggle wing later found at least seven caucus members, including Ben Rosenfield—a member of the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys, UAW Local 2325—who appeared blocked from access to the Zoom meeting where the vote took place. Rosenfeld later asked: “How can such a vote be seen as legitimate?” The activists also detailed a long list of issues and procedural violations by the leadership of UAWD during the meeting, including allowing a majority vote to pass the dissolution proposal, despite bylaws calling for a supermajority. Ultimately, thanks to undemocratic tactics like those faced by Rosenfield, the class-struggle wing believes that a swing of more than two-dozen votes went towards dissolution, which was more than the 23-vote margin by which it passed at the meeting.

“In all aspects, in all angles, it was a coup; that’s what it was,” said Tabb.

Regroup, refocus

Today, UAWD is the project of the class-struggle unionism faction and the majority of UAWD’s pre-split active membership, while those committed to continuing the reformist tack that is aligned with UAW leadership split off to create a new organization called UAW Member Action. The postdiluvian afterlife of each caucus provides a window into what separates both the theory and the practice of class-struggle unionism from mainstream union organizing found in most labor spaces today.

On UAW Member Action’s website, the caucus states it is a “union-wide network of members supporting each other to stand up to employers, grow as activists and organizers, and carry on the transformation of our union at every level.” Its bylaws have a heavy focus on the collective bargaining process and the role of contracts between workers and management. Under its “Resources” section these priorities– “UAW Contracts,” “Contract Negotiations,” “Grievance Handling”–are alongside support for the union’s bureaucratic structure: “Stewards Network,” which looks to connect officials to “troubleshoot handling grievances, building member involvement, and enforcing our contracts;” and “Running for Union Office,” a how-to if one is considering a position.

The contrast between the public presentations by UAWD and Member Action points directly to the gulf between the now-separate aims and agendas. UAWD member Nevena Pilipović-Wengler, out of Local 22 in Detroit, sees the two groups as coming out of “fundamentally different starting points.” She noted that the word “class,” working or otherwise, appears nowhere in Member Action’s bylaws or on its website.

“We have two very different projects. They think having elected positions locked down is what will lead to victories for the working class. We believe that it actually starts on the shop floor and through the politics of challenging capital, like fighting layoffs and overloaded jobs, and ending forced overtime,” Pilipović-Wengler said. “I think Members Action is thinking about reform within the constraints of labor law and within the constraints of capital. I don’t think they’re interested in increasing worker control of not just the shop floor, but in the larger production process.”

Multiple requests to speak to someone from Members Action for this piece received no acknowledgement or response.

A class-struggle focus, UAWD argues, rests on the belief that workers themselves–not management, not union leadership–are where all organizing should begin and end. Critically, the focus is not simply on the four corners of a contract, or on the most efficient ways to handle the grievance process, or even on wages and benefits.

Class-struggle unionism begins with a different analysis entirely, one familiar to many of the Left. Yet the focus on “class-struggle” versus an overt socialist framing is intentional. While the “big picture” class-struggle discussion reads like a typical Marxist analysis of the extractive labor-value relationship between workers and capitalists, the class-struggle focus brings the larger picture framing down to the quotidian concerns most workers face. This is praxis for those not necessarily soaked in or sold on socialism, but who comprehend the curse capitalism sets upon us.

UAWD sees its work within the widening gap between the real-world experience of workers under capitalism and the unsatisfactory solutions offered by the reformist labor organizing efforts of UAW Member Action and others.

The theory rests on five core values presented in the UAWD Member Platform. The first is worker control. It is workers, not managers or owners (nor union bureaucrats) who should be in control–from the shop floor on up to how production and the supply chain are managed. But that first step is critical in this formulation; it’s not expressed in grandiose statements as much as through the slow, difficult, uncertain process UAWD is in now, of trying to develop UAWD chapters within locals across sectors.

“If the workers were to step outside with the bosses, the workers would win that fight,” Josh Trombley, a UAW Temp Organizer based in Region 9A, said during the UAWD presentation. “You and your coworkers are the drivers of change. Our power comes from working together with our coworkers. Our power doesn’t come from our bosses, the government, from union staff, or even elected union leaders…you must be the ones to actually take action.”

