The UAW recently signed a new contract that guaranteed the forced dues payers would lose their jobs. The self proclaimed Socialist UAW President, Fain, has decided to end the auto industry by not stopping the building of EV vehicles—which take about one-third the number of workers than real cars do. Now he has proclaimed the UAW, with Jewish members, supports Hamas and wants the end of Israel—he does this by demanding an arms embargo on Israel. If implemented, Israel would not be able to defend itself and the next Hamas massacre the murders will be counted in the tens of thousands.
“Mancilla is not an auto worker, and the rally was not about workers’ rights. He was delivering a fiery address at a rally organized by anti-Israel groups to protest the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington. A Harvard doctoral student and the director of a United Auto Workers region that includes New York City, New England and Puerto Rico, Mancilla has been at the forefront of the historic union’s increasingly strident criticism of Israel. A promotional document posted online by the UAW-led “labor contingent” at the anti-Netanyahu rally called the Israeli premier a “wanted war criminal” and accused the U.S. of aiding “his ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.”
In December, the UAW — which, of course, includes auto workers and other industrial laborers, but has in recent decades expanded to include more college-educated workers such as graduate students and public defenders — became the first major union to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. It also created a group to consider divestment from Israel.”
Why is a Hamas supporter a regional director for the UAW—do the members understand that the leadership is killing their jobs and calling for genocide?
Why several leading labor unions abandoned their long-standing support for Israel
Last month, the UAW led a contingent of seven unions to throw their support behind a U.S. arms embargo on Israel
By Gabby Deutch, Jewish Insider, 8/28/24 https://jewishinsider.com/2024/08/united-auto-workers-union-israel-shawn-fain/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=torres%20airlines&utm_content=torres%20airlines+CID_c669b0608a78a0f7d542e1e56cadebec&utm_source=Campaign%20Monitor%20JI&utm_term=Read%20more
“Who’s got the power?” Brandon Mancilla, a union leader with United Auto Workers, shouted at a political rally in Washington in July. “We got the power!” the audience roared back.
Mancilla is not an auto worker, and the rally was not about workers’ rights. He was delivering a fiery address at a rally organized by anti-Israel groups to protest the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington. A Harvard doctoral student and the director of a United Auto Workers region that includes New York City, New England and Puerto Rico, Mancilla has been at the forefront of the historic union’s increasingly strident criticism of Israel. A promotional document posted online by the UAW-led “labor contingent” at the anti-Netanyahu rally called the Israeli premier a “wanted war criminal” and accused the U.S. of aiding “his ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.”
In December, the UAW — which, of course, includes auto workers and other industrial laborers, but has in recent decades expanded to include more college-educated workers such as graduate students and public defenders — became the first major union to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. It also created a group to consider divestment from Israel. Among the locals that had previously signed onto the cease-fire statement adopted by the UAW were a diverse contingent of workers, including teachers, legal aid workers and nonprofit employees.
By July, the UAW led a contingent of seven unions, including the National Education Association, Service Employees International Union, flight attendants and postal workers, to throw their support behind a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. The group represents more than 6 million workers.
All told, UAW president Shawn Fain has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of Israel on the left since Oct. 7. The pugilistic activist was elected in 2023 to the union’s top post in its first-ever direct vote by union members, a concession the union agreed to after facing corruption scandals. In a runoff vote, Fain won by fewer than 500 votes — and since leading a major strike last fall, he has become a well-known national figure popular on the progressive left.
The UAW’s public statements, including its call for an arms embargo, have always included a call for the release of the hostages held by Hamas. But Fain didn’t mention the hostages on a Labor for Cease-fire video call in February. Neither did Mancilla at his recent speech in Washington. Nor did they mention Hamas.
The decision by the UAW and other leading labor organizations to call for an end to American military aid to Israel represents a stunning reversal of many unions’ long-standing support for Israel, dating back nearly a century, when American unions donated money to the Histadrut, Israel’s national labor union.
“The fact that those seven unions last month, like UAW and SEIU, issued that statement is pretty remarkable, given how much reluctance there’s been, traditionally, to to have any criticism of Israel,” said Jeff Schuhrke, a labor historian at Empire State University.
Labor unions’ calls for an arms embargo puts Democrats in an awkward position. Unions have long been a core constituency for Democrats, and the UAW endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris days after President Joe Biden dropped out of this year’s presidential race in July. Then Fain received a prominent speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention last week. But neither he nor any of the other union leaders who spoke on stage in Chicago addressed the war in Gaza. (Later in the week, the UAW called on the DNC to have a Palestinian-American speak at the convention after the parents of Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin gave a primetime address.)
Other major unions, most notably the AFL-CIO, have not called for an arms embargo against Israel. But when the AFL-CIO, which represents more than 12 million workers, called for a cease-fire in February, labor activists viewed it as a historic declaration by a traditionally more cautious union.
