David Pillsbury is the fourth generation in his family to work at General Motors, the third to join the United Auto Workers union, and fiercely loyal to both. “In my house,” said Pillsbury, 57, a production lead at a GM plant in Flint, Michigan, “it was UAW jobs and GM jobs. That was the middle class.”
But the UAW of today looks less and less like his grandfather’s union—or even the union that Pillsbury began paying dues to more than 20 years ago.
The UAW has fewer than 400,000 members—a far cry from its peak of 1.5 million in 1979, when the American auto industry was booming. Fewer than 10 percent of all U.S. workers are union members, down from about 20 percent in 1983.
Hit hard by the 2008 financial crisis and factory jobs moving overseas, the UAW was forced to look to other industries to stay alive. Now, less than a third of its current members are autoworkers, aerospace engineers or agricultural workers, the union’s blue-collar base. They are far outnumbered by a hodgepodge of white-collar defense attorneys, librarians, roughly 100,000 people working in higher education, and more.
The diversity strategy worked for a while. Now, though, under UAW president Shawn Fain, there is a chasm between the union’s traditional autoworkers, who are moving toward the political right, and its newcomers, who are less likely to have worked a factory shift and more likely to have been involved in campus activism and the message boards of the Democratic Socialists of America.