The next is militancy. Union leaders, in particular, are fond of tough talk about the power of unionized workers, but the reality is that militancy has become a dirty word in business unions. Class-struggle unionism seeks to return the willingness to be overtly confrontational to the core of worker organizing. Wildcat strikes, sitdowns, slowdowns–these and more need to be on the table for workers, even as UAWD acknowledges most workers aren’t yet ready to take militant action.

The third is working class solidarity, one that extends beyond a local or a sector, that stretches beyond borders and industries. Democracy is the fourth value, placing decision-making in the hands of workers, not as an ideal but as “a strategic form of organizational power building,” according to the UAWD website. Lastly, independence–from not only union leadership, but more broadly in mainstream politics as a key towards charting a different and better course.

UAWD organizers are okay if this means not everyone is on board. UAWD co-chair Andrew Bergman, based out of General Motors Local 22 in Detroit, explained this understanding as one of concentric circles. Too small a circle, like the one a socialist-explicit formulation might create, would likely be focused on distant, abstracted political goals, failing to attract enough people or to meaningfully advance shop-floor activity or class-struggle politics, especially given UAWD’s goal of building organized branches within UAW locals across sectors.

Too big and broad a focus, which Bergman likened to the way UAWD operated prior to the split, would have the opposite issue: it could attract a broader group of people, of both viewpoints and numbers, but it would struggle to articulate a core motivation for action that would translate to local organizing.

“After the split, we realized that it wasn’t just our internal structure that allowed UAWD to be captured by the leaders we elected, it was our unclear political goals: a vague, apolitical notion of democracy and reform,” said Bergman. “In that way, having a smaller group of only a couple hundred more committed cadre was almost a good problem to have, because it meant we needed to be long-sighted and not imagine we already had the ideas, formations, or members necessary to race to the finish line.”

In that Goldilocks space is class-struggle unionism.

If there’s a specific dividing line between the class-struggle approach and what most labor organizing efforts look like these days, it’s in the relationship between workers and the union itself. This broad generalization has ample caveats. But it means that, whereas most organizing is focused on the structures of the union itself–the need for ratification through the approved legal process, the focus on their bureaucratic structure, the solutions to workers’ problems through contractual negotiations alone–are taken as givens, necessities, rather than choices made.

Tapping a more radical tradition, class-struggle unionism necessarily rejects this framing. But it also goes further, making the union itself a space of contest and struggle, where organized workers must also fight to make their goals real in the face of an entrenched bureaucracy that is more interested in labor peace than worker control. These battles come at every level, from the struggles on the shop floor created by both management and union officials, to the loftier goals of a union that fights against state violence or for control over the means of production–something that seems today wildly out of reach, but which locals within UAW itself fought for at times in the early 20th century.

As Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin note in “Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions,” in the 1930s and 40s radical organizers in UAW Local 600 at the Ford River Rouge plant–the largest industrial manufacturing complex the world had ever seen–were unwilling to cede conditions on the shop floor, and beyond, to control from above: “For working-class radicals or socialists, ‘management rights’ [‘to decide not only what they produce but how they produce it’] are neither ‘inherent’ nor legitimate; on the contrary, such alleged rights constitute, in their view, a quasilegal form of illegitimate class power.”

For UAW organizers of the day, Stephan-Norris and Zeitline write, this “struggle over the frontier of control in American industry” opened up the possibility of a formalized relationship between labor and management that put workers in control of greater parts of their work life and, intentionally, raised the specter of the ability to gain control of a bigger swath of the broader social system as a whole. Quoting a management expert who interviewed radical workers at the time, those interviewed indicated that, “[i]n both spheres [state and industry] they see the necessity of controlling authority in the interests of those who take the orders.”

This, then, is the shared spirit class-struggle unionism seeks, at least in theory, to embrace. In today’s labor dynamic, this means a battle not only with the ownership class, but with business unionism that long ago yielded to the interests of capital.

Comparing notes

UAWD is not alone among militant efforts within major trade unions. However, there is a contrast of styles in these efforts, with different priorities and tactics allowing for a useful comparison of strategies that ultimately have similar, if not mirror, end goals.

