The union doesn’t represent most autoworkers.
E conomist Jason Furman asked an excellent question on X: “What is the best theory for why the UAW supports the auto tariffs when most analysis finds they will cost U.S. auto jobs?” He’s referring to the United Auto Workers’ announced support for Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on automobiles and automobile parts, which will hurt U.S. manufacturing workers who need those parts to build cars and U.S. consumers who want to buy cars.
The simplest explanation is that the UAW does not represent most U.S. autoworkers. I don’t mean that to say the union does a poor job representing U.S. autoworkers (though I do believe that is also true). I mean it as a simple statement of fact: The UAW is not the bargaining agent for the vast majority of U.S. autoworkers.
About 1 million Americans are employed in motor vehicle and parts manufacturing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The UAW reported to the Department of Labor that it had 370,239 active members in 2023. The 1.5 million–member UAW of Walter Reuther is long gone, and the UAW today has far more retired members than active ones. Even if every UAW member were an autoworker, almost two-thirds of U.S. autoworkers would not be members.
But the actual proportion of autoworkers who aren’t in the UAW is even bigger than that because, contrary to the union’s name, most members of the United Auto Workers are not autoworkers. The UAW has about as many members in the University of California system as it does at General Motors. In recent years, it has been much more successful organizing graduate students, whom it attracts with its progressive politics, than autoworkers.
As of 2023, the UAW represented about 57,000 workers at Ford, 46,000 workers at GM, and 43,000 workers at Stellantis. That represents the bulk of its autoworker membership, since the union has few footholds in foreign automakers’ operations in the U.S. Throw in the roughly 4,000 Volkswagen workers in Tennessee who are represented by the UAW beginning last year (which is being generous because not all of them are necessarily members, Tennessee being a right-to-work state), and that’s about 150,000 autoworkers represented by the UAW.
That’s less than half of the union’s claimed membership. And it’s just 15 percent of the total number of U.S. workers employed in auto manufacturing. There’s no reason to expect that the UAW would speak in the general interest of autoworkers when 85 percent of autoworkers aren’t members.
The low union membership rate among autoworkers is actually high compared with other manufacturing sectors. Despite the common perception of factory jobs as union jobs, only 7.8 percent of U.S. manufacturing workers are union members, according to 2024 BLS data. That’s hardly different from the numbers in the private sector overall, where just 5.9 percent of workers are in unions.
The UAW is more than happy to see autoworkers outside the Big Three suffer, because if the tariffs work as intended to redistribute profits to the Big Three, that means more money for the UAW to bargain for its members who work there.
The UAW also likely sees hope in the details of the president’s decree imposing these tariffs. It says auto parts that comply with the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement will be tariff-free for the time being while the government devises a process to only tax their non-U.S. content. The order will still hurt the Big Three, but it will likely hurt them less than it will hurt the foreign automakers in the U.S., who are more likely to get parts from Japan, Germany, or South Korea that aren’t USMCA-compliant. It’s also entirely possible that the government never actually gets around to devising that process and the compliant imports remain tariff-free indefinitely.
The UAW knows it is more likely to be able to shape policy by saying it supports the president’s tariffs. Flattering Trump works, as Teamsters president Sean O’Brien has demonstrated by essentially picking the secretary of labor. The UAW is also digging itself out of the hole it dug by virulently opposing Trump and backing Kamala Harris during the 2024 campaign.
There’s also the simple fact that UAW president Shawn Fain is an ideologue who is opposed to free trade. In the UAW statement supporting Trump’s actions, he deplores the “free trade disaster,” and he has put out a video entitled “NAFTA Sucks” in which he says he voted for Ross Perot in 1992 because he opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Fain says is responsible for “plant closures, deaths of despair, and economic devastation.”
Never mind that the number of U.S. auto manufacturing jobs increased for five years after NAFTA took effect. Or that what really cost auto jobs was the Great Recession, which hit car companies especially hard in part because of the UAW’s exorbitant pension demands. Or that U.S. auto manufacturing employment had been steadily increasing from 2010 until Covid and today sits roughly at its pre-Covid level. Or that there are about as many U.S. autoworkers today as there were in 1991, before NAFTA supposedly destroyed their jobs.
Fain doesn’t care about the thousands of Big Three autoworkers who were laid off after the UAW’s much-lauded contract “wins” following its strike actions in 2023. And he certainly doesn’t care about the nonunion autoworkers in the South, whom, with the exception of the Volkswagen workers in Tennessee, he couldn’t convince to join the UAW, despite the entire national media cheering him on. He cares about his own power, and about getting the court-appointed monitor who is investigating him for financial misconduct and workplace retaliation off his back.
The UAW is best understood as a corrupt retiree association and progressive activist group that represents some autoworkers on the side. Most autoworkers want no part of it. No one should be surprised when it takes stances that aren’t in autoworkers’ best interest.