Nearly A Year After Unionizing, A Group of UAW Organizers Still Doesn't Have A Contract
“What they’re doing amounts to bad faith bargaining.”
By Peter List, Editor | May 2, 2024
Amidst the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) $40 million campaign to unionize foreign-owned auto plants and battery makers, claims that the UAW itself is refusing to negotiate in good faith with its union organizers are being reported.
Last year, as the UAW’s new leadership took office, “several dozen” staff organizers employed by the UAW decided to unionize.
After nearly a year of being unionized, however, the union organizers still do not have a contract. according to an in-depth article in The Chief.
Following their unionization last year, union organizers now say that the UAW has not negotiated a contract, let alone bargained in a manner that gives them confidence that a contract is coming anytime soon.
"We went six months without any economic proposal and very few proposals at all,” Rita Akincilar, a staff organizer with the UAW’s Association of Legislative Employees and a member of the staff union’s bargaining committee told The Chief. “What they’re doing amounts to bad faith bargaining.”
The Chief also tells of union organizers who were let go from the union shortly after they had won a campaign to unionize Columbia University.
A longtime union leader who’s overseen the organizing of union staffers said he’s never heard of a union retaliating against unionizing staff organizers by firing them….But, the union leader added, many unions are ultimately businesses that must make difficult financially informed decisions and employ cost-cutting measures.
“Akincilar also works on three-month contracts despite working for the UAW for two and a half years,” The Chief reported. “She and several other staffers have for brief periods lost their health insurance because it mistakenly wasn’t renewed at the time their employment was.”
In March, the UAW organizers took to X (formerly Twitter) to express their dismay.
First-time contracts often take much longer than successor agreements. According to a Bloomberg Law analysis in 2022, it takes an average of 465 days to negotiate a first contract.
However, the UAW organizers are not working for an employer that may not be interested in quickly signing a contract. Rather, their employer is in the business of negotiating contracts.
Read the rest at The Chief (registration required)
