AAH #803 - A 4-Day Week, Pensions For All and Other UAW Demands

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**John McElroy** (0:27)
Hey everybody, thanks for joining us on Autoline After Hours. A special thanks to our sponsors for making the show possible. And Gary, great to be sitting next to you again.

**Gary Vasilash** (0:35)
We missed you last week.

**John McElroy** (0:36)
I know, I know.

**Gary Vasilash** (0:37)
I would say we had a great show, but you weren't here, so I guess I won't say we had a great show. We had a pretty good show.

**John McElroy** (0:43)
So let's let everybody know who we've got. We've got Marick Masters. Do I have this right? Professor Emeritus from Wayne State University.
And we got Kalea Hall back on the show from Reuters. It's great to have you here, Kalea.

**Kalea Hall** (0:56)
Thank you.

**John McElroy** (0:57)
I think the last time you were with the Detroit News.

**Kalea Hall** (0:59)
So no, I came in March. I was.

**John McElroy** (1:01)
Oh, yeah, you did. Okay. Yeah. Great. Great to have you here. So Marick, obviously the reason we got you on the show, I consider you one of the foremost labor experts in the industry.
And boy, what perfect timing because I find it fascinating what's going on at the UAW right now, where we had three former presidents come out very publicly and essentially say, don't reelect the guy who's in there, go vote for somebody else. Have you ever seen anything like this before?

**Marick Masters** (1:35)
Well, it was somewhat expected given the last election where you had a slew of candidates opposing the incumbents.
The Administrative Caucus had one of the elections by overwhelming majority under the old convention system. But when you moved to a direct election in 2022 and 2023, that opened it up to a lot of oppositional forces, which broke a trend within the UAW for about 40 or more years of consistent Administrative Caucus landslides in the election of the president. But you now have oppositional forces. Wayne came in as an outsider even though he was an inside UAW, but he was an unknown quantity. He's had record successes according to him and others. In the contracts he negotiated in 2023, which gave him a lot of gravity within the UAW and outside. But his position has eroded since then because of the constant allegations that it made against him by some of his colleagues and others that have been reviewed by the Monitor and led to several condemning reports, I think, to his conduct. Nonetheless, I think he's the favored candidate at the present time, and there are those who oppose him. Three former presidents got together and said, you shouldn't vote for him, you should vote for one of the alternative candidates, Trisha Geiger, who is a very impressive person running. I think she's very knowledgeable and seems very sincere and focused on good management and good negotiating.
But whether that's enough to overcome Fane's advantage by simply being well known, well equipped based on the staff that he has to run a campaign and his past record, I don't know that that's enough to be a tipping point, but they could throw him into a runoff and a good strong candidate, if that were to come in second, could put him in some danger.

**Gary Vasilash** (3:38)
So, does incumbency sort of make it impossible to lose in UAW elections?

**Marick Masters** (3:48)
I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's difficult. It isn't all in the president's elections, because they just have so many advantages.
They have the staff and they have the infrastructure to support their campaign. They usually have more, unless there's a strong issue on what somebody can run to undermine the membership's confidence in them, they have the distinct advantage. I would say it's more so than, union presidential elections, more so than it would be in any given election that an incumbent president would have an advantage. There are times it would be against you if your record is bad, but if your record is pretty good in negotiating contracts, members are not terribly dissatisfied with anything major that they can wrap their arms around, then they're going to win. But these are not normal times. It's a very unusual situation with the monitor, and an unusual situation, I think, with the turbulence in the industry as a whole, and the uncertainty that people have about their futures.