Strikers guarding window entrance to Fisher body plant number three. Flint, Michigan, 1937. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

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In the past five months, New Labor Forum has hosted a robust debate on what lessons can be learned from the United Auto Workers (UAW)’s 2024 organizing victory at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee and its subsequent defeat just a few weeks later at a Mercedes plant in Birmingham, Alabama. If we hope for new organizing to succeed — and since the election of new president Shawn Fain in 2023, the UAW is one of the few unions making that effort — it’s worth exploring that debate.

Chris Brooks, who was Fain’s chief of staff during both elections, argued in January that the substantial vote for the union at Volkswagen and the fairly close defeat at Mercedes both came out of what he calls a “momentum moment,” a triumph of worker enthusiasm born out of 2023’s successful strikes at the Big Three automakers that meant the union could eschew some of its more careful, precise leadership development and workplace mapping in order to capture workers’ excitement as quickly as possible. The difference in the results, he argues — and the difference from often overwhelming UAW higher-education victories — was the higher level of management opposition to unionization at Mercedes.

On the other hand, Michael Belt and Carla Villanueva, who were lead on-the-ground UAW staff organizers at both auto sites, assert that the victory at Volkswagen was a result of a model of assiduous cultivation of leader-activists used successfully in their previous higher-ed organizing. The loss at Mercedes, in their telling, sprang from an over-reliance on the “momentum” theory in lieu of this nascent systematic organizing. And they deny that management opposition in higher education was as minimal as Brooks asserts.

Interestingly, both articles point to the touchstone year of 1937 to “prove” their argument. How could that be? It’s because both pick and choose selectively from the events of the year (and also mostly disregard the years immediately before and after) to make their case.

Brooks is right that 1937 was when the unionization campaigns of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) really took off. After the victory of the sit-down strike at GM’s Flint auto body shop — that is, after the agreement that ended it, which gave the UAW exclusive bargaining rights at GM plants for six months — previously hesitant workers flooded into the UAW. That year’s upsurge is encapsulated in an anecdote about a phone call from workers to the CIO’s Detroit office: “We’re sitting down. Please send somebody over to organize us.”

Belt and Villanueva, however, point to what made success at Flint and a handful of prior auto, rubber, and longshore victories possible: the long period of communist and socialist organizing in workplaces that preceded the upsurge, stretching back to the 1920s in some cases. Then, though Belt and Villanueva don’t say this, those activists led shop-floor fights about establishing greater control of the workplace that spelled out what the new unions meant in practice. That, too, encouraged workers to sign union cards.

Yet these snapshots don’t tell the whole story.

A Fuller History Tells a More Complex Story

As early as 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)’s declaration that “employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers” set off a wave of momentum organizing. Auto workers were typical. Encouraged by the idea that “the president wants you to join a union,” they poured into an American Federation of Labor (AFL) auto union. Then, when it became apparent that the AFL had no plan for confronting and defeating hostile automakers, and the NIRA provided no enforcement mechanism, they poured back out.

There were exceptions. The ranks of the United Mine Workers were revitalized. In 1934, left-led efforts in Minneapolis, San Francisco, Akron, and Toledo were crucial in overcoming AFL timidity and winning victories in, respectively, the trucking industry, the docks, tire manufacturing, and a major auto parts supplier through general strikes, mass illegal picketing, and battles in the streets. We need to recognize that today, when unions talk about community support, they mean something different, and far less effective, than putting thousands of people in the streets to confront the police or National Guard, and to prevent scabs from driving trucks or crossing a picket line.

But mostly, industrial workers remained unorganized, and in 1935, new organizing ebbed. Yet two events that year proved crucial to later union victories. In Washington, the Roosevelt administration, now concerned with labor support in the following year’s election — and also eager to lessen the prospects of a new round of left-led, take-the-law-into-their-own-hands militancy — acceded to the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which regularized union recognition through government-supervised elections. However, most employers simply ignored the act’s provisions until the Supreme Court ruled it legal in April 1937 — another reason 1937 proved such a climactic year. Meanwhile, a handful of unions, disgusted with the AFL’s hesitancy, formed the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO, later the Congress of Industrial Organizations). Funded primarily by coal miners’ dues, they began to pour money into the hiring of (mostly leftist) union organizers and the creation of organizing structures that might overcome worker reticence to join unions.

