In June, the president of the United Auto Workers celebrated the victory of one of “the UAW’s own” in a Democratic primary election. Shawn Fain wasn’t talking about a machinist from Flint or an assembly-line worker in Kokomo. He meant Claire Valdez, a program assistant in Columbia University’s visual arts department, who won the primary in New York’s overwhelmingly Democratic Seventh Congressional District with 58 percent of the vote. She will be prohibitively favored to win the seat in November.
Valdez came to politics through her union. She joined UAW Local 2110 as a Columbia employee, served on her unit’s bargaining committee, and in 2022 was elected chair of a unit representing 500 administrative coworkers. Local 2110 holds some 30 contracts covering universities, publishing houses, museums, and law firms, and its Columbia units have included thousands of graduate student workers.
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Valdez offers a preview of what the UAW is becoming: a union that puts politics first and is leaning heavily on higher education to sustain its dwindling numbers. The results of this transformation are changing not just unions but higher ed itself.
The academy is the UAW’s only real growth market, and the union has organized itself accordingly. Counting about 1.5 million members at its late 1970s peak, the UAW now has only 383,000 active members, roughly 100,000 of whom work in higher education, with graduate workers making up the largest and fastest-growing share. The University of California’s academic local alone represents some 48,000 workers—more than the UAW’s total membership at the global automaker Stellantis. Harvard’s graduate students account for another 4,000.
What happens to an industrial union when its fastest-growing constituency holds an entirely different theory of what a union is for?
The career of Brandon Mancilla suggests an answer. He began as a history Ph.D. at Harvard, joined the organizing drive that produced the Harvard Graduate Students Union, sat on the strike-coordinating team that planned campus disruptions during the 29-day walkout of 2019, and became the local’s first president in 2020. Two years later, at just 29, he won the directorship of UAW Region 9A (covering eastern New York, New England, and Puerto Rico) with 58 percent of the vote, unseating the incumbent and handing the union’s long-dominant Administrative Caucus its first defeat on the International Executive Board in more than 30 years.
Mancilla put it plainly when he took office: Region 9A is “not primarily an auto or a manufacturing region.” The Nation approvingly calls him a product of “the union’s fast-growing higher-education wing,” whose growth it credits with changing the face of American labor.
That wing has already redirected the international union’s politics. In December 2023, weeks after the Big Three strike, the UAW became the first major American union to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Mancilla announced that the executive board would form a Divestment and Just Transition working group to examine the union’s economic ties to the conflict. When the board declined to divest the following spring, academic and professional locals kept the pressure on. At the union’s constitutional convention this June, delegates voted to divest from Israel bonds, the first major national union to do so.
On campus, the same bloc has changed what a strike is about. In May 2024, UAW Local 4811 called a strike against the University of California over the university’s handling of pro-Palestinian encampments, demanding divestment from weapons manufacturers, amnesty for arrested protesters, and a right for researchers to opt out of military-tied funding. UC warned that the precedent would expose every public employer in California to work stoppages “advancing political and/or social viewpoints.”
The UC contract ratified this March carried politics into the agreement itself, featuring a $400,000 legal fund for international workers and a commitment to “non-collaboration with ICE.” The bargaining committee described the deal as having “compelled management to side with workers and not with Trump.”
Union involvement in higher education is changing universities as well—by exacting steep financial costs on the institutions, resulting in shrinking Ph.D. programs. UC’s academic workers ended a six-week strike in late 2022, the largest in the history of American higher education, securing raises approaching 46 percent over two years. The reaction was swift: departments began cutting doctoral admissions within weeks. UCLA’s psychology department has cut graduate student enrollment and is hiring one-third fewer graduate students in the department; a union survey found 89 departments planning reductions of as much as 33 percent.
Union contracts turn stipends from a flexible line item into a fixed obligation, so when budgets tighten, departments can’t pay each student less—they can only admit fewer. Incumbents enjoyed the raises, and the costs fell mainly on prospective students who never enrolled, never paid dues, and never appeared in anyone’s grievance process. The union understood this trade-off perfectly well: within weeks of the settlement, UC locals were campaigning to “stop UC from shrinking the academic workforce,” demanding the university maintain cohort sizes, with the state picking up the difference.
The UAW’s industrial members bear a subtler cost from their union’s transformation. The strike fund that campus locals draw on, estimated at $825 million, was built substantially by assembly-line dues, but the political operation it sustains has its own priorities. Region 9A became the first union in America to endorse Zohran Mamdani, in December 2024, when he was polling in the low single digits. Mamdani has since appointed Mancilla to New York’s Rent Guidelines Board. A worker at a parts depot in Connecticut has no obvious say in these matters, and a Stellantis employee in Michigan still less.
Walter Reuther’s UAW bargained over wages, pensions, and health insurance, and treated politics as the means of securing them. Its fastest-growing wing has reversed the order of priorities. The union contract is now an instrument of politics, and the university a site of struggle rather than a workplace.