Shortly before Shawn Fain led UAW through its contract process with the Big 3 automakers in 2024, labor supporters were focused on another major contract battle. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, led by the pugnacious Sean O’Brien, was poised for negotiations with UPS.

UPS is the single-largest employer of Teamsters in the country. The approximately 300,000 Teamsters working at the company account for roughly a third of all the union’s members in the U.S. The looming contract fight presented a rare and unique opportunity to see a major union fight to undo years of givebacks and clawbacks from one of the most recognizable companies in the world.

For part-timers, who make up more than 60 percent of the unionized workforce at UPS, this was also a moment of much-needed action. Conditions for part-time workers were far worse than those of full-time UPS employees, and many part-timers saw O’Brien’s bombast ahead of threatened strikes as an encouraging sign that he would fight for them.

The strike never came. The tentative contract agreement, hammered out between UPS and union leadership behind closed doors, failed to live up to expectations for many, including part-time workers. Ahead of the ratification vote, a group of these workers formed a new caucus, Teamsters Mobilized, to urge their coworkers not to accept O’Brien’s deal. They, too, faced a split with a reform faction within the Teamsters that had become closely tied to the union leadership: Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) had helped propel O’Brien to victory and were unresponsive to concerns about the plight of part-time workers in the bargaining process, leading some of them to form Teamsters Mobilize.

The contract ultimately passed, but Teamsters Mobilize continued to grow as a force of its own. Today, it has expanded beyond its core of part-timers to include a broader base of Teamsters across sectors. As the caucus has developed and grown, the group has retained a militant formation with an activist focus. This has meant pushing the Teamsters on issues around Palestinian solidarity and anti-ICE efforts. It has also meant taking aim at the Teamster leadership, especially O’Brien, whose active flirting with Trump and bizarre rightward shift provide ample fodder.

Jess Lister has been with Teamsters Mobilize since the beginning. A part-time UPS worker in Georgia, Lister sees the organization’s focus as addressing a set of needs for a broad set of people.

“We all had these big ideas, even back then, about what Teamsters Mobilize could possibly lead to. We wanted it to be Teamsters, all industries, both part-time and full-time,” she said. “I think we would all agree that we’re thrilled with the growth.”

Teamsters Mobilize operates at a high elevation. Group chats, with participants from across the country, provide central spaces for dialogue, information sharing, and planning. Political discussions, even arguments, get hashed out largely online. There are no Teamsters Mobilized local chapters to speak of; the closest formation is the unofficial SoCal Teamsters Mobilize grouping in California. While only Teamsters can be members, like-minded members of other unions or even non-union individuals have opportunities to be involved in the work. The group is currently going through a process of determining a membership-dues schedule.

“So many of these people thought we were a flash in the pan,” Lister said. “The fact is that not only are we still around; we’re actually doing a lot.”

Lister said that some discussion has occurred about developing more location-specific structures, likely by region. The focus currently is on utilizing online and social media channels as Teamsters Mobilize’s primary arena of agitation. This is conducted overwhelmingly on Instagram (the group is also active on Facebook). Their nearly 2,400 Instagram followers have seen a growth of content that features Teamsters Mobilize members at events, speaking directly to the camera about issues, and critiquing the regressive moves of the O’Brien administration, all in unvarnished left language.

For Lister, this is a strategy of growth grounded in principles that can help rebuild a militant labor movement.

“Anybody that wants to expose something, or bring awareness to something–or even a win, like, ‘I’ve accomplished this in my union, this is how I did it’–we want to put out more material educating people and bringing awareness to different things,” she said.

Chantelle Schultz has a particularly unique vantage point. She was an early member of Teamsters Mobilize as a part-time UPS worker in New Jersey. The Maoist Communist Union member is now with UAW Local 2179 in the Strand book shop’s warehouse, while continuing to work with Teamster Mobilize as a supporter.

Schultz is a firm believer in how Teamster Mobilize is looking to advance its purpose–and sees those efforts as something UAWD should likewise embrace.