Those structures paid off at Flint, but it’s worth noting that the number of sit-down strikers (the equivalent of Belt and Villanueva’s “leader-activists”) was actually quite small. There was certainly no widespread momentum yet and, in fact, the sentiments of the tens of thousands of auto workers simply laid off as the rest of GM shut down was unclear. And, brave as this militant minority was, their efforts might have been in vain if not for the tacit neutrality of the Roosevelt administration, the refusal of Michigan governor Frank Murphy to mobilize National Guard troops to oust the strikers from the plant, and the ability of the UAW and CIO to rouse mass community support of the strike.

So, momentum can be a factor, and so can leader-activists. But politics matters too, and community support, and union support for organizing efforts.

After Flint

Even after Flint and the almost simultaneous Supreme Court NLRA decision, success was hardly assured. Workers who joined the UAW and organized locals after Flint did so knowing, or at least believing, that General Motors and Chrysler were more or less ready to accept and bargain with the union. In most plants, official National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections came after what we would today call “card check” recognition. That was the story at US Steel too, which agreed to recognize the United Steel Workers (USW). It was frequently after “recognition” that the role of leader-activists became crucial; these were the new shop stewards who led contests against unilateral management control of production, demonstrating to workers what precisely the power of the union meant — about all the manifold issues on which these new, minimalist, contracts were often silent.

Elsewhere, though, there were reverses. The Flint “momentum” ebbed quickly in steel, when the “Little Steel” companies provoked, and then broke, a USW strike just a few months later (the USW apparently was uncertain whether it could win NLRB elections). Referring to the battling adversaries, Roosevelt’s “a pox on both their houses” statement, due to the economic disruption of the strike, indicated that perhaps the president didn’t really care if workers joined a union or not.

A combination of employer terror and African American worker loyalty to the one auto manufacturer that hired them in numbers, allowed Ford to fend off the UAW. Then, the 1938 “Roosevelt recession” and subsequent widespread layoffs left many unions unable to defend the earlier year’s gains. Many workers in these and other industries simply stopped paying dues. For a year or two, the fate of these new unions was unclear.

Maybe they would have regained their footing anyway, but what actually both saved them and shaped their character was the danger, and then outbreak, of war in Europe. On the one hand, the economy picked back up due to orders from Britain and France and the beginnings of American rearmament. But by 1940, the Roosevelt administration became increasingly insistent to both employers and unions that those rearmament efforts not be disrupted. Infamously, at North American Aviation, a key military supplier, the Roosevelt administration mobilized troops to break a UAW strike led by the mastermind of Flint; UAW and CIO leadership, eager to maintain good relations with Roosevelt, supported his action and repudiated their own leader-activists.

To make a long and complicated story much shorter, the federal government decided that unions could best enforce labor discipline where, in fact, employers recognized them and agreed to detailed contracts spelling out management, union, and worker rights. This was the government putting its thumb on the scale for union organizing of a certain kind. The early war years were thus both a peak period of union growth and an early stage of the unions acting as contract policemen, telling workers what they were not allowed to do. Ironically, they tried to demobilize those leader-activists. That pattern — of derailing shop floor activism as soon as recognition was won — is still common in organizing drives.

What Does All This Tell Us About Organizing Today?

New organizing is an art, not a science. Nevertheless, art isn’t random; it is a conscious activity which proceeds from general principles which you then decide how and when to apply. Mercedes was different from Volkswagen; both are different from Starbucks, which is different from Amazon, which is different from Uber.

Among the questions that workers and organizers may have to assess and address are:

• Can you find ways to negate employer opposition? What happens if that involves making sweetheart deals with the employer?
• Can you find ways to build community support? What kind of community support?
• Can you find ways to get the government on your side, or at least ensure neutrality? What are the costs that may be tied to government support?
• Can you bring other outside economic pressures to bear?
• Can you find a worker in every department that will speak up for the union – and then, can you train them to speak and act effectively?
• Do you listen to those workers and their experiences and concerns and adjust your tactics accordingly?
• How do you organize outside the workplace?
• Can you spot an opportunity when it presents itself?
• Can you find ways to build momentum and ride it? Are you prepared if and when it flags?
• Are you willing to weigh whether it is worth it to break the law?

Nor should we forget that all these decisions and choices have ramifications beyond a successful recognition vote. That’s because we seek not just greater union density — quantity — but quality too. We need union organization — and strategies and tactics — that can help build power directly in the workplace, across bargaining tables, and in political arenas.

A version of this piece first appeared at Marc Kagan’s Substack.

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Marc Kagan, long-time union activist and author of Take Back the Power: The Fall and Rise and Fall of NYC’s Transport Workers Union, 1975-2009, writes about contemporary and historical labor issues.