Abstract
Over the past decades, the US auto industry has faced multiple existential crises. As foreign automakers aggressively entered the American market and opened new facilities in regions where the United Auto Workers (UAW) had little organizational presence, Detroit-based automakers steadily lost market share, required government bailouts, and extracted a series of painful concessions from the union. Throughout this period, the UAW repeatedly attempted to organize these so-called transplants, including Nissan, Toyota, and Hyundai, and yet consistently fell short. The frustration was particularly acute given that many of these foreign automakers maintained unionized facilities in their home countries. This gap between what seemed possible abroad and what proved achievable in the American South became a defining puzzle for labor scholars, raising questions about the conditions under which organizing in hostile terrain can succeed.
Abe Walker's new book, Reassembling the UAW, is a welcome contribution to this question. Walker meticulously traces the UAW's decade-long campaign to unionize Volkswagen (VW)'s Chattanooga assembly plant across three election cycles, with losses in 2014 and 2019 before a decisive 73% victory in 2024. The main analytical framework is the strategic capacity model developed by sociologist Marshall Ganz, which assesses union performance along four dimensions: knowledge, motivation, learning, and innovation. Notably, Walker departs from Ganz's original formulation by treating learning and innovation as functionally distinct, arguing that learning alone does not generate genuine organizational change when deep structural obstacles remain in place. He applies this revised framework systematically across all three campaigns, tracking where the UAW fell short and what finally changed in 2024.
Chapter 1 situates the VW case in the structural context of the American auto industry's geographic dispersal to the union-hostile South and the UAW's resulting organizational decline. Chapters 2 and 3 reconstruct the 2014 defeat in detail, documenting how a combination of management tactics, including delay, political interference, and disinvestment threats, overwhelmed a union that was underprepared across all four strategic capacity dimensions. Chapter 4 then widens the scope to examine the transnational dimension of the 2014 campaign, offering an important critique of the UAW's reliance on VW's Global Works Council (GWC) and a Global Framework Agreement (GFA) as substitutes for shopfloor organizing. Walker's broader point is well taken: Institutional power, however carefully cultivated, cannot substitute for the associational power that only genuine rank-and-file organizing can build.
Chapter 5 turns to 2019, when the UAW improved on three of four strategic capacity measures yet lost by nearly identical margins. For Walker, this event is the book's sharpest theoretical lesson: Without innovation, even a well-resourced and highly motivated union risks "slipping into an iterative feedback loop in which incremental course corrections substitute for more serious change" (p. 98). Chapter 6 serves as the book's pivot. A federal corruption scandal targeting Administrative Caucus (AC) officials provided the focal moment that enabled the insurgent caucus Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) to replace the delegate-based election system with one-member-one-vote direct elections and to displace the decades-long entrenched leadership. Walker situates this event within a broader discussion of rank-and-file, bottom-up power as a force capable of triggering what he, following economist Joseph Schumpeter, calls “creative destruction” within the organizational body itself (p. 124).
Chapters 7 and 8 explain the 2024 victory. Under Shawn Fain, the first directly elected UAW president in the union's history, the UAW linked the 2023 Big Three stand-up strike to transplant organizing to sustain momentum, deployed a bottom-up member-centered organizing model, went public with the campaign from the outset, and reoriented its reference group away from VW's German works council and toward the unionized GM plant just up the road in Spring Hill, Tennessee (p. 156). Rather than looking overseas for solidarity, workers now had a concrete, proximate model of what unionization could deliver. In the conclusion, Walker extends this argument into the electric vehicle (EV) supply chain, framing it as the next frontier for the UAW while cautioning that the solidarity produced through the 2024 campaign, though more genuinely democratic and membership-driven than anything the union had previously managed, remains fragile and its durability unproven.
The book's greatest strength lies in the rigor and consistency with which it applies the strategic capacity framework across three distinct campaigns, situating each within the broader history of UAW decline and the structural constraints of southern labor politics. Readers versed in the labor revitalization and union strategy literature will find the central argument familiar: The virtues of shop floor militancy, bottom-up organizing, and internal union democracy have been well documented, and Walker's framework largely confirms what scholars in this tradition have long maintained. The book's contribution is less one of theoretical novelty than of careful empirical demonstration, showing precisely how and why these principles operated across a decade of contested organizing.
The most pointed challenge to Walker's argument comes from outside the book's empirical scope. Within weeks of the Chattanooga victory, the UAW lost a representation election at Mercedes-Benz's plant in Vance, Alabama, a defeat that sits uncomfortably alongside the book's optimistic account of organizational renewal. Walker's framework offers no ready explanation for why the same union, running what was ostensibly the same reinvented campaign, succeeded at one German transplant and failed at another in the same regional labor market and within the same election cycle. Nor does the book fully reckon with what happened after the Chattanooga vote. It took the UAW several years to reach a first contract with VW, raising the question of why the organizational transformation so visible in the election campaign did not translate with equal force into the bargaining process, an arena that prior research has identified as analytically distinct from organizing.
These limitations, it should be said, are not unique to this book. They reflect a broader challenge that labor and employment relations scholarship has long struggled to resolve. The field has produced a rich accumulation of case studies documenting why organizing efforts succeed or fail, yet predictive power remains elusive. What the VW case does clarify, however, is that electoral victory is only the beginning. The more demanding test of union revitalization, or even innovation in Walker's own terms, is whether the organizational energy that produces a winning election can be sustained through contract negotiations and the slower work of building durable worker power on the shop floor, where workers actually spend their working lives. As Walker notes in the conclusion, this challenge is compounded by the need to extend local victories across dense supplier networks and navigate an industry undergoing an uneven transition to EV production amid growing geopolitical uncertainty.
With that said, this volume is a rewarding read for anyone with a stake in the future of the labor movement. Beyond its contributions to the academic literature, the book will resonate with a broader audience grappling with the question of why workers and unions have lost ground and what, if anything, can be done about it. At a moment when such questions feel increasingly urgent, Walker offers something rarer than a diagnosis: a carefully documented account of how things can, under the right conditions, actually change.