The recent organizing breakthroughs of the United Auto Workers (UAW) in auto manufacturing in the South, major nationwide strikes, and decisive contract successes raise questions about what lessons we can and can’t draw from the last few years’ record of wins and losses. Following the March 2023 change in union leadership, in which reform candidate Shawn Fain won the union’s presidency, the UAW took a harder-line stance in bargaining. The 2023 "stand-up strike" in auto won historic gains, including up to a 25 percent wage increase, restoration of cost-of-living adjustments, and an end to differentiated wage tiers for some workers, changing the previous strategy of taking a less aggressive stance in bargaining with the Big Three automakers.

What of these victories can we chalk up to shifts in messaging and organizing approach from the union’s international leadership over the last few years? What was the outcome of campaign practices honed in some sectors of the union’s organizing department over the last decade and a half? And what was the result of different conditions on the ground — industries that are “easier” to organize, relatively pro-union locales, less hostile bosses, or general upsurges of worker confidence and indignation? The stakes to figuring out how to win, massively and on tough terrain, are high. Having worked for years on some of the recent UAW unionization efforts in the South, as well as in higher education, we learned an organizing approach that laid the groundwork for the recent UAW victories in manufacturing.

The successful 2024 union drive at Volkswagen (VW) in Tennessee, after two unsuccessful votes over the previous decade, and the 2025 win at BlueOval SK in Kentucky, built on a specific approach to deep leadership development. The unsuccessful vote at Mercedes in Alabama in 2024, only weeks after the VW vote and despite the momentum many had hoped the stand-up strike at auto’s Big Three would create, was a blow. For some of us involved in these campaigns, though, this loss was not so surprising, given that it was not building on the same kind of leader-dense, structure-based organizing foundation that had carried the day at VW and BlueOval SK.