Fighting for a Class Struggle UAW at the 2026 ConCon: Introducing UAWD’s Convention Program

The UAWD Steering Committee shares a political analysis of the 2022 Constitutional Convention, our lessons learned in the ensuing years of organizing within the UAW, and UAWD’s membership-approved program for the 2026 ConCon. UAWD is encouraging UAW members across the country to bring the program to their locals to show their coworkers how we can chart a new path of class struggle unionism beyond the confines of the Convention floor in June.

Featured image: UAWD delegates sit amongst their Regional delegations during the 2022 UAW Constitutional Convention. Image credit: Rachel Petherbridge.

The Steering Committee, composed of UAW members spanning shops and sectors across the country, is the political leadership body of Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD).

The 2026 UAW Constitutional Convention is fast approaching, and UAWD is putting forward a program to fight the most pressing attacks on UAW members and the broader working class. In 2022, current UAWD Steering Committee member Nolan Tabb called for a floor vote on a resolution to begin the calculation of strike pay on the first day of a strike, instead of the eighth day. The resolution ultimately passed unanimously after top UAW leadership had tried to block it procedurally. This was a victory for workers on picket lines around the country. What happened afterward, though, showed the limitations of what’s possible at the Constitutional Convention. 

The next day, a contested vote to raise strike pay to $500 per week was approved on the floor, only for the International Executive Board (IEB) to fear-monger and call in favors to have it reversed by an even bigger margin on the final day. And none of this changed the fact that the IEB continues to have a veto on approving strikes, enabling them to block strike pay any time they want. The narrow reforms considered at the Constitutional Convention are not enough on their own to create the broad changes needed to build a fighting, class struggle UAW. This is why our 2026 program is broader, bolder, and paired with a new organizing approach to build a militant rank-and-file movement on the shop floor.

After adopting our new member platform in June 2025, UAWD has been committed to developing class struggle unionism in the UAW. A class struggle union grows through mass engagement and participation of union membership, through bottom-up organizing on the shop floor and in communities. This is the only way to develop a working-class movement that is able and willing to push against the limitations imposed by business unionists who collaborate with corporate management and to take the fight directly to our bosses and the ruling class at large.

Unfortunately, the Constitutional Convention floor is anything but a space for mass engagement and participation. The UAW leadership and staff bureaucracy that controls the Constitutional Convention is likely to block any program that escalates the struggle between workers and bosses beyond what can be controlled by leadership. Delegates to the Convention will include conservative local officials, staff, and Administration Caucus members, and all proposed amendments will be filtered through the IEB-appointed “Constitution Committee,” which will be tasked, as it has been for decades, with allowing only leadership-approved resolutions onto the Convention floor.

Organizing for a Class Struggle UAW at the 2026 ConCon

Although the Convention itself is structured to stave off militant member energy, the lead-up to the Convention presents an important opportunity to discuss the tenets of class struggle unionism in locals across the UAW. Our Constitutional Convention program contains eight constitutional amendments grounded in rank-and-file militancy, workers’ democracy and workplace control, international working class solidarity, and political independence. Two of these are designated as priority amendments that UAWD is encouraging UAW members across the country to bring to their locals.

Our first priority amendment is “Fight Layoffs with Work-Sharing.” Thousands of UAW members have been laid off over the past few months alone. These layoffs have decimated workers’ livelihoods and destabilized entire communities, yet our union has failed to mount an effective response. Our amendment to fight layoffs would mandate the right to work-sharing in all UAW contracts. Rather than dividing the workforce—laying off some while speeding up those who remain—when production slows down, work-sharing provisions give workers the ability to distribute the remaining work democratically and more equitably. This is one way workers can dictate the scheduling of our labor and chip away at the total control of our shop floors by our bosses.

Our second priority amendment is “Abolish ICE and Fight State Attacks on Workers.” Over the past year, ICE has escalated its assaults on working-class communities, using raids, detention, and political repression to divide and brutally punish immigrant workers, who are an essential part of the UAW and the broader working class. Immigrant workers are targeted to divide the working class and promote nationalism and nativism, undermining class solidarity. Our amendment to fight ICE commits the UAW to bargaining contract provisions that specifically protect members from ICE and to withhold union support from politicians who back ICE, and sets up local membership meetings to vote on strike action when ICE attacks our communities. 

The rest of our program calls for direct membership votes before any presidential endorsement, eliminates the International Executive Board’s veto over strike authorization, and calls for a wage floor in our contracts to combat cross-border whipsawing—pitting workers at different factories against one another with threats of closing plants and moving jobs—paired with a solidarity strike fund to support Mexican workers. It commits the union to ending support for Israeli genocide and imperialist wars, prohibits bargaining committees from agreeing to forced overtime, and rewrites the UAW Constitution Preamble to affirm the principles of class struggle unionism. Together, these measures advance a class struggle agenda aimed at putting power in the hands of the rank and file and directing our union’s resources to the militant defense of workers and our communities.

We can’t change our workplace and our union culture with a piece of paper or bureaucratic meeting, but we can use the opportunity presented by the Convention to show our coworkers where our union is currently falling short and to present an alternative vision.

Our call for our members, and for every UAW member who is attracted to any portion of our program, is to use these resolutions to build local groups of rank-and-file members who will fight to make these visions a reality. UAW members can each run a local campaign to pass the resolution most relevant to their material circumstances. Whether it passes or fails, whether it’s considered on the Convention floor or not, members should keep meeting regularly and work to realize these practices in your own shop in the future. Ultimately, what’s needed to realize a better vision for our union is building shop-floor militancy with our coworkers from the bottom up—we can’t change our workplace and our union culture with a piece of paper or bureaucratic meeting, but we can use the opportunity presented by the Convention to show our coworkers where our union is currently falling short and to present an alternative vision.

The ConCon process allows us to do more than revise governing language—it creates space for urgent collective discussions about how to fight back against the attacks that we face every day. If you’d like to join this fight, bring the UAW Constitutional Convention program to your local, and become a UAWD supporter today.