The shift away from Israel among several major unions has been years, if not decades, in the making. Bob Bussel, director of the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon, attributed the shift in part to historical realities: the death of the two-state solution after the Oslo era and the Second Intifada, and an entrenched right-wing government in Israel.
“The sense of a two-state solution going from Oslo beyond — that that seemed to be slipping away or not really on the agenda, [and] concern about the treatment of Palestinians in the ongoing wars, particularly with Israel and Gaza, over the years, from the late ‘90s and 2000s on up, that I would say, has been simmering,” said Bussel. “I think recent events have really brought it to, shall we say, a high simmer or even a boil. It didn’t come exactly from nowhere.”
But Mancilla, in his speech last month, did not talk about that. His answer to the question of why auto workers were at an anti-Israel rally rested, instead, on demographics, and on what he described as suppression of workers’ rights as universities and other institutions cracked down on anti-Israel protests viewed as antisemitic.
“Why is a cease-fire and an end to arms shipments to Israel a labor issue? I’ll tell you why,” Mancilla said. “Because auto workers in Dearborn, Michigan, have been personally affected by this issue and have demanded that their union and their government stop funding a genocide.” And academic workers, Mancilla continued, “have been protesting for their literal right of free speech to call on their universities to divest and to be held accountable.”
To attribute the shift in unions’ attitudes purely to the growth of graduate student unions would be too simple of an answer. But they are a crucial part of it. The UAW was not a natural fit for graduate students, who have long sought to organize for better pay and working conditions in a chronically underpaid field. Student workers’ desire to organize collided with a decline in worker power and the reduced size of unions like UAW. The need for the UAW to grow its ranks brought them together. (A UAW spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
“Around the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, in the period of deindustrialization, unions in the manufacturing sector like UAW were losing lots of members. Not just UAW, but a lot of those industrial unions, including United Steelworkers, Teamsters, etc., started unionizing basically any workers to try to keep membership levels up,” said Schuhrke.
The UAW and other major unions have stopped short of endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel, which earned the backing of the much smaller United Electrical union in 2015. But the current wave of anti-Israel sentiment within the UAW and elsewhere has its roots in the BDS movement, and in particular in graduate student workers expressing support for BDS.
In 2014, a union of 13,000 teaching assistants and student workers at the University of California became the first union local to pass a resolution endorsing the global BDS movement. A year later, however, the UAW’s international executive board voted to nullify the resolution.
The international board called out the BDS advocates’ targeting of Jewish students and union members: “The local union’s attempt to address the predicament of the Palestinian people appears to be accomplished through biased targeting of Israeli/Jewish UAW members, and the scorning of the state of Israel and all alleged entities complicit in actions against Palestine,” the board said at the time.
One former University of California PhD student who was involved with the effort to convince the UAW to overturn the BDS resolution told Jewish Insider on Tuesday that Jewish students threatened to not pay their dues if the BDS resolution remained.
“I think they took that seriously, and I think at the time they said, ‘This is not worth it for us.’ That’s my guess. They never revealed all their thinking,” said the former UC student, who requested anonymity to discuss the negotiations at the time.
Still, the seeds were planted. The Connecticut AFL-CIO voted to endorse BDS in 2015, and it divested itself of holdings in Israel bonds. In the years since, many other campus unions and other locals have followed the lead of the University of California student workers, particularly after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. In November, the Harvard Graduate Student Union — a UAW local — voted to sign onto a pro-BDS letter drafted by rank-and-file UAW members. “As members of the labor movement, we call on U.S. labor unions to cut all ties with Israeli unions,” read the letter.
“There’s still a lot of rank-and-filers who are very pro-Israel, or who, even if they’re not very pro-Israel, are uncomfortable with criticisms of Israel or supportive statements of Palestinians or whatnot, or tactics like BDS,” said Schuhrke. “BDS is still, I would say, pretty controversial within unions.”
Even as unions have moved away from their historic support for Israel, workers have not all rallied behind the cause.
“There’s still a lot of rank-and-filers who are very pro-Israel, or who, even if they’re not very pro-Israel, are uncomfortable with criticisms of Israel or supportive statements of Palestinians or whatnot, or tactics like BDS,” said Schuhrke. “BDS is still, I would say, pretty controversial within unions.”
Just this week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student union (part of the United Electrical union) was ordered to pay a settlement to Jewish members who had requested religious exemptions from union dues after the union endorsed BDS. The Jewish Labor Committee, led by Stuart Appelbaum, the head of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, has stuck by its support for Israel, despite opposing headwinds from other unions.
“UAW, they just go with the wind,” said the former UC graduate student. “Maybe they didn’t want to lose some grad student money, and maybe at the time, it didn’t seem politically savvy or whatever, and now it’s politically savvy, so let’s do it.”