“TM has had a particular emphasis on putting out media–instagram posts, blog posts, articles–to reach Teamsters members to talk about what the issues are that we face as workers, to talk about the issues of class collaboration in our unions, how the union leadership collaborates with the capitalist class and tries to get us to believe the lie that as workers we can have class harmony and shared interests with the capitalists and so on,” Schultz said, adding that there was a specific focus on addressing “working class position on all these issues that we see in society, economic and political” that include the war in Iran, the genocide in Gaza, and U.S. imperialism.

Schultz has been a member of UAW for a short period–since the autumn of 2025–and involved with UAWD for only a few months, but sees a qualifiable divide in the two organizational focuses. She sees that “there is an idea in UAWD that we should only focus on shop-floor organizing right now, and that we shouldn’t try to do national-scale organizing, or national-level campaigns, or spend much time on exposing what’s going on at [upcoming international union elections].”

“I think this is a mistake,” she said.

The “larger issue” of UAW’s overall business unionism orientation is tied directly to the issues on the shop floor: “We’re only going to be able to get so far in terms of organizing on the shop level if it’s not connected up on the national scale…In order to really fight for some principles about waging the class struggle, we need to not only think about our struggle as UAW members being on a national scale, but really as the class as being on the national scale.”

The solution? Be more like Teamster Mobilize: see social media as a vital arena for member outreach and propaganda, focus on broader sets of political and economic issues, and pick a fight with UAW’s leadership.

“There’s a difference in how much TM and UAWD have respectively criticized the international leadership of the two unions,” Schultz said. “Teamsters Mobilize…has put out very consistent, scathing criticism of O’Brien and the union leadership. TM sees this as absolutely necessary to expose him for what he is and to develop the necessary consciousness amongst Teamsters members to wage a militant fight. I think UAWD should have been putting out consistent criticism of Fain and other UAW leadership.”

This tactical focus is a familiar one to anyone who engages on social media with issues on the Left. Groups aplenty have developed outsized online presences that see combat by online posting as not only a legitimate way of advocating for their issues, but as the most effective. Outrage and frustration are easy to both find and stoke online, and this tactic seeks to connect with those most impacted by the messaging and the targets, in the hopes of persuading them to join in the fight.

It would be foolhardy and counterproductive for any group, be they an activist organization or a militant union caucus, to ignore the very real power social media plays these days in the lives of everyone, and most notably among younger generations. The question is not do or do not, but rather what are the political aims? Who are you trying to organize? What are the outcomes you’re looking to realize along these tactical lines?

Every set of choices has pros and cons. Here, the answer to the above points to two different projects. Teamsters Mobilized is a highly dispersed organization, one that was described as a reform-focused group by Jess Lister. Their aims are upwards; the fight focuses mainly on top union bosses and their allies, the capitalist ownership class, and the political actors who support them. The demands on these power structures hope to find resonance with individuals online, both Teamsters and others, who seek to join the fight.

This is a well-worn tactical array. Most issue-based nonprofits, and more than a few left groups, utilize a similar playbook of online-first advocacy around big-picture issues. The challenge (or problem, depending on one’s point of view) is that there isn’t a track record for success. Targeting individuals like union bosses doesn’t mean the next person is going to be any better. Building a network of individuals spread out all over the country means that very little collective action on physical ground is possible.

And while online advocacy is an indispensable part of any contemporary political fight, success in the digital realm is not a stand-in for success in the real world. Teamsters Mobilize has an Instagram account with 2,500 followers as of this writing. Some of their videos have gotten more than 400 likes at times, but many others received less than 200. In a world where interactions in the thousands are a baseline for meaningfulness, this strategy has a significant threshold yet to be met.

As it pertains to UAWD, these issues, as realistic as they are, are almost insignificant. They aren’t targeting the same priorities. Rather than making the powered elite the specific target, the class-struggle perspective goes in the opposite direction, placing the organizational priority on organizing, developing, and growing shop-floor worker power. While both objectives are the overthrow of the extractive capitalist order, the focus on workers has the longer, more uncertain prioritization of a working-class movement built out of the shop floors, offices, and institutions that workers toil in every day.

The difficulties down this path are not lost on UAWD organizers.

