The voice of UAWD, from the frontlines of the class struggle, by and for UAW members
For the US labor movement, the UAW’s divestment from Israel bonds, decided by members at the union’s 39th Constitutional Convention, in June 2026, after decades of rank-and-file organizing, marks a significant step toward making international solidarity a reality—but there’s still a long way to go.
The six leaders of UAWD’s team at the 2026 UAW Constitutional Convention discuss the class-struggle strategy that enabled UAWD to lead the effort to divest the UAW from Israel bonds. Standing on the shoulders of decades of Palestine solidarity organizing, the win was made possible through the past year of organizing Local UAWD Chapters grounded in shop-floor struggle and the development of a UAWD ConCon program, which featured resolutions to enable rank-and-file militancy to fight layoffs, fight ICE, and in support of Palestine.
After UAWD members forced the amendment onto the Constitutional Convention agenda, UAW delegates voted to divest the union’s reported $400,000 in Israel bonds, marking a victory for decades of rank-and-file organizing.
UAWD Steering Committee members present a deep dive into Shawn Fain’s presidency, through the lens of the pressures to deliver on the Stand Up Strike and the co-optive trap of bureaucracy. Fain has turned away from class struggle unionism, failing to follow through on his refreshing shift toward militant rhetoric and his influential push to reinvigorate the idea of a mass general strike. UAW members should understand Fain as the more progressive face of the old-guard Administration Caucus. Though he was elected to put an end to their stranglehold, Fain has instead re-entrenched his former antagonists and been realigned as their new leader.
Stellantis is shutting down its Brampton, Ontario, plant, devastating a Canadian community while saying it is sending jobs to the U.S. Instead of enabling Stellantis to execute on its whipsawing playbook, UAW leadership and U.S. autoworkers should unite with Unifor and Canadian autoworkers. Our union should be promoting a class struggle strategy of resisting plant closures by exerting control over production and building cross-border worker solidarity.
UAW members from across sectors came together for UAWD’s Class Struggle Unionism 101 Training, sharing concrete tactics and examples of how they’ve been used to build power on the shop floor, escalate fights, and take on the bosses and capitalist class.
The International Autoworkers Conference (IAC) took place in Pune, India from November 20 to November 24, 2025. This was the third IAC; the first took place in 2015 in Germany and the second in South Africa in 2020. Martha Grevatt talks with conference delegates from Brazil, Germany, and the U.S. about the shared struggles that autoworkers are engaged in internationally, the state of the industry, the upcoming International Day of Action for Stellantis workers, and the meaning of class struggle unionism.
Workers at BlueOval SK, who recently unionized with UAW, lost their jobs in February as the joint venture between Ford and Korean battery manufacturer SK On was dissolved and as Ford pivots from EV battery to energy storage manufacturing. UAW members can build the capacity to challenge plant closures through a sectoral strategy that combats whipsawing and enables workers to fight for one another.
Layoffs are devastating to us as workers, but we’re trained to think of them as inevitable or even “natural.” If we understand the corporate profit-seeking that drives layoffs, we can fight for our jobs.
The recent large-scale layoffs across General Motors plants and beyond are raising questions for workers everywhere. We can accept the boom-and-bust corporate logic of the auto industry, or workers can fight to win real layoff protections and control over how reductions in work are carried out, by collectively deciding how we share remaining work.
