ON THE LINE

The future of American labor politics

- DAN KAUFMAN

Late in the summer, several hundred autoworkers jammed into the auditorium of United Auto Workers Local 12, in Toledo, Ohio, for a monthly meeting. Local 12 is the largest amalgamated union in the country, representing more than ten thousand people, including nearly six thousand at a Jeep factory in town. Typically, the monthly meeting attracts a far smaller crowd, but word of a possible strike had been circulating among U.A.W. membership. The union’s contract was set to expire three weeks later, at midnight, and negotiations between the union and representatives of the Big Three—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis (Chrysler and Jeep’s parent company)—were going nowhere. Bruce Baumhower, who is sixty-eight years old and has been president of the local for more than three decades, got up to the lectern. He has wisps of reddish-gray hair and the large forearms of a former assembly-line worker. He described how, not long ago, the union had given up hard-won wages and benefits to help save the industry in a period of crisis. Those compromises had been exploited by corporate greed, he said; close to a third of the unit still earned less than sixteen dollars an hour. The starting rate had barely budged in fourteen years. “That’s all going to change now,” Baumhower said. “Now it’s our time!”