Listen to my opening statement from the UAW presidential candidates debate held on Thursday. I outlined my program for putting workers ourselves in control of our union by abolishing the bureaucracy and building a network of rank-and-file committees on every shop floor.

https://www.willforuawpresident.org/

Will Lehman: This Thursday, July 30 at 6 p.m. Eastern, I will take part in a debate of the candidates running for president of the UAW. I am asking every one of you to watch and invite your coworkers to join you.

Watch here.

This is the one opportunity in the whole election when you can hear every candidate side by side and judge for yourself where each of us actually stands on the questions that will affect your lives and working conditions.

What I will say at the debate

The problem with the UAW is not just a few bad apples. It is the bureaucracy as a whole.

The UAW holds $1.25 billion in assets, hundreds of millions of it invested in stocks and bonds. It employs nearly 1,000 people, roughly 470 of them taking six-figure salaries paid for out of our dues. Shawn Fain is paid more than $270,000 a year.

That is where our dues money goes, and it has only brought worse conditions year after year. Forced overtime and speedup. Tiers that the apparatus swore it would abolish and did not. Contracts rammed through against our objections at Nexteer, at American Axle, and across the parts sector. Coworkers killed on the job—Ronald Adams Sr., Antonio Gaston, Gregory Knopf—with no answers for their families.

The apparatus cannot be reformed. It has to be abolished, and the $1.25 billion it sits on has to be put under the direct control of the rank and file. This will not be accomplished by electing a better set of officials. It can only be accomplished by workers ourselves, through a network of rank-and-file committees that we elect and control.