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A Working-Class Foreign Policy Is Coming [1]
['Spencer Ackerman', 'John Nichols', 'Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins', 'Sandeep Vaheesan', 'Tara Pincock', 'Sarah Chihaya', 'Peter Kuper', 'Larry Cohen', 'Kelly X. Hui', 'John Semley']
Date: 2023-12-18 10:00:00+00:00
World / Column / A Working-Class Foreign Policy Is Coming After a transformative year on the picket lines, the United Auto Workers’ ambitions for building worker power don’t stop at the US border.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain speaks during the press conference with union leaders and supporters of a cease-fire in Gaza outside the US Capitol on Thursday, December 14, 2023. (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call / AP Images)
As a bleak 2023 comes to a close, no political development this year was as hopeful as the reemergence of the United Auto Workers (UAW). Under its dynamic new leader Shawn Fain, the UAW embraced worker militancy and deployed it in innovative ways. It won big wage concessions from the Big Three automakers for 150,000 workers. And once the UAW’s rolling strikes paid off, Fain wasted no time announcing a new campaign to organize another 150,000.
After a decades-long decline of organized labor in the United States, few expected the UAW to triumph. But perhaps fewer anticipated what the autoworkers’ union did earlier this month. It threw its weight behind “an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege of Gaza,” in the words of an unequivocal statement signed by dozens of unions, including the similarly dynamic Chicago Teachers Union.
With President Joe Biden sponsoring the Israeli decimation of Gaza through arms sales and UN cease-fire vetoes and the toxicity of media discourse that slanders solidarity with the Palestinians as antisemitic, the stance taken by the UAW and its union brethren was courageous. And, as first reported by Jacobin’s excellent labor correspondent Alex Press, it’s just the beginning of the union’s ambitions on US foreign policy.
Three key proponents of the UAW’s decision to oppose Israel’s assault on Gaza told me the cease-fire call will be followed by an internal audit to see if the union’s assets are tied up in Israeli bonds. More broadly, the same late November executive-board vote to endorse the cease-fire also created a political-education panel, the Divestment and Just Transition Committee, which, among other things, will examine the size, scope and impact of the US military-industrial complex that employs thousands of UAW members and dominates the global arms trade.
The committee will “think about what it would mean to actually have a just transition, what used to be called a ‘peace conversion,’ of folks who work in the weapons and defense industry into something else,” said Brandon Mancilla, director of the UAW’s Region 9A, representing 50,000 active and retired workers in New York, New England, and Puerto Rico. “And what that means is a big question. No one has solved that question.”
The group is a long way away from offering answers. But its members know they want to preserve jobs and wages in the factories whose production lines might be put to a different use than making bombs and artillery.
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