“Our coworkers often see the bureaucracy as ineffective in providing an expected service, but don’t yet see our union as capable of waging or winning militant fights, even though they’re often ready to fight the bosses themselves,” UAWD’s Bergman said. “The challenge is to build up rank-and-file political and organizational capacity for collective struggle, which we’re working to anchor through local chapters and class struggle propaganda. We believe that when our coworkers are engaged in struggle and see their elected leaders collude with management to undermine them, then our critiques of the bureaucracy will resonate much more broadly.”

The future is uncertainty

As of early June 2026, UAWD has approximately 200 dues-paying members. There are currently three chapters organized with union locals across the country, with a number of additional ones in the pipeline. To better serve its educational and propaganda purposes, it launched a new publication, Daily Struggle, last October, because, as an editorial note in the first issue stated, the “lack of any serious response by organized labor to the attacks on our unions, our rights, and the very principles of democracy and equality since the start of Donald Trump’s second term points to the need for a renewal of independent working-class militancy.“ Recent articles include a look at commitments by UAW Local 2325, the legal services workers in New York City, to authorize a strike to resist ICE, and a critique of the grievance process and how it can be used in more militant ways. UAWD recently published its second issue.

Labor organizers, staff, activists, and press will gather in mid-June for the annual Labor Notes conference in Chicago. During the registration process, Labor Notes informed Teamsters Mobilize steering committee member Colleen Donovan that they were refunding her registration, in effect banning her from the conference. TM has spent weeks highlighting the decision, conducting an online campaign on social media over Donovan’s ban, and has plans to host actions during Labor Notes. UAWD has minimal plans for Labor notes, with those members attending focusing on connecting with rank-and-file UAW members present and sharing copies of Daily Struggle.

For UAWD, a larger organizational get-together looms. UAW is holding its annual constitutional convention in Detroit immediately after Labor Notes this June. The caucus has released its “Class Struggle ConCon Program” ahead of the event. Two priority amendments have been put forward. The first calls for the union to actively fight layoffs–the Big 3 are estimated to have cut more than 20,000 jobs so far in 2026–by demanding work sharing across individual bargaining units. The second would call for the abolition of ICE and other attacks by the state on workers.

UAWD organizers know they are far from having the internal strength to push a union as big as UAW to not only left political priorities like standing up to ICE but to even to take a more aggressive stance towards work losses. Winning amendment fights isn’t the goal right now; being able to argue for these kinds of ideas and actions among the wider union membership is a win of its own kind.

“We put [the amendments] forward knowing they weren’t something we could win, but we wanted to show people what workers could demand if we wanted to,” said Margie Thornton, the recording secretary for UAWD and a member of the legal services UAW Local 2320 in Colorado.

The hope is that the path forward of leading by example within the larger union context, developing a working class propaganda arm to speak directly to workers on the shop floor about shop floor issues, and continuing to develop local UAWD chapters inside UAW locals is the right one.

Navruz Baum works in legal services as a paralegal and is a member of UAW Local 2325 in New York City. He is a veteran of the split last year and, since then, has been actively developing a UAWD chapter with his coworkers in Local 2325.

For him and other UAWD organizers, this will remain the priority.

“Our chapters are very, very young. I think we chartered our first chapter, like, two months ago. We’re still very much implementing and growing this strategy,” he said.

Despite these still early and modest beginnings, Baum feels that UAWD has “an outsized presence” within the larger UAW universe–through their policy activism, Daily Struggle, and influential members on shop floors. Even so, there is little appetite to leverage what resources there are to pick fights with the powers that be in the union.

“The focus is very much on growing a base for class-struggle unionism. We’re going to do what we can with these moments, and we’re bringing our program to the [UAW constitutional convention], but the forces that are against, the more conservative unionism, they’re much stronger than us in the UAW. They have firm control of the bureaucracy, of the [union’s leadership]; there’s a lot stacked against us. We’re not under any illusions about that,” Baum said.

This goal–the hope–is that this slow-boil process will spread, creating ever-more pockets within locals committed to the vision of class-struggle unionism, until a critical mass can take the fight to the next level–and beyond.

“We really see these moments as a means, not the end. Winning a battle over an amendment, or even winning control of the UAW–these aren’t the big goals,” Baum said. “At the end of the day, the big goal, the big strategy, is to win the working class over to class struggle.”

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Unite All Workers for Democracy; modified by Tempest.